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The Help Movie Review

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51 The Help (2011)

Discrimination in the help.

By Alexia Privratsky

Imagine washing dishes and caring for another woman’s children all day, every day, with little to no appreciation or recognition; feeling like the children are your own, due to the fact that you practically raised them. Imagine being an African American woman in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s, working as a housemaid, when the civil rights movement was in full motion. Jim Crow laws prohibit you from entering the same stores as white people, sitting in the same bus seats, using the same restroom, and even going to the same schools. You live a life entirely separate from that of white people, yet they still allow you in their home to work for them. This depiction of the lifestyle of African American housemaids in the 1960s is portrayed in the movie, The Help . This movie is about a young woman, named Skeeter, who recently graduated college and has returned to her hometown, Jackson, Mississippi, to work on a project for her career as a journalist. The other white women that are the same age as Skeeter refer to their housemaids as “the help,” who are predominantly African American women. The treatment that the maids receive from the white women sparks unsettlement in Skeeter’s gut, giving her the idea to write a book about the relationship between housemaids and Southern white women. Skeeter eventually has numerous of the housemaids agree to tell her their stories, from which eventually Skeeter is able to publish a book. The main purpose of this movie is to portray the reality of racial discrimination in the 1960s. The Help , overall, effectively portrays the magnitude to which racial discrimination impacted the lives of many African Americans in the 1960s through the use of specific visual and audio techniques, including editing, sound design, mise en scene, cinematography, and visual design.

During the 1960s, when The Help is set, the civil rights movement had begun to run full force. At this time, people were protesting, sit-ins were taking place at restaurants, the Little Rock Nine made a bold move attending an all-white high school, Rosa Parks got arrested for not giving up her seat, and so on. African American people were pursuing change in the world and were tired of the consistent discrimination that they faced. The director, Tate Taylor, and the producers of The Helpwanted to portray the racial discrimination that many African American women faced on an everyday basis, that was not always talked about in the media. The Associate professor of Theater at Tufts University, Monica Ndounou, states the filmmakers’ purpose as well when she states in her book, Shaping the Future of African American Film , that “the black female protagonists in each film are intended to appeal to female audiences across color and class lines on the basis of women’s issues.” This shows that not only were the filmmakers of The Help seeking to portray issues of race, they also included issues regarding women’s rights. The filmmakers were able to convey the importance of the historical component of the movie through using film elements as well, such as mise en scene. The filmmakers created each set to include specific details, such as in the white womens’ homes the scenes had expensive decorations and looked virtually perfect while when the scene shows one of the black womens’ homes, it is not as nice nor particular (12:06 and 41:01). This detail that the filmmakers included also entails the historical importance of the impact that racial discrimination had on class standing. Since black families were not able to pursue the same careers or education that white people had the opportunity to, they often lived very simplistic and poor lives. Overall, this film portrays a very important time in history when minorities were finally embarking upon freedom and independence.

Through the historical component of this film, viewers are also able to determine instances of difference portrayed. The filmmakers were trying to exhibit the large social gap between African Americans and white people during this time period; they accomplished this through including scenes that show the difference in housing, clothing, lifestyles, and careers that different racial groups had. For example, at 8:21 in the film, Hilly, her mother Missus Walters, and Minny are walking down the sidewalk. In this scene, the camera makes a following shot, meaning the camera follows the characters’ movement to keep them in the frame.

This technique accentuates the clothing that each character is wearing: Hilly and her mother are wearing nice dresses and heels while Minny is wearing a maid’s uniform. This technique peaks the attention of viewers at each character’s outfit, and shows the drastic difference that their social classes are through the things they are wearing. Another instance of how the filmmakers portray examples of difference in the film is seen through Skeeter’s character. Although Skeeter is a white woman, she is still widely different from her peers. Exactly like Carol Miles, a professor at the University of Nebraska Omaha, states, “from [Skeeter’s] untamed curly locks to her practical shoes, and seeming lack of interest in marriage and starting a family, she is unconventional by the standards of the day and among her peers.” The filmmakers purposefully create Skeeter’s character to be an outsider to justify her decision of completing illegal acts, such as when she listens to the black womens’ testimonies regarding the treatment they receive from white people (56:26). Due to the time period exemplified in The Help , the filmmakers worked very hard to distinctively portray differences among the black and white characters. Without these differences, the stark laws regarding interracial friendships would not be as understood by the audience. Not only was it dangerous for black and white people to become friends in the 1960s in Mississippi, like Skeeter did with the maids, “it was dangerous in Mississippi for whites and blacks [to even] talk about racial oppression” (Denby). The portrayal of difference in this film has such a heavy importance that without it, the civil rights movement of the 1960s would be inaccurately represented.

