Is 'The Help' Movie a Retro Form of Racism?

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Is 'The Help' Movie a Retro Form of Racism?
Why Some People Are Boycotting 'The Help'


Nancy Tracy, Yahoo! Contributor Network
Jul 18, 2011


Despite having a black president in the White House with an Ivy League education, the biggest movie about African Americans this summer involves black maids and their deadbeat men. The rekindling of demeaning stereotypes and depiction of white people as their saviors are two of the problems some African Americans had with the 2009 book version of "The Help," the novel upon which the upcoming movie is based. Critics of Kathryn Stockett's take on blacks of the 1960s are saying "thanks, but no thanks" to the author's patronizing portrayal of the black experience.

"The Help" quickly became a New York Times best-seller and book club favorite, and the movie version -- which is being marketed as an island of sophisticated drama in a sea of summertime shoot 'em ups and sci fi -- is likely to sell a lot of popcorn. Yet beneath the glossy veneer of this hyped Hollywood movie are some tired funhouse cliches that distort the reality of being black in the 1960s.

Some of the movie's detractors are urging a boycott of the film, creating a Facebook page to publicize the protest. Critics of the movie also dished on its defects July 16, using the Twitter hashtag #100voicesrespondtothehelp.One blogger even called the book "a whitewashed, declawed version of history."

Here are some of the biggest beefs that boycotters have with "The Help":



Reinforces Negative Stereotypes



The Help" dredges up stale stereotypes of African Americans being less intelligent and attractive than white people.The maids in "The Help" are adorably illiterate, like children who unknowingly say funny things. Minny, for instance, mixes up her body parts and cars: "Cat got on the porch this morning, bout gave me a cadillac arrest thinking it was Mister Johnny," she says. Another maid, Aibileen, is an Uncle Tom who admires her friend's straight hair. "Yule May, Miss Hilly's maid setting in front in me. Yule May easy to recognize from the back cause she got such good hair, smooth, no nap in in," she gushes. In "The Help," good hair is code for white women's hair


Black Men are Worthless


Minny is married to an abusive man who refrains from beating her only when she is pregnant, but otherwise lacks paternal instincts. After bearing six children, Minny complains, "Plenty of black men leave their families behind like trash in a dump, but it's not something the colored woman do. We've got kids to think about."

But why should black men be good to their women? The maids in "The Help" seem to like their men mean. Even the devout Aibileen laments, "Much as I love the Lord, church going man never do all that much for me. Kind a man I like ain't the kind that stays around when he done spending all you money. I made that mistake twenty years ago. When my husband Clyde left me for that no-count hussy up on Farish street."

Overdone Dialects

Remember Prissy in "Gone With the Wind," the silly young black woman who said, "I don't know nothin' 'bout birthin' babies"? Echoes of her illiterate speech and that of Mammy, Aunt Jemima and every other comically drawn black female character from historic pop culture can be heard throughout "The Help."

A writer for the Christian Science Monitor wondered why Stockett used a thick dialect only for the black characters, "with nary a dropped 'g' among her generally less sympathetic Southern white characters." Even Viola Davis, the actress who plays the maid Aibileen in the movie, had qualms with duplicating her character's exaggerated speech patterns. "I didn't want [Aibileen's] dialect to be as strong as it was in the book," she confided in an interview with Cinema Blend.

White Women Are Saviors

As with "The Blind Side," a 2009 movie in which a white middle class housewife played by Sandra Bullock saves a poor black teenager, in "The Help," an unmarried white journalist named Skeeter comes to the black maids' rescue. The subtext in both movies is that African Americans cannot improve their lot in life without a white lady to help them.

Desperate for Reality

Ironically, the movie trailer for "The Help" looks like a 1960s version of "Desperate Housewives" -- only instead of wine and housework, these southern-fried white women have maids and mint juleps. It is likely that Stockett's flawed film will not only prove as popular as the Sunday night soap, but also bear as little resemblance to reality.

Is Viola Davis Character In The Help Just The Stereotypical Black Mammy?

trailer for "the help



Is Viola Davis Character In The Help Just The Stereotypical Black Mammy?

by the blogger "GayblackCanadianman"

I cannot contain my anger and disappointment that Viola Davis decided to star in the new film The Help. Hollywood produces very myopic representations of black women. Black women are either whores like Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball or maids like Viola Davis in The Help. The social construction of the binary of black female sexuality is very limited.

I noticed a couple of things while watching the trailer for The Help. First, the white women are presented as the stereotypical pristine, upper class, and feminine. However, the black women in The Help speak in a Southern dialect, and constructed as inferior to the white women.

Of course, the white woman saves the day since the purpose of The Help is to promote the narrative that black people we cannot save ourselves.

The Help is just another form of the classic white saviour movies.

I am so tired of the racist white saviour narrative that black people need to be saved by whites.

Another problem, I have with The Help is the film promotes the racist narrative that black women have no agency. The only purpose black people have is to serve white folks. Black womanhood is constructed as just to be loving and nurturing. Hollywood consistently promotes the discourse that a black woman’s purpose in life is to exist in an anterior time. I cringed when I heard the line in the trailer “we love them and they love us.”

Yes, black women love working in the domestic sphere and serve rich white women. Of course, The Help ignores the fact in America, black women were blocked from higher educational opportunities for decades. Black women worked in the domestic sphere because this was the only work to make a living in America prior to the civil rights movement. Of course, there were black women such as Zora Neale Hurston that became a writer. However, the majority of black women had to work in domestic work because that’s the only form of work they were offered!

Two years ago, Sandra Bullock racist film The Blind Side also promoted this abhorrent narrative disavowing black agency.

I understand Viola is a black actress, and she needs to work. However, time really has not changed for black women in Hollywood.

I wish Viola Davis had more pride and decided NOT to take the role in The Help!

In the year 1940, Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award for her role as mammy in the film Gone With The Wind. The black mammy stereotype of black womanhood is so pervasive in racist Hollywood!

McDaniel did not have a choice because in the year 1940 there were a paucity of good roles for black women in Hollywood.

I understand Viola Davis needs a pay cheque but taking on the role of a maid is demeaning.

The trailer for The Help is so racist and sexist against black women. I just feel so sick watching this racist garbage!

It is so sad that the best role Viola Davis can get since her Academy Award nomination for Doubt is just being the black mammy! It is so so deleterious and abhorrent that Viola would take this disgusting role as a maid to a white woman!

The Help engenders the discourse that a black woman purpose is to be subservient to white folks. I also find the racist narrative of the white saviour in The Help problematic. In the 1960s, civil rights movement my black elders helped themselves they did not sit and wait for white folks to gain freedom!