Time & Perspective Quote by Kathryn Stockett

“Just the way things were done” is the most chilling phrase in Stockett’s line, because it’s the language of moral laundering. It turns an architecture of humiliation into a matter of etiquette, as if a separate bathroom were no more political than crown molding. The intent is not to defend segregation so much as to show how segregation defended itself: through habit, through the soothing voice of normalcy, through the collective shrug that makes cruelty feel like tradition.

Stockett’s subtext hinges on domestic space as a battleground. A “black domestic” isn’t merely a worker; she’s someone close enough to cook meals, raise children, clean bodies, yet still treated as contamination. The separate bathroom is a literalized fear of proximity, a carefully maintained border inside the home that preserves white comfort while extracting Black labor. The house becomes a quiet state, enforcing policy without needing a policeman at the door.

The second sentence performs a second, subtler move: it gestures toward progress (“had faded out”) while revealing how recent and contingent that progress is. “New homes” matters. Old homes keep old rules; new construction offers a convenient fiction of innocence, as if changing floor plans could substitute for reckoning. The timeframe (“’70s and ’80s”) punctures nostalgia. This isn’t distant antebellum history; it’s within living memory, which is precisely why the euphemism of “the way things were done” remains so seductive - and so dangerous.