Not only are instances of difference among the characters important in the film, instances of the amount of power that different characters have is as well. The filmmakers of The Help crafted each character’s socioeconomic standing to represent the amount of power that they had in society. For example, due to the fact that the maids worked for the white women, they were often treated as if they did not have any power in society at all. At 32:24 in the movie, Hilly and Minny have an argument about Minny using Hilly’s restroom, which leads to Minny getting fired. In this scene, the amount of power that Hilly has is seen through the sound design in the film; when Hilly screams at Minny when she hears the toilet flush, she immediately uses her power to fire Minny. This scene directly correlates to the power that black people had in society in the 1960s as well. Manohla Dargis illustrates the degree to which white people had power over their maids when she states that the filmmakers included scenes of Aibileen and Minny “cleaning white houses and polishing the silver — and cooking meals and tending children and smiling, always smiling, even as they pretend not to hear the insults — to remind you that this is at least partly about backbreaking, soul-killing black labor.” Another instance of the portrayal of white power in this movie is when Hilly states that as a Christian, she is doing Yule Mae Davis a favor by not loaning her the money to pay for her sons’ college. This scene uses a medium close-up on Yule’s facial reaction to show the disappointment that she has in Hilly after she says that she would not loan her the money. Overall, the portrayal of power in this film is crucial to the central purpose of the movie, which is to accurately depict the lifestyle of African American women in the 1960s in the South.

Similarly to how difference and power are portrayed in the movie, discrimination is also depicted. In the Southern states amid the civil rights movement, white people were incredibly discriminatory towards African Americans. Due to the fact that the movie, The Help, takes place during this time period and the main characters are African American women, discrimination is central to the development of the plot. An example of when discrimination is portrayed is when Hilly finds it unacceptable that the black maids use the white women’s restrooms (14:52). In fact, due to Hilly’s disgust, she refuses to use the restroom despite how badly she has to go. This scene directly illustrates the degree to which black women faced discrimination during this time period; due to their color of skin, they were not allowed to use the same restroom as white people. The filmmakers of the movie were able to use frontality shots and still focus of the camera to isolate Aibileen’s reaction to Hilly’s statement regarding the bathroom, which provides a detailed explanation of the emotions that the black women felt from the discrimination they faced.

Another example of discrimination that is portrayed in the film is when Aibileen and Henry are riding the public bus home when the bus stops at a traffic block and the driver tells the “colored people” to get off the bus so that he can take the white people home (1:21:07). This scene contains numerous different forms of discrimination, from the fact that Aibileen and Henry were riding in the very back of the bus, entirely separate from the white people to the fact that they were forced to walk home. The filmmakers use a medium close-up on Aibileen and Henry before they are forced to get off the bus, to subtly show that they are in the very back of the bus, which is seen ever so slightly to the left of the camera’s focus. This technique enhances the portrayal of discrimination in the film because it adds another aspect of African Americans’ daily lifestyle that was affected by racism. This distinct illustration of racism also contributes to the film’s sole purpose, which is to show“the injustice of black-white race relations in the South at the dawn of the civil rights movement” (Rainer).

Even though the filmmakers of The Help carefully crafted the film in order to ensure that every detail was accurately portrayed regarding the real-life events during the civil rights movement, there was still a minute amount of criticism. Tiyi Morris, a professor of African American studies at Ohio State University, states that the filmmakers of movies, including those of The Help , “continue to ignore or deny the ugliness of racism and race relations throughout our nation’s history, instead opting for a sanitized and ultimately fictitious version of the past.” This was a common criticism of this film, due to the fact that it glazes over the harsh realities of racism and discrimination in the South, such as in lynching and violence. While this statement does contain some truth since The Help does not portray instances of the true violence that many black people faced during this time, there is valid reasoning as to why the filmmakers did not include such scenes. Since the film is rated PG-13, there are certain requirements that it must fulfill; if the movie were to portray the degree to which black people faced violence, the movie would need to be rated R. Also, the filmmakers made a decent effort in trying to depict the violence that African Americans faced, such as at 1:22:37 in the film, when Minny and Aibileen hear on the radio that a black man was killed by the KKK. Even though the film never shows the instance of the man being killed, the impact that it has on Minny and Aibileen shows enough. The filmmakers implicitly show their audience the violence that black people faced without graphically showing it on screen. So while criticisms of the movie state that the film shows a “fictitious version of the past,” others could counter the argument by showing scenes in the movie where the filmmakers allude to such violence black people faced amidst the civil rights movement (Morris).

