Question About "The Help" For Those Who've Seen It...

They didn't give a damn about their kids.

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I didn't know about all of this stuff as a kid but a lot of it doesn't surprise me. There were a lot of people who definitely felt threatened by the changes to their society.

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My family didn't feel threatened by the societal changes but many people had very irrational fears. I remember it well.

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As a kid you just wondered why other people were treated like they weren't really people at all.

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Absolutely....and not just when I was a kid. I still sometimes see it.

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All of the housewives, cracker ladies, whatever else you want to call them - had outside bathrooms for the help, since they were under the impression that they carried diseases, filth, etc.

Since they believed this - why did they allow the same people to kiss and hug their children, change their diapers, etc.??

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I am white and 62, so I vividly remember segregation growing up as I did in New Orleans.

The prevailing belief in those days was that "it might rub off" (the Black color) if you as a white person even touched one of "them" and that if they used your bathroom or you used one that they did in public, you'd probably catch some terrible disease and die. It was sheer ignorance on the part of the White community, but it was stuff ingrained deep and hard to overcome. And this was the benign stuff, not like what the Klan and the White Citizens' Councils preached and did.

I can remember the "colored only" bathrooms and water fountains, and how there were some movie theaters that permitted them to sit in the balconies, but not all theaters did. I remember the signs on the backrests of the NOPSI buses that read "For Colored Patrons Only" and forced all Black riders to sit behind them. I remember the terror many whites felt when integration began and NOPSI buses took away the signs and Black people could sit wherever they chose (even next to a white person). I also remember the humiliation on the faces of those Black people bold enough to do that, when the White person would then immediately glare and pop up out of the seat and stand rather than sit beside a Black person. It was shameful, it was normal, it was life back in the 1950s and 1960s.

I remember as a kid my mom's amused horror once when we rode a NOPSI bus and I didn't understand the signs, and darted to those cool wide seats all the way in the back of the bus. She made me come back forward so I could sit in front of the signs.

As far as the movie goes, and why the Mississippi ladies allowed their maids to kiss and hug their precious children but not use their bathrooms... double standards when it suited their purposes, and it suited their purposes for somebody to do the grimy work of cleaning diapers and wiping snotty noses so they could play bridge and sip martinis to their hearts' content.

I'm not a liberal, but I am no racist, either. I simply believe that every person has his or her own worth, and that worth is not based on color or creed, but something deeper within.