Restroom Bills: North Carolina’s HB2, Kathryn Stockett’s The Help & Social Paranoia

Social norms are not just abstract concepts. Often, perceived social norms take on a political inflection. At times, they even form the basis of legislation.

This was the case recently in North Carolina where a law was passed to regulate “bathroom rights” in the state, limiting the use of public restrooms according to the sex on a person’s birth certificate. The target of the law in this case was North Carolina’s transgender population.

A similar issue is explored in Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 novel, The Help, where a prevalent racial bias is reinforced with a local initiative to ban women of color from using the bathroom in houses where they work as maids. In the case of The Help, the restrictions on restroom rights are very clearly aligned with a social norm of racial segregation that existed in the American South in the 1960s.

It should be pointed out that North Carolina’s legislature has now repealed its HB2 law, but the connections between these stories suggest that certain kinds of segregation remain active as social norms, sometimes made into legal tools that translate internalized social-identity concepts into controversial laws. One of the strongest connections in these stories is found in the fact that specific and illogical social paranoia spurred the bathroom initiative in The Help and the same kind of illogical paranoia seems to have propelled the HB2 proposition into law.

We should see the commonalities between these stories as an indication that it is a fear of difference which gives social norms their real weight and this fear often lurks beneath the surface of our discourse on issues related to perceived difference.

In The Help (set in the early 1960s in Jackson, Mississippi), a politically ambitious and well-to-do White woman, Hilly Holbrook, presents an initiative to ban Black maids from using the bathrooms in White households where they work. She attempts to justify her idea in a number irrational of ways, at first presenting the “Home Help Sanitation Initiative” as a science-based program, saying, “Everybody knows they carry different kinds of diseases than we do” (10). (The “they” here is in reference to Black people.) Later she insists that the maids of Jackson, Mississippi are grateful for the Home Help Sanitation Initiative, successfully pressing Abileen (a Black maid) to thank her for coming up with the idea of legally forcing her to use a bathroom attached to the garage: [H]ow do you like your new bathroom out there? It’s nice to have a place of your own, isn’t it?” (129). Thus Hilly hides the real rationale for the initiative behind science, then polity, but neither of these veneers is convincing.

These false justifications do eventually give way to a more frank explanation for Hilly’s bathroom restrictions. The initiative, in her moments of honesty, is admitted to be a strategy to maintain racial segregation (218, 342). At its core, the restroom policy in The Help is a legal means of enforcing a social paranoia. Once the false justifications are seen for what they are — an elaborate rhetorical dodge — the discriminatory nature of the restroom policy becomes clear. Yet, because the social paranoia exists in the version of Jackson, Mississippi presented in The Help, the Home Help Sanitation Initiative is widely supported — not despite any misunderstandings of its actual intent but because people can actually see through the false rhetoric. The justifications for the initiative are made-up, but the paranoia behind it is real. Yet, due to the false rhetoric surrounding the Home Help Sanitation Initiative, no opportunities arise to debate the validity of the irrational paranoia that inspired it.

Critics of North Carolina’s HB2 “bathroom bill” have made a similar point about the logical discrepancies between the stated reason for the legislation limiting bathroom access and the actual rationale behind it. Covering the story in The Nation, Katha Pollit writes:

The ostensible reason for the bathroom rules is that if transgender women could use the ladies’ facilities, so could men dressed as women, and either group could go in there and commit sexual assaults and no one could do a thing about it. Never mind that supporters of the bill couldn’t point to a single case of trans women committing such crimes in ladies’ rooms, and municipalities around the country with trans-friendly bathroom rules report no increase in incidents of men doing so, either.

We see here the same defense of segregation that was used in Stockett’s novel by the proponents of Jim Crow era bathroom bill. The stated reason for the law does not match the facts. Instead, the law is justified by an ill-fitting mask of factual-sounding rhetoric and is intended to reify a stigma that unjustly punishes one group of people. But this story does not take place in a fictional Jackson, Mississippi. And it does not take place in 1962. This was 2016 and the same legal enforcement of social paranoia is still at work.

There is reason to celebrate North Carolina’s decision to repeal its HB2 “bathroom bill” but there is also reason to pause and consider how the bill existed in the first place as an attempt to criminalize a population in the eyes of the public due to the perceived difference of that group. Perhaps more distressingly, the bill illustrates the ways in which segregation can itself become an accepted social norm, a practice sanctioned by the state. One of the central ideas exemplified in The Help is that our local political bodies have little trouble imagining ways to enact and enforce social biases, concocting justifications that posture as scientific, factual, and objective when they are none of these things. North Carolina’s HB2 law puts this notion on display, suggesting a lesson for our own, non-fictional world. In a political climate often fraught with extremes of rhetoric, we should strive to think clearly and honestly about the real motivations behind our political choices. The HB2 law was a form of segregation targeting the transgender population in North Carolina, regardless of the stories its advocates told on the floor of the legislature. Fiction like The Help can help us to see past the fictions embedded in our political rhetoric and ascertain the truth behind this kind of troubling legal action.