‘The Help’ resurrects mammy image

Opinion: October 27, 2011 at 12:00a.m.

By Lewis W. DIUGUID

McClatchy Newspapers

Weeks after “The Help” opened, I finally worked up the nerve to see it.

A lot of African-Americans I know said they’d never watch the hit film or read Kathryn Stockett’s 2009 best-selling book with the same title. It was no surprise that I was the only black person in the theater to see the film about black domestic workers in the South.

They did the cleaning and cooking, served meals and raised the children of middle- and upper-middle-class white families in early-1960s Jackson, Miss.

“The Help” was disturbing on many levels.

It is a story of a tragic period of overt racism, degradation and domestic terrorism on African-Americans.

But to appeal to white audiences, “The Help” was framed through the lens of a white woman as the central character. Stockett, who is white, in the book shared the oral histories of several black domestics, bringing to light the deplorable things the black women endured.

Black maids

The movie showed that black maids were not allowed to use toilets in white homes, lived in fear of white reprisals and devoted their lives to raising white people’s children while their own kids suffered.

Hollywood typically frames the stories of people of color around whites as central heroic figures to appeal to white audiences. Examples include “Glory,” “Mississippi Burning,” “Dances With Wolves” and even “Avatar.”

Ida E. Jones, national director of the Association of Black Women Historians, explained some of the problems with the film in a National Public Radio interview.

She said “The Help” was packaged “as a nostalgic reminiscence.” The Association of Black Women Historians said: “‘The Help’ distorts, ignores and trivializes the experiences of black domestic workers. We are specifically concerned about the representations of black life and the lack of attention given to sexual harassment and civil rights activism.”

Black women as domestic workers ensured the success of the Montgomery bus boycott, and they played a huge role in the civil rights movement.

Mammy image

The movie resurrects the mammy image left over from slavery and ignores “the systemic racism that bound black women to backbreaking, low-paying jobs where employers routinely exploited them.”

The movie didn’t show the sexual harassment black women faced as domestics or the “physical and verbal abuse in the homes of white employers.” The film made “light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities, turning them into moments of comic relief.”

The movie also makes it seem as if that awful treatment of people of color is history in today’s “post-racial” Barack Obama-as-president America.

If it were true, then racial profiling reports wouldn’t still show black and Hispanic motorists being stopped and searched at disproportionate rates.

Diuguid is a Kansas City Star columnist. Distributed by MCT Information Services.