Beyond help

It's not very often that I will pick up a book and read it non-stop, and this can be for so many reasons.  I never understood why my mother liked reading so much, I mean, didn't she know that TV was so much better?  I bought "The Help" by Kathryn Stockett from the local bookstore when I had a bit of money left over from our tax return.  I had seen the trailer for the movie, but decided that I'd go a different route and read the book instead.
I laid in bed all day with the flu and decided to finish the last 200 pages and I've just now finished the last page of the book.  There's so many emotions....many of them too heavy for my heart to bear.  I think about these women and even though they're fictitious, it doesn't mean they've never existed.  The guts it takes to speak up and change the way society thinks about thinks, these invisible lines, inspires me to look deeper into myself.
I've always considered myself fairly even-ended when it comes to discrimination.  I grew up in a town that had a strong homosexual presence, so because of that, I thought myself fairly well rounded.  Truth it, I'm far from it, and in fact my issues with my fellow humans beings tend to be the very issues I have with myself.
If one were to take a collection of all the friends I've ever had and profile them based on their ethnicity, my pie chart would be mainly Causacian.  But was that by choice?  Or is it a result of geographic circumstance?  I remember as a young girl, playing with my Barbies, and I recall thinking "what if my hair was brown, like my best friend Elizabeth's?"  I felt very sorry for Elizabeth because all the pretty Barbies only had blonde hair...and peach skin, at that.  Oh, and they were straight, too, and nasty bitches to each other.  It's these things that I reflect on now as I'm maturing and aging into an adult that I realize how skewed my reality really is.