the help

Hey!  The Help! Black people in Jackson, Mississipi, mid twentieth century! Racism is not that big a deal! All you need is one offbeat white girl and some pluck and suddenly Jim Crow is white folks pulling out the chairs for you! You may also decide to be best selling authors and feminists!


Now, The Help isn't all okra and peach pie. There's a nod to Medgar Evers' murder and we almost get to see a billy club in action. But the movie's racism is a bizarrely pure and dense thing. It crowns Hilly, a young woman, the racist, and it is from her that all the ugliness flows. There are auxiliary bigots, but they're just her stooges, and Hilly kind of has to bully them into her devilry. Society isn't racist, some people are just so mean. 

This is an insidious and lying depiction of racism. The Help makes an insistent argument that there were two worlds in the South: the racist South: racist tattooed on its forehead, helpfully synonymous with bitchiness, caddishness and domineering unpleasantness, and the good South, with its barely stifled progressiveness, personal charm and Mexican shoes. Structurally, both have the same maids with the same responsibilities and uniforms (and wages, doubtless), but the movie calls one racist and the other romantic.


This bogus binary is extremely troubling because it equates racism with personality. Because Skeeter's family is personally appealing, their patronizing, racist and fundamentally foul relationship with their black maid is legitimate, and so the illegitimacy of wicked Hilly's relationship to her maid rests on the same grounds. There isn't systemic racism -- the mammy's a member of the family, it's just that there are just some mean families. All the mammies ask is that their fried chicken be properly crispy, their masters not cinematically cruel, their butts permitted to touch the family toilet. If only they got to pee in the same place everything would be alright.

Since all the racism in The Help comes from Hilly the racist, the problem is just that Hilly is so popular and hosts terrific bridge parties. If Hilly wasn't so popular nobody would be racist. So The Help humiliates Hilly in the end, redeems the auxiliary bigots and disappears the racism. Racism is to The Help what plasticity is to Mean Girls, and with all due respect to the evils of Regina George, this is a false and monstrously trivializing analogy. 


On a separate note, it's hilarious how pop cultural ugly ducklings are always incredibly good looking people with their hair curled or their fingernails dirty. i'm waiting for that real thumper of a face, affirmative action for the challenging chins! undersized foreheads! elbows for noses!