The Role Of Racism In Kathryn Stockett's The Help

The first thought that comes to mind when talking about racism is the separation of two races based on skin tone. “In 1960, when a six-year-old girl enrolled in a white school in New Orleans, parents withdrew their white children in her class. She was the only child in her classroom for over a year.”(Baughman et. al.). In the 1960s, African Americans were mistreated in the US, mostly in the south. Kathryn Stockett, the author, assumed that society wouldn’t be as understanding in her writing The Help, because many wouldn’t clasp the fact that the nation was discriminating.(Stockett). For her, though, it was convenient to write about the other side of the situation in this era. “I don’t have to think about the dialect. It wasn’t hard for me to get that musicality on the page because I started writing the voice of Demeitre and she sounded exactly the way I wrote her.”(Stockett). Growing up, she had an African American maid,Demeitre, in which she got close with, and being accustomed to her always being around, it later got her to write Aibileen’s parts in the
The novel, The Help, by Kathryn Stockett, takes place in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s, where Miss Skeeter, a white woman, secretly interviews the help, black maids, on how they are treated in