vinthegreat asked: “The Help” - What a shame you got distracted by character wigs, it was a great movie which represented a realistic and factual period in African-American History. I feel like your post did not promote this Oscar worthy movie at all, but discouraged your fans to miss out on a factual representation of a period in African-American history. My grandmother worked as one of those maids and went to college at night so I am somewhat irked by your post. Advice: read the comments made to your post
If someone reads my opinion about ANYTHING on this blog and blindly decides to adopt it as their own without first informing themselves of the subject matter, then they have bigger problems to address than merely missing out on such a “great movie” as The Help. When I read the writing of people who have strong, unpopular opinions about things, I don’t want to NOT see/listen to/participate in whatever is being discussed; on the contrary, I MUST see/listen/participate in it myself so that I can formulate my own ideas about it. I believe that people are responsible for making up their own minds and I don’t have the power to make anyone DO or NOT DO anything. You overestimate the capacity for my blog to change lives by my posting an In Living Color gif. Shame on you.
Secondly, don’t you dare assume my opinion is not valid just because YOUR grandmother worked as a maid and went to college at night. Guess what. My black grandmother worked as a maid her entire life, too, up until the day when her shoulders were so stooped that she couldn’t stand up straight any more to clean white people’s homes efficiently. She was born in 1911. She called my ladyparts a “pocket book”. She made me candied yams every time I came to her house. She was weary and untrusting of white people, but she loved my mother- they had the same birthday. And she loved me. And she cussed a lot. And she went to jail once for pulling a knife on a woman in a juke joint who questioned her status as the best dancer in town. I am very familiar with the racial dynamic of the civil rights era, but even MORE familiar with the STILL present discrimination and segregation that exists in Alabama, where I spent 18 years of my life. It is why I haven’t been back to Birmingham in three years, despite the fact that many of my family members still live there. It is why driving over the train tracks from the lush, wealthy white suburb to the black, poor side of town where my grandmother lived in an old, cold, broken down house broke my heart every single weekend I went to see her. Every single weekend.You know what would have made The Help better? If it was told entirely from the perspective of the black maids. If, instead of reducing the black women to individuals that just so happened to cross the young, awkward white girl’s path, the whole story was about how that young white girl came into THEIR lives. It would have been better without glorifying the fact that this white girl gets her shit together because these two funny, intelligent and wise black women open up their world to her, so that she can then move to NYC to pursue her writing career and find love, leaving them in a fragile, explosively dangerous environment to fend for themselves in the wake of this book she has just published, thanks to their stories. I could have also done without the white people being painted as complete caricatures- they are so evil and tasteless and despicable that they are one-dimensional, which makes them easy to hate, and makes white audiences see the white character’s over-the-top racism as being so un-relatable. “I would never make a black person use a separate bathroom in the rain! I would never be that racist!” And yet, racism is still so prevalent today in very subtle, un-exaggerated ways. Racism has changed, but it has not disappeared, and things for African-Americans today are different than they were in the 1950’s and 60’s, but not everything is better. This, in my opinion, was a movie to make white people feel better about the *sticky* past that they may (or may not) feel inadvertently guilty about. The heroine in this movie is a young, privileged white girl, who always says “please” and “thank you” to the help, even though no one else does. For that, she is to be commended? I want to see movies about how black people in the south during the civil rights era changed their OWN lives. I want to see THEM helping white people change the future for both races, and I am tired of seeing it the other way around.
If it takes THIS movie for a person to recognize for the first time in their life that the Civil Rights era was really difficult for black people and they were treated unfairly, then the movie has fully done it’s job, but I sure would hate to be that ignorant, insensitive person.
And for future reference, you are more than welcome to be irked by any and everything I say, and you are also welcome to un-follow me. I make no apologies for my opinions, because they are my right, and I will abuse the shit out of it whether you like it or not.
Have an awesome day! Thanks for the message!
