Black girlhood and the help: Constructing black girlhood in a “post” -racial, -gender, and -welfare state

Abstract

“If you white you alright / If you black step back”: the lyrics of this 1967 folk song capture the storyline of black and white girlhood in Kathryn Stockett’s The Help. The Help is primarily a story of two women: a young college-educated woman nicknamed Skeeter and an older black domestic, Aibileen, who has raised a number of white children. After completing college, Skeeter returns to Jackson, Mississippi, to a way of life that she finds stifling. As such, she seeks to find an alternative via a career as an author. She fosters a relationship with Aibileen, to the extent that one is possible in 1962 in the Deep South, as a means of writing the great novel that would allow her to escape the trappings of a middle-and upper-class life of a white Southern belle. With reluctance, Aibileen and other maids agree to help Skeeter in her clandestine project that tells the stories of the black maids. The Help is set as a story of multicultural and multiclass female relationships-which can be touted as an ideal of postfeminism and postracism. Postracialism and postfeminism are ideologies that function to suggest that racial differences and gender discrimination are no longer salient (see McRobbie). While The Help attempts to situate itself in the ideologies of postracialism and postfeminism, the discursive practices deployed actually work to reinscribe racialized and gender tropes.