Final Lit Circle Essay
500 words
The inequity and social injustice of the book
The Help are similar to those of the women in Canada today.
The Help takes place in the Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960’s and a lot of injustice took place during this time period. One issue is the employment inequality between the African Americans to white Americans. This struggle can be easily compared to the employment inequality between the chinese immigrants in Canada and the white Canadians when building the Canadian Pacific Railway in the 1880s.
Between 1881 and 1884, as many as 17 000 Chinese men moved to British Columbia to work as labourers on the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Chinese workers worked for roughly
$1.00 a day, and from this $1.00 a day the workers still had to pay for their food, their camping, and their cooking gear. The white workers did not have to pay for these things even though they were paid more money ($1.50-$2.50 per day). As well as being paid less, Chinese workers were given the most painful and life threatening work to do. They cleared and graded the railway's roadbed, they blasted tunnels through the rock, and there were accidents, fires and disasters. Landslides and dynamite blasts killed many.
Just like the Chinese immigrants in Canada, the African Americans in the States’ employment standards were unequal compared to any white mans .
African Americans did gain employment in Southern manufacturing, and pay differences between blacks and whites