The movie, The Help , portrays such a realistic and appalling version of the past that draws viewers in instantaneously. It is because of this reason that I decided to analyze this film. When I first watched The Help , I was astounded to see how white people treated such kind-hearted and hard-working African Americans. It truly broke my heart to see the amount of discrimination and power that white people had over innocent black people. I felt a deep connection to this movie in my heart because of the way that it portrayed white and black people. I found it interesting that while the white women were always trying so hard to look “perfect,” they often had more flaws than their maids. This shows the amount of humor that the filmmakers tried to include into The Help , they have a better interpretation of what it was truly like to be an African American in the 1960s. It is through films such as this that the issue of racial discrimination is brought to people’s attention in an urgent matter.

Due to the urgency of the issue regarding racial discrimination, it is important that people place themselves in the shoes of those who are part of racial minorities in order to understand the struggles that they have gone through. For example, imagining you were an African American maid in the South in the 1960s can directly show the treatment that black women received during this time period; not receiving appreciation, being paid incredibly low wages, not being able to use the restroom in the house, and raising another woman’s children as if they were their own are all hardships that these maids faced during this time. The movie, The Help , portrays the relationship between black maids and white women to show viewers how influential the civil rights movement was to today’s society; without the civil rights movement, society would not be as progressive as it is today, meaning that even more racial discrimination would exist than what already does. Overall, this film discusses such important topics regarding racial discrimination that everyone should watch it. If we want society to continue to progress towards racial equality, we must first become educated on what initially caused racial tension to understand the pain that many white people have caused other races.

Baek, Su Bin. “Minny Is Using the Guest’s Bathroom Not Maid’s Bathroom | © DreamWorks.” Medium.com,18 Dec. 2017, medium.com/@subinbaek/the-help-2011-you-is-kind-you-is-smart-you-is-important-5c04de42d28d.

Dargis, Manohla. “‘The Maids’ Now Have Their Say.” New York Times, 10 Aug. 2011, p. C1(L). Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A263841461/AONE?u=lbcc&sid=AONE&xid=2f46ca21. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Davis, Sharen. “Skeeter Phelan (Emma Stone, Back to Camera) Plays Bridge with Friends Elizabeth Leefolt (Ahna OReilly, from Right), Hilly Holbrook (Bryce Dallas Howard and Jolene French (Anna Camp), While Aibileen Clark (Viola Davis) Looks On.” Latimesblogs.latimes.com,10 Aug. 2011, latimesblogs.latimes.com/alltherage/2011/08/sharen-davis-dressing-southern-belles-maid s-for-the-help.html.

Denby, David. “Maids of Honor.” The New Yorker, vol. 87, no. 24, 15 Aug. 2011, p. 96. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A265027401/AONE?u=lbcc&sid=AONE&xid=31ab6a75. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Miles, Carol. “The Help.” Journal of Religion and Film,vol. 15, no. 2, 2011. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A271665744/AONE?u=lbcc&sid=AONE&xid=d95a6eda. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Morris, Tiyi M. “(Un)Learning Hollywood’s Civil Rights Movement: a Scholar’s Critique.” Journal of African American Studies, vol. 22, no. 4, 2018, p. 407+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A573714537/AONE?u=lbcc&sid=AONE&xid=613252ff. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

Ndounou, Monica White. Shaping the future of African American film. Rutgers University Press, ebookcentral.proquest.com, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/linnbenton-ebooks/reader.action?docID=1687285. Accessed 17 11 2020.

Rainer, Peter. “The Help: Movie Review.” Christian Science Monitor, 9 Aug. 2011, p. N.PAG. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=63993388&site=ehost-live.

Robinette, Dale. “Heavy Handed Help Saved by Great Acting,” www.npr.org,2011, www.npr.org/2011/08/10/139086532/heavy-handed-help-saved-by-great-acting.

Difference, Power, and Discrimination in Film and Media: Student Essays Copyright © by Students at Linn-Benton Community College is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Critic’s Notebook: ‘The Help’ goes beyond stereotypes

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In “The Help’s” homespun story of racism in ‘60s-era Mississippi, some saw stereotypes. I saw pieces of my childhood — for better or worse.

That’s the inherent difficulty of deciding what is and is not a stereotype. How we view any character is grounded in personal experience — what you know well you see differently. What plays as exaggeration, even parody, can reveal deeper truths. And that was the case for me with “The Help.”

