Friday night, several members of my book club saw The Help. We read it several months ago, with a very interesting, lively discussion being the result. The book club is actually quite racially mixed, and it's been something I've truly enjoyed. There have been book club meetings when I have been in the distinct minority in terms of race - and if I said I was 100% comfortable with it in the beginning, I'd be lying. Those gatherings were very much outside my comfort zone, but in all honestly it was exactly where I needed - and wanted - to be.
I grew up in the south, in Arkansas. School desegregation and racially divided city lines were stalwarts in my early education. I didn't attend public school until 7th grade, and few of my friends were black. The ones who were were those individuals who, for one reason or another, easily mixed with white crowds. My crowd of friends has never been 100% white, with the other races usually being Hispanic and Asian. Black always felt "different" for some reason, and I'm sure a big part of that was not having any frame of reference for what those friendships should be like. Why they should be any different, I'm not sure.
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I can remember being warned off a close friendship with a black boy when I was in high school, because of the "complications" that could occur. Yeah, that message came through loud and clear.
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The crew that saw the movie on Friday night was 50/50 mixed. And I do wonder if I would have viewed the movie differently had I been with an all white crowd. In the back of my mind, as I watched the scenes flow by, I wondered what was going through my friends' heads. One of the ladies had brought her mom, who is probably in her 60s. I wondered what was going through her head, what memories something like this might trigger. Maybe nothing. But probably much more than I could imagine.
And for me, one particular scene helped me sort out one of the more frustrating things (to me, anyway) about race relations. The scene where the main character, a young white lady who is proposing to write about the lives and stories of black maids in 1960s Jackson Mississippi, is sitting in the kitchen with the one maid who has agreed to tell her stories, taking notes. A second maid comes into the house, realizes what is going on, and absolutely lays into the white lady. What right did she have to come and ask for their stories? How could she, this privileged young white girl, possibly know what they, these downtrodden black women, were going through, how could she possibly understand.
How, indeed.
And maybe she couldn't, maybe we still can't. Maybe that's a large part of why we don't talk about it, why we try to sweep it under the rug. It's embarrassing that we would do something like that, it's entirely out of our comfort zone, but it's more than that. It's frightening that a group of human beings was capable of behaving like that - with some still believing that that sort of behavior is ok. But how do you even begin to go about making something like that right? I have no experiences with racism of that magnitude (or probably at all), and I can't even begin to try to understand. Even trying to understand seems laughable, and likely to result in exactly what you see in that scene - derision and incredulity at the notion that you, a white person, might be able to understand what these black women - blacks in the United States - went through.
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An acquaintance of mine (http://thedramatic.com/) wrote a very intriguing, thoughtful blog post about the movie as well. She referenced a black lady's review of the movie here: http://www.artscriticatl.com/2011/08/film-review-the-help-a-feel-good-movie-for-white-people/. Reading the lady's review made me feel as though I had watched a completely different movie.
A feel good movie for white people.
I'm not sure where the article's author got that. The only way you could see it as a feel good movie was if you conveniently ignored the history of our country, and took it to be 100% fiction. And if you are from the south, you know that any single scene in that movie could have easily been played out in real life, and many far worse were. White people might hope we would behave more like the heroine of the story than the villainess, but the movie also showed the social pressures and customs of the time. Chances are, precious few of us would have bucked custom. If you are from the south, you know these things.
I had most of my thoughts put together for this post before I read the article; as I was typing this post, I decided to give it a read and reference it. The review's tone, which felt somewhat ascerbic to me, confirmed the fact that the one scene in the movie probably does give some insight into why race relations can be so hard. Most likely I can't possibly understand, although I can still try to find common ground. And not being able to understand will always be an impediment - there's nothing I can do about that. But I don't necessarily think the movie was a "bad movie" because it wasn't perfect and it didn't address all issues of racism during that time. And I still can't possibly begin to understand how it is a "feel good" movie. It was thought provoking and illustrated some of the injustices that were done at the time. And it shed some light on why race discussions, even today, can be so incredibly difficult.
I'm not sure I can agree that we are a nation of cowards, as the article's author so strongly asserts. I think we are a nation that still hasn't figured out how to effectively communicate on racial issues. Maybe that does make us cowards, maybe not. But I do think it is something that comes down to an individual level. How and what you teach your children, what you show them is "ok". How you yourself behave, how you confront your comfort zones and break out of them. No, these aren't hugely obvious, public, in-your-face ways of addressing racial issues. But they are still instruments of change that I can use. And if a movie helps remind me to continue using those instruments, it was well worth the ticket price. And then some.
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