Always The Help, never an Equal

One of the most enlightening things I accomplished during my vacation was reading The Help, by University of Alabama alum Kathryn Stockett.

The Help" tells the story of black maids Aibileen and Minny, who work with a white woman named Skeeter on a book about their experiences as domestic help. The black characters fear retribution for working with the white woman on such a book, but Aibileen decides to help in part because black maids are forced to use outside restrooms.

The movie doesn't do the book justice. IMHO the screen adaptation was more about making white people feel good about themselves than a factual, historical, dramatization. Although the book was set during the 60's, black folks from President Obama to RedEye still find ourselves being put in our place when we get too uppity in "post racial" America.

Every campaign enlists its own meta-language. As Randall Kennedy reminds us in his provocative and richly insightful new book, “The Persistence of the Color Line: Racial Politics and the Obama Presidency,” the Obama forces disseminated several messages intended to soothe the racially freighted fears of the white electorate.

On one channel, they reassured voters that he was not an alien, but a normal American patriot. They also made clear that he was a “safe,” conciliatory black man who would never raise his voice in anger or make common cause with people, living or dead, who used race as a platform for grievance. On yet another wavelength, the candidate proffered his bona fides as a black man to ?African-Americans who were initially wary of his unusual upbringing, his white family ties and his predominantly white political support.

In chapter 7 page 95 of The Help, Abileene, the black maid, potty trains Mae Mobley, the white child she cares, for by taking her to the only bathroom she can use, a bathroom built especially for her kind outside. Unfortunately Mae Mobley doesn't know the difference and attempts to use the colored bath room. I say it's unfortunate because Mea Mobley gets a spanking and told she was not raised to use the colored bathroom because it was dirty and she would catch diseases. These are Abileenes thoughts after the fact;

"I feel that bitter seed growing inside me, the one planted after Treelore died I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't Negro side of town. I want to stop that moment from coming--and it come in every white child's life-when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites."

I know there are some who want to believe this kind of thinking is in the past, but it's alive and well in 2011. No matter how smart we are, how educated we are, how rich we are, we are still black folks who "ain't as good as whites".

Part of the problem is that many blacks don’t expect much of themselves, either. That’s why they elected idiots like Waters and Carson to represent them. The implicit message from such buffoonish leaders is: “You’re helpless and need an angry brawler like me to go to Washington and fight the system for you.”

Ironically the real life Abileen Cooper filed suit against the author of The Help claiming Stockett used her name and likeness without permission and with embarrassing results.

The six-page lawsuit claims, among other things, that Stockett's refusal to publicly admit that she based the character on Cooper's likeness "is so outrageous in character, and so extreme as to go beyond all bounds of human decency, and is utterly intolerable in a civilized community."

It quotes passages from the book, including one in which Aibileen's character describes a cockroach: "He black. Blacker than me."

The lawsuit said Cooper found it upsetting and highly offensive to be portrayed as someone "who uses this kind of language and compares her skin color to a cockroach."

The author in her own words;

That was a normal part of life, the rules between blacks and whites. As a little girl, seeing black people in the colored part of town, even if they were dressed up or doing fine, I remember pitying them. I am so embarrassed to admit that now

Another relevant part of the book deals with the justice system, or should I say injustice system and how it was used to discredit and punish The Help. One of my friends took her six year old grand daughter to see the movie because she wanted her to see what life was for her ancestors. In one scene a white police officer strike one of the maids in the back of the head with his Billy Club while she is handcuffed laying face down on the hood of the police car. She said her grand daughter said she was glad there were no more mean white people around today. She said she didn't have the heart to tell her that wasn't exactly true.

I long for the day when all of God's children will be be treated as equals and not treated like The Help.
All we say to America is, "Be true to what you said on paper." If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn't committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for rights. And so just as I said, we aren't going to let dogs or water hoses turn us around. We aren't going to let any injunction turn us around. We are going on.

We Shall Overcome Someday.