When the subject is race, the stakes are ratcheted up, as we saw in the highly charged reactions in 2009 to “Precious” and “The Blind Side,” very disparate films both pummeled for what some considered Hollywood’s version of racial profiling. The faces of race relations in “The Help” — framed with such specificity in Skeeter, Aibileen, Minny and Celia by actresses Emma Stone, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain, respectively — were not strangers to me. If anything, they felt like old friends, and given the film’s surprisingly warm embrace at the box office, topping $120 million and attracting a cross-section of moviegoers, others may feel the same way.

Davis’ nurturing but wounded Aibileen, and Spencer’s spitfire Minny, who spent their lives caring and cleaning for white families, brought memories flooding back. Aibileen’s determination that the baby girl in her care, the towheaded toddler, would know just how special she was, reduced me to tears. Minny’s impatience with Hilly Holbrook’s (Bryce Dallas Howard) nonsense and her rich slice of revenge lifted me right back up.

I knew what it was to be a black maid’s “baby girl” being raised in Tampa, Fla., in racially charged times, though never as explosive as in Mississippi. A soul-warming smile and a sharp tongue when crossed by a willful child, Amanda Dupree raised me as much as my mother for the first seven years of my life. I felt the power of that presence next to me almost from the moment the lights went down. “The Help” became a communal experience that night in a different way, its images re-immersing me in a South that I knew only too well.

The line between a character that feels organic and one that feels a fraud is always a tricky one for filmmakers. We want them to populate movies with people who are “relatable” — i.e. recognizable and realistic — a good thing. When characters are too “relatable,” they drop down the scale, marginalized as “stereotypes,” not to be taken as seriously. When they are too extreme, they are branded a “cliché,” dismissed out of hand. It’s a sliding scale we critics use all the time.

But I found I could even find a little forgiveness for the extremes of Howard’s Hilly — the portrayal, not the actions. Fear of equality and integration had made her brittle, her separate but equal bathrooms a desperate campaign to protect a way of life that she doesn’t realize has already been lost. I had seen women like that at my mom’s weekly bridge club in their crisply starched cotton dresses, their spines stiffened against change. But watching “The Help,” I felt it hitting even closer to home, the remembered tension of a dinner at my grandmother’s the summer before I was about to start school, one that would, as she put it, have me in classrooms alongside “colored children.”

No words were minced that night as she made a separate-but-equal argument for my “protection” that is seared in my memory. I already knew my parents would stand fast. Being in Little Rock in the fall of ’57 when schools were desegregated had changed my dad; his memories shaped me. Though the violence that rocked Mississippi never directly touched our lives, we felt the rising tensions. If anything, the dynamics of the human interactions, the conflicts, the conversations of my South, which stretched back generations to North Carolina tobacco and cotton farms, felt like pages out of Kathryn Stockett’s bestselling novel on which the film is based.

The ways in which writer-director Tate Taylor, like Stockett, a Jackson, Miss., native, re-imagined it for the screen, resonated just as deeply. Looking at Skeeter steal out onto the wraparound porch of her house, I could see my great aunts outside in their rockers, sipping sweet tea and talking through hot summer afternoons. Even the issue of Skeeter’s unruly hair — which some critics took umbrage with — dredged up stories of all the ways the aunts tried to tame my mother’s.

The point — in the film, as in real life — was never the hair, but the propriety. The rules, defining what was and what was not appropriate, were never written down, yet remain clearly defined in my memory. Watching Chastain’s Celia bump up against them at every turn was both funny and heartbreaking. But it was her relationship with Minny that touched me the most. There’s a scene when they are at the kitchen table, eating a fried chicken lunch, trading local gossip. It is the most ordinary of moments made extraordinary by the lines of “propriety” crossed by that simple exchange. I see another kitchen table, Amanda and my mom, heads bent close in conversation.

That world began to slip away from me when my dad’s job moved us to Texas, which had a whole different set of racial issues. Once a week someone would come in to clean the house, but no one ever replaced Amanda. She and my mother wrote for years, sending pictures, family updates. We knew her daughter Clarice had a baby, we heard when her son Jackson graduated from college.

It was Jackson who called to let us know about his mother’s death; she was just worn out by life, he said. All that came rushing back as I watched Skeeter brought to her knees by the news that Constantine (Cicely Tyson), the woman who had raised her, loved her, scolded her, shaped her, had died. It felt important, it moved me deeply, as if the memory of “the help,” the countless legions of black Southern women who cooked and cleaned and cared in the face of repression and discrimination, are finally getting the respect they deserve.

