Milgram Experiment vs The Help

The Milgram Experiment is a series of psychological experiments conducted by Dr. Stanley Milgram of Yale University. This experiment, influenced by the events of the Nazi Holocaust, was suppose to demonstrate the relationship between obedience and authority. The experiment began on July, 1961. Milgram's testing showed that even if a person's conscience tell him/her to not do something but an authoritarian or a dictator is telling him/her to do something, he/she will do it anyway.

This experiment can be connected to how people become racist towards certain races. Like how Milgram conducted the experiment, people probably become racist towards certain races because they were told ideas or stereotypes about certain races through their lives, or brainwashed for short.

The novel "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett, for example, illustrates how people in a town like Jackson can be racist towards certain races, coloured people to be specific. These people have been brainwashed with idiosyncrasies that they show when dealing with coloured people. For example, Hilly Holbrook, a character in the novel, was able to persuade people of Jackson that coloured people carry diseases that White people are not immune from. From this, she was able to brainwash them with the idea of building a separate toilet for the coloured maids of the citizens of Jackson that time. This kind of brainwashing is not only evident in fiction books but also in real life. For example, the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler was able to convince the people of Germany that Jewish people are the cause of all the troubles Germany underwent during the World War I and the Great Depression. This evidently ended up with fascism, and then the genocidal killing of Jewish people around German occupied countries.

Racism is bad, but we cannot avoid it. We live in countries were people think about certain races. We live in a society where you hear racial terms everywhere. Young people think that it is funny to make fun of other races, and not everyone can control themselves into laughing into some of these jokes. Most of us are raised by our own parents with the ideas of racism surrounding us. The thing that we need to put in mind is that racism is an error. The error is we tend to think that we are superior over other people and that these people stand in the way of our wants and we get those people out of the way by attacking them verbally with idiotic ideas, commonly known as stereotypes. Racism grow from the same lethal roots, selfishness and ignorance.