Am I the only one who finds it discouraging that the most celebrated relationships between black and white women in film are those which feature the former working as a domestic servant for the latter?
Here we are, 72 years since Gone with the Wind first celebrated this hardly “ennobling” relationship; yet people (mostly misguided, guilt-ridden white women) are flocking to the cinema to see it play out again in The Help – where Scarlet is to Skeeter as Mammy is to Abileen/Minny. Even worse, though, reports are that the white woman who wrote The Help based it on the real life of a maid in her family without her permission and, more to the point, without offering this long-suffering black woman a red cent of the millions she’s raking in from her book and this film.
No doubt, given the copycat nature of creativity in Hollywood, the popularity of Mad Men – extolling the halcyon days of the 1950s for whites as it does – has spawned other shows (and perhaps even this movie) that whitewash racial strife right out of U.S. history.
This is why I urge all of you who are reveling in the ante-bellum female bonding The Help depicts to reconsider how truly worthy this film is of the social praise and financial rewards you are heaping upon it.