Disney's "The Help" Does It Again

The film version of "The Help" will be released on DVD and Blu-Ray December 6. I saw "The Help" last month with my girl Janet who is White. I went in with all the preconceived notions of a race movie veteran. I knew that the White protagonist would be placed at the center of the Black woman's story. She was. I was nearly positive that this story would also castrate the issue at the root of systematic White supremacy, the basis of what we call racism. It did. I knew that Janet would be touched and I would be irritated by what was left out.

                                   

"The Help" is set in 1960's Jackson, Mississippi, which at the time was one of the most segregated cities in the country. Blacks throughout the South were institutionally made second class citizens under laws of lifestyle known as Jim Crow Laws. These laws were instituted as early as 1877 through 1964, a year prior to the 100th anniversary of the end of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. The film takes a fictional look at Jim Crow's end days through the eyes of Black maids and the White people for whom they cooked, cleaned and took care.

Lawd, Have Mercy

As the typical middle class White family in the early '60s had a suburban tract home, a Ford or Buick in the driveway, a black-and-white console in the living room, they also had a maid. Domestic work was just about the only work a Black woman could get in the South, condemning them to lives of servitude.

The film opens on the starring maid, Abileen, played by Viola Davis. She is a long-suffering woman. It seems the only joy she experiences besides that she gets shooting the shit with her best friend Minny (Octavia Spencer) is caring for her White family's baby girl. "You is kind, you is smart, you is important," Abileen tells the cherubic child. No doubt Abilene herself benefits from the affirmation. Her White family along with many others in the community begin to build outdoor toilets for their "help" in an effort to fully carry out the 'separate but equal' tenets of Jim Crow, emphasis on the separate. This serves to undermine the dignity of the Black characters psychologically, which is the objective. Feed up with subjugation, Abileen risks her life to tell her story to the White protagonist, Skeeter (Emma Stone), whose motives for writing the book exposing the lifestyle of the South are unclear.

"Eat My Shit"

I always refuse to give too much away about a film. Suffice it to say that there is a shocking subtext to the film that deals with retribution. Part of the films begs the questions, if someone has abused their power to do all they can to put you under a bridge and block your pursuit of happiness, would you strike back with devastating force?

      
Sir Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. When Milly does what she does to Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard), a persistent bigot, it is her attempt to make Hilly feel, or taste, just a little bit of what she's been treating her like for far too long. Now, that I can dig as figuratively historic. There are numerous accounts in slave narratives of all the ways Black ancestors struck back in passive aggressive ways to get their owners back for brutally oppressing and subjugating them.

Sex, The Root of All Racism
The film skirts around the real reasons why Whites instituted segregation to begin with. It was the fear of miscegenation, defined by Merriam-Webster as the marriage, cohabitation or sexual intercourse between a white person and a person of another race. The widespread belief in the inferiority of Blacks was a lie propagated to hide the fact that xenophobic White males of privilege did and still fear the loss of the material power their blood lines control and the obliteration of people who look like them through race mixing. Once institutionalized racism in the country took effect a drop of "Black blood" made a person Black and anyone considered Black found virtually no protections under the law.

Whether we realize it or not the one drop principle persists to this day. Our own president is a product of this principle. Barack Obama, even though his mother is White and he was mostly raised by Whites, grew up to identify as a Black man because in this country he could never be anything else. His father's DNA prevented him from benefiting from the White skin privilege his mother's folks shared. In short, it's the fear of a Black planet, the fear of whiteness being fucked out of existence, that made many Whites cosign on institutionalized racism. However, to hide their fear the myth of Black inferiority was propagated and the lives of Black folks have been made miserable in great measure because of this once popular psychosis.

"The Help" portrays Black characters who are completely devoid of sexuality. Absent among the maids complaints is the topic of sexual harassment by the mister of the house. The topic of sex is avoided in the Disney tradition. Odd that Hilly (Bryce Dallas Howard), the hateful childhood friend of Skeeter's sports a cold sore the last quarter of the film, suggesting she has a sexual past. It's ironic as she leads the initiative for separate bathroom for household domestic on the basis that Blacks carry different diseases. In the end, it is clear that she is the one who is infected.

History Shrugged

The real life story of Black women during this time is actually phenomenal. Every day Black women who became larger than life such as Rosa Parks, Fannie Lee Hammer and Shirley Chisholm come to mind. These women were the center of their lives, the center of history. Yet, in this so-called historical tale, a young White woman is injected as the gatekeeper to the Black women's freedom on the dawn of the Civil Rights Movement. It's typical Hollywood revisionism.

Minny and Abileen's preacher delivers the moral of "The Help." On the pulpit he states, "Love compels us to put ourselves in harm's way for our fellow man. If you can love...you already have the victory." The historical accuracy of this love theme is the best thing about "The Help." It's the theme of cooperation through love that bought Janet to tears. However, I left the theater feeling like the real facts about racism and the real story of the Black woman's roles in history on screen has yet to be told.

