The Help by Kathryn StockettMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
South Africa was at the receiving end of crippling isolation due to the reprehensible practice of apartheid. However, racial segregation persisted even in the Sixties in the southern states of America. This was during the time of the Bob Dylan, Hippies and Woodstock.
The derogatory so called Jim Crow laws from the 1880s had been diluted but the social distinctions persisted. Public parks were forbidden for African Americans to enter, and theatres and restaurants were segregated. Segregated waiting rooms in bus and train stations were required, as well as water fountains, restrooms, building entrances, elevators, cemeteries, even amusement-park cashier windows. Laws forbade African Americans from living in white neighbourhoods. Segregation was enforced for public pools, phone booths, hospitals, asylums, jails, and residential homes for the elderly and handicapped.
Some states required separate textbooks Black and white students. New Orleans mandated the segregation of prostitutes according to race. In Atlanta, African Americans in court were given a different Bible from white people to swear on. Marriage and cohabitation between white and Black people was strictly forbidden in most Southern states. It was not uncommon to see signs posted at town and city limits warning African Americans that they were not welcome there. Some example of these despicable laws
No person shall require any white female to nurse in wards or rooms in which negro men are placed.The characters may appear to be stereotyped and cliched, but this well scripted yarn is engaging, suspenseful and yet poignant.
It shall be unlawful for a white person to marry anyone except a white person. Any marriage in vilation of this section shall be void.
No coloured barber shall serve as a barber to white women or girls.
The officer in charge shall not bury any coloured persons upon ground used for the burial of white persons.
Books shall not be interchangeable between the white and coloured schools, but shall continue to be used by the race first using them.
The Board shall maintain a separate building on separate grounds for the instruction of all blind persons of the coloured race
Despite reservations, urbanization and the social churn in India, we have yet to get over our abhorrent caste system and the prosecution of Dalits - saddening examples of which still occur tragically frequently, especially in the countryside.
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i haven't read the book, but have seen the movie. And this discrimination is all too prevalent in the high societies of urban india too. The earlier building we used to stay in had a policy that household helpers could only use the "service lift" no matter how slow or crowded it became even if the "residents lift" was going empty.
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