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.