The other black maids are also responsible for cooking meals for their white employers. First of all, Minny has literally been hired to cook for her. Perhaps the loudest warning signal was this quote by Minny, who says “I’ve never met a white person worse off than me” (43) in response to her discovery that Celia Foote, her white employer, doesn’t know how to cook anything. It is the use of Minny’s and Aibileen’s narratives that makes this book problematic, as it suggests Stockett thought it acceptable to tell the story from the black perspective, regardless of her being white and, therefore, unaware entirely of the black experience. I would not be making the claim that The Help is problematic as a white saviour text if the book had simply been told by Skeeter’s perspective, since Skeeter is, like Stockett, a white woman. The book is told from multiple perspectives, including black maids Minny and Aibileen. While normally, I would think this is acceptable, I think the way she approaches the subject matter was wrong. In the afterword, Stockett claims that she tells this book from her own experience as a child with a black maid. This is exactly the type of mentality that makes the publishing industry harder to navigate for BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour) because white authors are taking up all the spots that could – and should – be filled by Own Voices authors. Most white saviour narratives are written by a white author, an author who claims that they’re aware this isn’t necessarily their story to tell but at least someone is telling it. I think, in part, the problem lies in the author being a white woman. In an era where the black minority is letting their voice be heard, The Help feels unnecessary and… wrong.

White saviourism refers to the idea that racial minorities – typically the black minority – requires saving by a privileged white person.

Scouring the internet, it’s almost impossible to find any reviews or articles that call The Help out for its evident white saviourism. As we watch The Academy Awards annually and we tweet out about the racial injustice of the awards ceremony, about the white privilege, about how it’s a white people’s event, it’s curious that we don’t talk this way about the racial injustice in books, about the white privilege, about how publishing is a white people’s industry. It’s beloved by readers globally, as proved by its reception of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction in 2009.

Kathryn Stockett’s The Help is the winner of numerous awards, including the 2010 Townsend prize for fiction and the 2012 Peter Selvin award.

The help by kathryn stockett genre