Our Love of the N-Word

It's hardly a secret. Black people use the N-Word enough. Enough in the earshot of non-Black folks for them to notice. I've been on enough mass transit trains, buses and college campuses to be privy to the indiscriminate use of the N-Word by numerous non-Black youth to other non-Black youth. I've heard the term applied to Jerry Sandusky, the disgraced Penn State defensive coach, by a Black female friend on Facebook. Didn't seem to matter to her that Sandusky is White.

The N-Word, most popularly "nigga," has captured the imagination of youth of all colors since Hip-Hop trickled up. The word is itself a rebellion. Replacing the -er in the last syllable of the original N-Word with an -a took the violence and hate out of the word and melded it with a spirit of irreverence toward authority and anyone else who doesn't like it.

V-Nasty, of The White Girl Mob she formed with fellow Oakland rapper Kreayshawn, has caught some heat for her use of the N-Word in rhymes. It is obviously a way to fit in and drop street credit. A lot of white girls that come from the hood want to prove themselves in the hood for good reason. They often are reminded on the daily of a White skin privilege that they don't yet see residing in the ghettos. Kreayshawn and V-Nasty's White Girl Mob exists as a reaction to their alienation growing up White and disenfranchised in the hood.

I grew up in a home where the N-Word was taboo and never used. My mom's folks are from Minnesota and have a history of being proud race people. The word was always looked down on as a term used by the so-called lower class. However, black culture has become a matter of fashion. Hip-hop has made the word ubiquitous. It can no longer be looked at as simply a word used by those with a "lack of class," as today's richest Blacks use it.

The word is like sex, it's provocative. It's illicit in that it breaks the rules of etiquette.  It's language noir.

In a recent Tale Tela online poll, 42 percent of folks thought that rappers in general should stop using the N-Word. The rest were equally divided by those who said no, it has a whole new meaning and those who did not care. I wanted to plant my flag in the "It's Complicated" camp, but the option was not given in the survey.

I wonder, can the success of a race lie on the back of a word, a word branded in the minds of so many and  functions as a vocabulary staple?

I personally don't use the word more than five times a year. Because of the way I was raised the word doesn't just roll out of my mouth. Only my closest friends have ever heard me use it and probably without them being able to ever recollect it. I slipped once in front of a white friend and I just didn't feel right saying in her presence. That never happened again. I use it like everyone else, for effect. To connote just the right emotion about a person.

As a possible upside to the use of nigger and nigga, we come across another important n-word  meaning we never use at all. A word new to us but rooted in antiquity, Negus, has been making its social media rounds recently. Negus is an East African word meaning King or member of royalty. So, David Duke, former KKK Grand Wizard turned mainstream politician, put that in your pipe and smoke it.

The N-Word tests the boundaries of free speech and good taste. The righteous seem to think that if the world is lanced from the English language we will enter through the pearly gates of the post-racial society many talk about but many know does not yet exist. The thing is that language is fluid. The word is not only a part of the American lexicon, it is woven in the fabric of it's history and cannot be easily unraveled, if ever at all.

Cyber Life

Life online is a world of discovery. We are both adult and child while surfing the net as we indulge every wonder.

Let's face it. The internet is magic. It's power for good and evil is omnipotent. If T.V.'s mystique were likened to the Smurf-hating wizard Gargamel, bumbling and full of error, the internet is Potter's Dumbledore. These days, everyone is online. Social media gives us all a public persona to do with as we want. What we create is a unique cyber imprint.

What's more interesting is how cyberspace has made us all more of who we really are as opposed to who we want to be. Most active users leave a trail. It's hard to fake your vibe. Some of us manicure our profile pages as if they were a bonsai plant. Some of us don't. But we all show a bit of our true selves online.

All hail, the almighty relationship status. I have a cousin who's newly engaged every few months. I'm single and I admit that I look forward to the day "in a relationship" can be my status, simply for the likes. They're like tiny little wrapped gifts. I just love them when I get them. But I'm no Kim K. I'm not in it for show. I want the relationship to be real.

We have entered an era in which we must redefine privacy when we've all become public figures in so far as we engage in social media to share ourselves with our friends and followers. Never have we been so accessible to so many. Not since we left the village. Even then our audience was never this broad. The possibilities for both expression and connection for the individual in cyberspace are exhilarating to the spirit and has captivated billions. It's undeniable. We crave connection. We want to plug in.

We've handed in our anonymity en masse. Some of us seek fame and fortune, some search for love and others simply want to share our voice. It's all valid here. We know Big Brother and corporations monitor our moves at will but we continue to covet the net like a moth to a flame. Will this be the death of us or will it breath new life into the collective consciousness? I'm counting on it being the later.

What's funny-ironic is our human fear of the computer. Like Dr. Frankenstein, we mistrust our own creation. It's the basis of so many of our best sci-fi film thrillers, from the early cinema classic Metropolis to 2001 to The Matrix. They are cautionary tales symbolic of how The Age of Technology and our dismal world economy has displaced millions of workers, stripping them of their livelihood; a symbolic apocalypse. Our fear of computers replacing humans has been realized. We scramble for new ways to live in cooperation with our fantastic monster.

We've decided that if we can't beat them we might as well join them, especially where there are apps involved. I've heard people describe their smartphones as best friends. Cyber life is no substitute for real living. We must strike a balance least we get caught up in the magic.