Segregation in Housing Segregation

There are four kinds of segregation that found in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help :

4.1.1 Segregation in Housing

According to the conception inspired by Marxist Sociology, segregation is the expression of social inequalities within the territory of cities, and reflects the unequal appropriation of land, goods and services by different social classes. Residential segregation is therefore thought to have characteristics that are specific to capitalist societies. It is also thought to be the result of the social struggle, which in turn accounts for the unequal appropriation of the territory, consumer goods, and housing in its different forms Lojkine,1979. The blacks in Mississippi live in their own part of town. The whites use pejorative terms to refer to the black characters, and public buildings such as the courthouse have separate areas for the whites and for the colored.In The Help, Aibileen as the main character live in the area of black population, her house is far away from white’s house. Skeeters description of the layout of Jackson helps us understand the segregation in housing Constantine lived about a mile from our house, in a small Negro neighborhood called Hotstack, named after the tar plant that used to operate back there. The road to Hotstack runs along the north side of our farm, and for as long as I can remember, colored kids have walked and played along that mile stretch, kicking at the red dust, making their way toward the big County Road 49 to catch a ride. Stockett, 2009: 61 Six days a week, I take the bus across the Woodrow Wilson Bridge to where Miss Leefolt and all her white friends live, in a neighborhood call Belhaven. Right next to Belhaven be the downtown and the state capital. Capitol building is real big, pretty on the outside but I never been in it. I wonder what they pay to clean that place. So Jacksons just one white neighborhood after the next and more springing up down the road. But the colored part of town, we one big anthill, surrounded by state land that aint for sale. As our numbers get bigger, we cant spread out. Our part of town just gets thicker. Stockett, 2009: 12 These quotations describes that Aibileen and Constantine are lives in separate area with white’s house. Segregation appears in The Help where all physical facilities are separated Universitas Sumatera Utara between the whites and the black-americans. Both of them have different places and, of course, different facilities.Black people are living as second class citizen and they are oppressed by the existence of regulations that limit their access to public area. They lived separately with white people even though they lived together in one city. The novel shows that segregation resulted from the fact that black Americans resided in distinct neighborhoods, stemming from insufficient income as well as a desire to live among their own people, as many ethnic groups did. However, blacks separated themselves not merely as a matter of choice or custom. Instead, realtors and landlords steered blacks away from white neighborhoods and municipal ordinances and judicially enforced racial covenants signed by home owners kept blacks out of white areas. Most of the blacks live in the bad part of town, or the slums. Even if they had the money, they wouldnt have been able to live in an upper class neighborhood like Jackson. Blacks are considered dirty and unsanitary therefore, people didnt want them next to their houses. Residential segregation by race remains a salient feature of contemporary American cities. Indeed, black Americans were as segregated from whites in 1990 as they had been at the start of the twentieth century, and levels of segregation appear unaffected by rising socioeconomic status Massey Denton, 1993.

4.1.2 Segregation in Public School