The Help

Before I read The Help, I had one of those epic Facebook discussions on a friend's wall, about the racial divide in the South, how people up north don't get it (she is a professor at Drake in Iowa), and had all these ideas and indignance that I needed to share.  I grew up in a racially, culturally, and socioeconomically divided city.  Black people went to public schools, which were terribly underfunded and in a sad state- some of them didn't even have air conditioning.  The whites that could afford it went to private school, mostly Catholic.  There was little to no mixing.  Whites had their golf and tennis clubs, neighborhoods, Mardi Gras clubs and parades, and suburbs.  Blacks had theirs.

New Orleans East was built as a haven for whites, with big homes and was far enough from the city... and then it was populated with blacks looking to get out of the inner city.  The white people then headed for the Northshore of Lake Ponchartrain, and build out in that area exploded.  What I never understood, and still do not understand, was the disparity of it all.  It is unfair in a lot of ways, but white people have not yet understood what they have done to themselves.  Segregating their kids into private schools and then paying taxes on public schools is paying twice.  Giving no oversight or funding to public schools means that the graduates of those schools have no skills when they graduate, some of them can't even read and write.  This is the job pool that white employers have to draw from for their businesses, and spend extra money training things that could have been learned in high school.  Also, moving across the lake means an hour commute to and from the city, and an hour and a half to the CBD.