Racial Discrimination in Kathryn Stockett’s "The Help"

Abstract

Kathryn Stockett’s novel titled The Help is a narrative novel about the lives of African-American maids named Aibileen and Minny who received discriminative treatments from the white masters around 1960s in Southern United States. This research aims to answer two objectives, which are; to explore the racial discrimination acts toward the black maids and to investigate the effects of racial discrimination to the black maids’ lives. Since the present writer analyzes the discriminative treatments from the white masters toward the black maids based on the real social condition in the era of 1960s in Southern United States, Sociological Approach is considered as the most suitable approach to be applied. In addition, Fred L. Pincus’s theory about type of discrimination is also used in analyzing the discrimination acts. The result of this research paper shows there are two types of discrimination as seen in the novel; individual discrimination and institutional discrimination, and those discrimination acts reflect the social condition of 1960s in Southern United States. Meanwhile, racial discrimination affects the lives of the black maids in term of distrust toward white people and insecurity.