I'm reading a book called
The Help by Katherine Stockett. It's set after Rosa Parks took her famous bus ride and right around the time Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed a dream and James Meredith entered Ole Miss as its first black student.
Until my high school history class four years ago, I pretty much labored under the delusion that once segregation ended, it ended. For good. I did know there was still a lot of prejudice and hatred that lasted for a long while in
some Caucasian circles, but I really did think that those circles were the minority.
Well, they weren't.
The Help is narrated from three different view points, and one of them is the perspective of Abileen, the black hired help of a finicky, too-good-for-her-britches white woman. Abileen was raising this woman's child, just as she'd raised twenty other children for white people. After the little girl's mama spanked her for using Abileen's bathroom instead of her own, (back then, I've discovered, the "help" was required to have their own bathroom, separate from the rest of the house, because the white people were afraid of catching a disease from the blacks,) Abileen wrote:
"I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side of town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites."That moment. It came in every white child's life, especially if they lived in the South. The moment they decided that colored folks aren't as good as whites.
As I was reading, (you can buy the book
here or get it at your library - it's worth it, but keep in mind it's not for kids to read,) I was overwhelmed with thanksgiving that we've come as far as we have in America.
I see segregation being like a massive door in a medieval castle. Little by little, blow by blow, the battering ram of equality has succeeded in knocking it down, but that didn't happen all at once. The efforts of William Wilberforce, the civil war, the Emancipation Proclamation, the civil rights movement, all these things were blows to the door. Prejudice still lives, especially in the South, but it's
so much better, at least outwardly, from what it used to be.
In the early nineteen hundreds, President Theodore Roosevelt invited George Washington Carver, a black man, to be his dinner guest at the White House, and oh, the scandal that ensued!
And now, we have an African-American president for the first time.
The Help was set in Mississippi, and it told about one woman who had to give up her baby girl, because she was too light. The white woman she worked for considered having the daughter of a black servant being so close in color to their own children an affront to white people's respectability.
It was against the law for whites and blacks to marry each other. If they broke that law, the very least, (and the best,) consequence was imprisonment. More often, it was lynching.
Today, all over America, Caucasian families adopt brown children, and African-Americans adopt white kids. There's intermarriage between black people and white people. I don't think we stop and think about how great a blessing this is. It's pretty much normal. It's every day life. And that's so wonderful.
Like I said, prejudice isn't dead. But I really believe it's breathing its last. Maybe, Lord willing, by the time I have children, there will be absolutely no doubt in anybody's mind that
"dirty ain't a color."
::Clarification::
I don't view this through rose colored glasses. I realize that racism won't fully die until Jesus comes back. But I do believe that perhaps in another generation, it will be completely dead outwardly... not within some people's hearts, but in our country as a whole.
