Her family hired me as a maid for 12 years, but then she stole my life and made it a Disney movie | Mail Online
why everything about the help is shitty.
‘I think she is just a racist. She claims she respects black people but she just ran all over me.’
Aibileen
The Help compares Aibileen’s skin colour to a cockroach: ‘He black,’ Abilene says of the insect, ‘blacker than me. How can Kathryn live with herself after writing that? How can a person be that cruel? ‘I think she is just a racist. She claims she respects black people but she just ran all over me.’
I am not even surprised about this. Not even a little. And when some legal reason is found to show why the author was perfectly justified in writing this drivel, I won’t be surprised then, either.
(Source: catcrow)
source:
One White woman can write about a fictional Ole Miss graduate who has enough compassion (and White Guilt) to write a book from the POV of the help, and then this book within a book causes a firestorm of hope, happiness and harmony in the eyes and hearts of (White) people everywhere, even in the UK. Why? Because it creates the possibility of a world where black servanthood and black insufficiency are soothed by the medicine of a benevolent whit person reaching across a line they believe does not exist, or are daring to cross even in the face of death, because they themselves “are not racist”.
I call this character a White Easter Egg. There are two great types I know well who fit the description, though they both have their differences: Lily Owens (The Secret Life of Bees) and Atticus Finch (To Kill A Mockingbird). There’s a reason why NPR said The Help was the most important piece of fiction since To Kill A Mockingbird, because it was written to examine racial politics between differing races of women in a less brutal way. There were instances of brutality and social truth, but The Help is far from the reality. The film does it even worse, but that is another story.
Many (White) people are losing their literary minds over it because The Help allows them to either step into, reaffirm or acknowledge their White Easter Eggness. The state of being post-racial in a world where racism is de riguer and evidently so, to the socially conscious mind.
The Help “helped” many (White) people feel good about themselves and touched them, because finally a White person from the Sixties was two things:
* not a Klansman
* the center of it all
It also promoted the idea that racism from White women was limited to socialite snobbery. It wasn’t. Klanswomen were sometimes more vicious than Klansmen. They had their own “wives of the Klan” culture and everything.
I believe we should all recognize one very important, rigorous thing: people like Skeeter Phelan does not exist anymore, if they ever did. White folks like her either died in the struggle (many did), or continued living in Whiteness after the Civil Rights Act was passed and became armchair allies, or are aware of the sickness of racism in this country and in this world and are in hiding or do not care altogether.
Books like The Help are not books for Black people, direct descendants of the help, to digest in the same attitude as many White people. The problem with The Help is that Stockett can write something so glaringly post-racial (“we are just two women”); that she can craft lines about a cockroach “being blacker than me”, and move White people to tears about how they understand racism (most do not) and touch them, but these same White people would show hesitation to read anything by Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Cade Bambara or James Baldwin.
Books like The Help offer White readers the delicious option of believing “it wasn’t all that bad.”
Because black authors who write on these particular topics face the truth of the time with their pen. White authors tend to offer peaceful, sometimes comical, distractions. White authors do not possess enough cultural flexibility to make racial books balanced enough in their themes.
That is they they fail, in the eyes of the Negro. Should a White person believe The Help is the greatest piece of fiction since To Kill A Mockingbird, so shall it be written, so shall it be done. What do the eyes of the Negro reader matter? We are, after all, just the help.
(Source: zorascreation)
Essentially, The Help is a story about a color-blind, white woman who wants to be a writer. Someone who tells the story of Black women who are domestic workers. This is not the story of Black female domestic workers.
One need not look too far to see how the author’s standpoint affects her work. The movie’s title is a great example of the author’s perspective. An author who talks about Black women from a color-blind perspective wouldn’t be able to see her own white privilege in constructing the title. A color-blind author who writes about Black women won’t be able to see how she continues to reproduce a racist narrative.
She didn’t call it the ‘The Black Help”. She called it The Help. And I will add that when I caught a quick glimpse of a preview of the film and saw that the first person in the preview was a white woman, I thought “Wow. A movie about white female domestic workers. How interesting.”
Wrong. The Help implied The Black Help. Similar to using terms such as “disadvantaged”, “urban”, “Inner city” and “at-risk”, the title The Help is a manipulation of language to replace racial specifics. We use coded terms to mark bodies, construct race to make some bodies deficient (Black/Brown bodies) and others the norm (White).
This author, like many, is getting paid and rewarded to continue a cycle of racist reproduction. We are all involved in this kind of racist reproduction in one way or another.
It’s problematic because it’s a white savior film. A white woman comes out to “save” the POC in the movie, when it reality, she only benefits from their stories, endangers their safety, then takes a cushy job in New York while they’re left to the new dangers in their environment CREATED because of her, not to mention she only chooses to write the books because her favorite negro got fired by her mom.
Such a bullshit fucking film. It pisses me off just thinking about it, especially since so many white people think this shit’s progressive.
I watched it last night with Jordan, we both really enjoyed it. I thought the acting was fantastic, for all of the actors. I really love Emma Stone, though. I don’t usually care about celebrities that much but she just seems really lovely.
Anyways. I don’t see why everyone seems to hate this film so much. I don’t think this movie is racist. Is it entirely accurate? Of course not. Does it do everything right? Of course not. But overall I think it is a good story. It’s enjoyable. It shows that racism is not a problem that only existed pre 20th century. It existed in 1967, and it exists to this day.
I think that white people who do not understand that their parents and grandparents were most likely racist need to see this. Racism can be extremely hurtful and blatant even if it is not master and slave.
I think this movie did a lot of Oscar baiting, but that’s to be expected, I guess.
That’s uh…that’s not why people don’t like the movie. There are lots of movies about the Civil Rights era, know what most of them have in common? There are white protagonists. Want to know a secret? I don’t care how Civil Rights affected white people. Really what changed for them? Shit, now the law says you gotta treat people like people.
How
Awful
Now I’m not saying that there weren’t white people who disagreed with the way things were, I’m positive there were. But I’m tired of hearing about them. Dead tired. Civil Rights wasn’t a white people fight and yet I get more stories about how hard it was for them then I do about real People of Color that actually had to deal with it.
Why was Skeeter the main character? Why does, at the end of the movie/book, a White woman get to reap all the benefits and then leaves a whole community that she potentially put in danger. Where was Aibileen supposed to go at the end? My aunt, who was a maid during that time says chances are she would be forced to move (WHICH WE KNOW SHE COULDN’T AFFORD TO DO) because chances are she wasn’t going to get another job in that town. NOT TO MENTION chances are the Klan would be after her cause news travels.
Had The Help actually been, ya know, all about the black women dealing with their issues I might have liked it. But instead, I got a movie/book about a white woman being sad because there’s racism and her black nanny was fired and sent away and so she, running out of ideas btw, decides to write about black maids so she can jump start her journalistic career. Then she succeeds, runs off to be even more successful and leaves everyone who helped her alone in the dust.
filed under: Reasons I Won’t See The Help
The Help by Hunter Langston
This poster says more about the problematic aspects of the movie than almost anything I’ve ever seen
Pretty fucking accurate.
