If the film The Help were set in the 21st Century, it would tell a different story.
The black women who were maids in the American South before the civil rights movement of the 1960’s became the mothers and grandmothers of today’s doctors, lawyers, business professionals, CEOs, and yes, the first lady of the United States.
Domestic workers in the U.S. are now largely Hispanics and people of Caribbean descent. Immigration, pay scales and working conditions have shifted the paradigm of social mobility, and African-Americans have been the beneficiaries of their own hard work and struggle.
The civil rights movement created broader opportunities for black women and men, who were previously relegated to working-class roles. Of course, disparities and barriers to progress remain prevalent in American society, but this latest Hollywood homage to the lives and stories of African-American women who never knew our kind of freedom and opportunity should encourage pause and reflection, while measuring the distance between their past and our future.
The Help has received mostly positive reviews from mainstream audiences and critics, but the response among African-Americans has been mixed. The film, based on the best-selling novel by Atlanta author Kathryn Stockett, chronicles a familiar story of the black maids who kept many white Southern homes running for a century following the Civil War. It follows the well-established Hollywood tradition of films about black-white relations, in which the story is told primarily through the eyes of the central white character — who is inevitably transformed through their experiences with black people. Though African-Americans may have a powerful role in the narrative, they are never the central character, and as such are still relegated to the help – both on-screen and behind the proverbial curtain.
For reasons that are understandable, The Help deliberately omits the more violent and brutal experiences blacks endured during the rule of Jim Crow, and it does so largely because that isn’t the story being told.
Admittedly, many African-Americans may take issue with the light treatment of historical realities, but that is par for the course when it comes to Hollywood cinema.
White heroes are often featured, giving blacks a supporting role in their own fight for recognition. The 1988 film, Mississippi Burning and the 1996 film adaptation of John Grisham’s A Time to Kill follow this mold.
In The Help, Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone) is the young aspiring writer who seeks the help of Aibeleen, portrayed by Viola Davis, who happens to be the maid of her friend. The legendary Cicely Tyson is cast as Skeeter’s former maid, who has since been fired, and Aibeleen’s best friend Minny is brought to life by comedic actress Octavia Spencer. Aibeleen is the secret writing force behind Stone’s Skeeter, and that forms the central premise of the story.
But perhaps this backseat way of driving the narrative has become out-dated; both on-screen and off.
In an official statement recently released, the Association of Black Women Historians weighed in on The Help, and added to the critiques:
During the 1960s…up to 90 per cent of working black women in the South labored as domestic servants…. The Help’s representation of these women is a disappointing resurrection of Mammy — a mythical stereotype of black women who were compelled, either by slavery or segregation, to serve white families. Portrayed as asexual, loyal, and contented caretakers of whites…this most recent iteration is troubling because it reveals a contemporary nostalgia for the days when a black woman could only hope to clean the White House rather than reside in it.
Their words reveal the yet unresolved conundrum inherent in telling these kinds of stories: Hollywood directors try to escape the historic political realities, by portraying emotional fallacy. The truth remains that those black women were bound to “back-breaking, low paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them”. And not all of this is in the past. This summer’s unfolding drama of the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case in New York City has proven that there are still poor black women in vulnerable positions: abused, and ignored. There is no tender way of conveying this dichotomy, but this twisted history represents both the beauty and darkness of the African-American journey, all of which should be embraced, and the best of which should be celebrated.
The Help is a necessary reminder of how far we’ve come.
Of course, not everything has changed for the better. The election of President Barack Obama briefly represented a new era in racial politics. But as Obama faces the challenge of a seemingly fierce, and at times racist, block within the Republican Party committed to his failure – the tone has quickly reverted. The recent story of a mob of white teenagers caught on video beating and killing a black man for sport Jackson, Mississippi — in 2011, is starkly disturbing in what is supposed to be a “post-racial” era. Incidents like this were common throughout the South in the 1960s, and our grandmothers and great-grandmothers lived through that harsh reality. But they survived.
There is a distinct difference between the immigrant story of Italians, Irish, Polish and Germans who came through Ellis Island seeking ‘streets paved with gold, flowing with milk and honey’; and the wild contrast of having arrived in chains, enslaved and subjected, but through it all re-drawing the lines of freedom, re-writing the Constitution and re-defining the Bill of Rights. African-Americans did this; and in so doing, have become the greatest exporters of the idyllic American Dream.
Often, there is a tendency to focus on the negative, for fear that all our positive gains will be erased. No film is perfect, and I understand the failings of this adaptation (the impeccable performances notwithstanding). But I also appreciate the story being told. It reminds me, as it does so many of my generation, of the strong women who nurtured us, and managed to maintain their sense of pride, femininity and self-worth despite the outside forces that sought to devalue them.
Some didn’t make it, as Dr. Martin Luther King said, to the promised land. But they would be happy to know, that in this America, their choices extend far beyond being able to clean the halls of the White House: because their daughters and granddaughters now reside there.
And that is certainly a story worth writing, telling and repeating.
Edward Wyckoff Williams is an author, columnist, political and economic analyst, and a former investment banker. Follow him on Twitter and on