U. of California Names New Chancellors

I wouldn’t touch this topic with a ten-foot pole.

It sounds like the movie suffers from the fatal elision of the role of white dudes in creating, benefitting from, and perpetuating Jim Crow in the first place.

These are all great questions, lesboprof — I guess I would answer quickly:

My own changes in consciousness came more from becoming deeply immersed in Black and Latina women’s work on the Lower East Side when I became a community organizer for a brief period, and subsequently by privileging the perspectives of academic colleagues of color, not from a one to one relationship with a single woman of color that I imagined as uniquely affectionate, or from becoming alienated from other whites.  This required from me a sublimation of the self, deferring to others and learning some harsh lessons about my own class/racial ignorance, rather than the emergence of a newly, empowered individual agency as Skeeter demonstrates.  While Skeeter demonstrates the possibilities inherent in listening, and a new sense of reciprocity (sending money from the book to each woman), her articulation as “a good person” throughout mutes what is actually a far more difficult transformation for white people.  Her passage into becoming one of the group also rings quite false to me:  she goes from outsider to insider in a heartbeat, and doesn’t have to demonstrate the ongoing earning of trust which I think is critical for white women even (especially?) in relation to our sisters of color in the academy.  And Skeeter *never* unlearns her privilege in any obvious way, although she does learn guilt (which Aibileen and Minny free her of, so that she can go take a job no Black woman would have been offered in New York in 1963.)

Strict gender split?  Maybe.  But that said, do we really believe the elite women of Jackson knew nothing about what was being done in their name?  And that they read no newspapers, didn’t listen to the radio?  Do we believe the female Black workers of Jackson were utterly insulated from the Freedom Struggle?  As a historian I don’t think that is credible.

This point that you make is so important:  “Aren’t our relationships, our interactions with other people who differ across lines of race and class, worthy of discussion and review? Don’t you think that sometimes it is the little rudenesses, the slights, the dismissals, that push us into action? Yes, the larger issues keep us moving, but sometimes I think the interpersonal stuff really challenges us in a very personal way. I have often read of specific actions that sparked people to advocacy.”  I agree.  But the problem is that the movie is making a far bigger claim for relationships — that in and of themselves they produce all the change we need.  Maybe it’s all the change white people like Skeeter needed, but it isn’t all the change the descendents of Aibileen and Minny, or any of their Northern counterparts, needed, nor was it all the change they wanted. Hence, for white women, that’s often the spark — but they get it at the expense of Black women privileging relationships over good jobs, decent education, wages and childcare — all policy questions.  I also think that by excluding politics the movie inadvertently sequesters women to the household, whereas we know that powerful female organizers — Ella Baker, Fanny Lou Hamer, Barbara Deming to name a few — have not received their due as the political visionaries that they were.

I grew up middle class in New Orleans in the ’60′s and briefly had a white nanny. I never witnessed  anything like what was portrayed in “The Help.”I read some of the negative reviews before seeing the movie. I don’t find entertaining movies with a lot of obligatory racism and thought the focus on peeing and pooing a bit much.
To expect a female-centric novel-adapted movie set in Jackson, MS in the ’60′s to be the equivalent of a balanced thorough documentary is rather unrealistic. 
I thought it was an okay movie, but only one character, the Skeeter’s mother, transformed from a racist to non-racist. Everyone else pretty much stayed the same. Did like the final scene where Aibileen finally tells Hilly what a bitch she had been. As Aibileen walks away, she suggests her new career path will be that of a writer, which is a bit unrealistic.
I’m not sure that a book about southern racism would have sold as well as portrayed in “The Help.” I mean, how many people south of the Mason-Dixon Line read “Black Like Me?”
Many of the criticisms expressed above about “The Help” are perhaps valid, but I think a greater criticism should be directed at today’s culture which is a lack of leading non-subservient roles for black actresses…

Full disclosure: I was raised primarily in Africa, the daughter of international aid workers, with the help of African women (and men).  

A few days ago, I finished reading The Help.  As such, I cannot speak to the movie — which, by the way, I plan to see (although only because I’m curious as to how the screenwriters translated the book and, frankly, because of all the hype, I want to get into the conversation).  Everything that follows, therefore, is based on my reading of the book and is not an analysis of the movie.  As a side note, I suggest you read the book as I am guessing that the movie’s portrayal of the three protaganists is a hollywoodized version that likely simplifies the characters as well as the issues.  I note first, that you mention that Hilly has no children.  In the book, her only redeeming quality is that she is a loving and affectionate mother to her two children.  Second, at least in my reading, Skeeter’s mother dies a racist. 
As a preface, I was disappointed in the book.  Primarily at the ending which too easily tied up what should have been a much more complicated (and perhaps, tragic) conclusion.  That said, it’s a book.  A book aimed at portraying a sliver of life and a glance at what was, and continues to be, complicated relationships between and among women.  To give it more credit is to play into the notion that mainstream hollywood speaks truth and that this is somehow a pronoucement and/or a prescription of how to overcome racism.  I don’t think it is.  Nor should it be.  Nor, in fact, do I think that is what Katherine Sockett intended.  I  know very little about what it was like to be either white or black in Jackson, Mississippi in the mid-1960s.  I do know, however, what it is like to grow up white with black servants.  And I do know the swirl of complexity, anxiety and unwelcomed privilege that comes with that.  I also know how deeply and emotionally connected and bonded I felt (and still feel) to the women (and men) who helped raise me.  The book struck a chord with me and challenged me to think about these complicated relationships — and for that, I thank Ms. Sockett.To act as if The Help is intended as some cure-all for racism and the deep-seated institutional injustice that exists in this country is to give The Help too much credit.  Rather, for me, The Help is an exploration.  Of characters.  Of marriage.  Of friendship.  And of privilege.  It’s one from a white Southern woman’s perspective.  (Let’s not forget this is largely autobiographical).  Let’s leave it at that.  Once we do, it has value, warmth and, in the end, import.  But let’s leave it at that.

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