The Help Blog Chapters 11-14: Separate but Equal

               Throughout chapters 11-14 of the Help, Stockett really brings forward the contradiction of the fact that blacks and whites are “separate but equal” (185). In chapter 14, the white women talk about how the bathrooms are separate but they’re still bathrooms. They try and justify it by saying that it’s all the same and that no black help wants to share the bathroom with a white lady just as much as a white lady doesn’t want to share with the help. We see the contradiction with this chapter and the past ones, because the issue of the Jim Crow laws was brought up in the past. Miss Skeeter looked at the laws and was “mesmerized by how many laws exist to separate [them]” (173). Numerous rules exist to separate blacks from whites, as the Jim Crow laws displayed, and Skeeter is met with a reality she had been genuinely shielded from growing up. She knew they were different, but she never understood the lengths at which these laws existed.

                Skeeter realizes that as soon as she steps into Aibileen’s house, Aibileen stood taller. But, she couldn’t help but notice that Aibileen was still hesitant; that removing her white uniform didn’t remove the laws that controlled her life. The black neighborhood is separate, that the white women are correct about, but it is most definitely not equal. Besides the main issue of the quality of the neighborhoods and houses, there are no black police, so if something goes on and someone is hurt the white police won’t be as quick to respond and will automatically blame the fact that it’s a black neighborhood. That that stuff just goes on. The white people are discriminatory and hateful. They do not see the black people as people; they see them as workers and alive to serve the white people and to do nothing else. Looking around me today, I see so many different people. I have never once questioned the legitimacy of anyone of any other race, ethnicity, or religion. I look around me and see equals. Some of them I see as smarter, stronger, more athletic or anything, than I am. I do not judge based on color because what does it even mean to have different color skin? It means you have an identity. Then I read this book, and I just can’t imagine it—these ladies talking this way. About diseases you can get from black people if they use the same toilet as you. It greatly disturbs me, and I see it eating away at Skeeter as well.

                Skeeter is around the ladies all the time; she sees them act this way to the help so often, it becomes foreign to her if they don’t. That is why it was hard for her at first to do what she is doing now. It is so hard to stray away from something we have known our entire lives. That we have heard, seen, lived. But, Skeeter is trying and is establishing equality. She treats Aibileen and Minny with the same respect she gives everyone else, and doesn’t look at them as pathetic or feel bad for them. She looks at them with respect, not with apology. She sees truth in them and strength, more of it than she could wish to have. So maybe there is a double play on the words of the white ladies. The help, they are separate but equal. They live apart from the whites, but they are equal in mind, person, and strength. Sometimes, they are even greater. So maybe the white ladies speak a truth they have misunderstood.