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The Help Movie Review Essay

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Studies of Black History at the University of San Diego

Remembrances, discussion, and analysis, the help, a film review by courtney cureton.

The Help, a film review by Courtney Cureton

The Help is a famous novel turned Oscar-winning movie about the lives of black female domestic workers in Jackson, Mississippi, at the turn of the Jim Crow Era.

We follow the lives of two domestic workers, Aibileen Clark (played by Viola Davis) and Minny Jackson (played by Octavia Spencer). As the seasons change, young Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan graduates from college and moves back for the summer, a progressive journalist looking to tell stories. In this case, to tell stories from unheard voices and to cast a new perspective on the revolution of not only the Jim Crow era but the black perspective in Jackson, Mississippi.

After much hesitation and careful thought, Aibileen accepts Skeeters’ offer to be interviewed and describes her own experiences as The Help . As racial tensions arise in the city of Jackson, the employers of the domestic workers implement Jim Crow segregation laws on their home, including a coloreds only bathroom. The addition of the coloreds only bathroom seems to be the tipping straw for Minny, and she soon joins in and gives her own experiences as a domestic worker. Soon after, many other workers open up and tell their stories to Skeeter.

As time goes on, employers of domestic workers get suspicious of their whereabouts and of Skeeters’ intentions of speaking with their Help. While Skeeter eventually finishes her book, the consequences are grave for many of the domestic workers, including jail time for some, and loss of employment for others.

There are both positive and negative portrayals for the advancement of black history in the film version of The Help.

Some of the positives involved in the film version include the representation of Black women’s voices and the intersectional lens. The main characters of this film include those primarily living in a low-income area with a constant fear of terror from their white counterparts, and those impacted by the intersections of race, class, and gender power structures. As these intersections are rare in Hollywood, the film sheds new light and adds diversity to Hollywood and entertain new audiences. With its inclusive nature of low-income domestic workers at the forefront, audiences can take a step back and analyze the world through a different lens.

Another strength is the overarching portrayal of the black community in the time of Jim Crow, which has ties to what we learned in class, specifically including the emphasis on the black church. As we learned in class and through Freedom in our Mind, the black church gives way to the black power movement and the civil rights movement. As seen in the movie and during the civil rights era, gospels such as We Shall Overcome. The black church is a tight-knit community where families help each other and care for each other, implementing the importance of educating younger generations about the history of oppression and the ways to live and survive in a white supremacist society, especially during the Jim Crow Era.

While there were many positives, many negative portrayals in this movie highlighted the oppressed overtone of racial power structures in America and Hollywood:

White Woman’s Savior: In many black historical movies, the purpose of a white savior is to save the day and defend the minority characters. As seen in movies such as The Blind Side, with the white family helping and taking in a homeless black boy, or in Hidden Figures, with a critical white male authority figure tearing down the “coloreds only” bathroom sign, The Help seems to be no different. While it is not as glaring, due to the alignment of philosophical values from Skeeter, and her progressive tendencies, it does bring to light how Hollywood implements the classic trope of a white savior throughout black Hollywood films. The trope’s broader meaning stems from the racial power dynamics in America. As shown with the Help of Skeeter, allowing the domestic workers to share their experience, it would not have been done without a white woman’s Help and trailblazing through defiance of the racial struggles in Jackson, Mississippi.

As Malcolm X and many others during the Black Power Movement voiced, while allies in the white community are appreciated, at some point, it can do more harm than good, and reiterate the racial power dynamics of whites as superior and blacks inferior. As heard from Malcolm X himself in his ‘Ballot or the Bullet’ speech: “The political philosophy of black nationalism only means that the black man should control the politics and the politicians in his community. The time when white people can come in our community and get us to vote for them so that they can be our political leaders and tell us what to do and what not to do is long gone” (Americanradioworks). As addressed by Malcolm X in his pivotal Black Nationalism speech, the best way to help better the black community started staying inside the community and supporting each other. As in the case with The Help , both Aibileen and Minny are apprehensive about working with Skeeter, due to the dangers of getting caught and to their solidarity with other community members supporting black nationalism and the self-help philosophies illustrated through black nationalism. We can see this trope throughout the film, and in many cases, Aibileen, an older black woman, was told by collegiate Skeeter to stop calling her “Ma’am” to try to shed the power dynamics from their budding friendship.

As well as instances such as this, the main plot of the film, telling black domestic workers stories, only came through Skeeter, as a white woman in contact with a national journalism source. Therefore, the dynamics of the black people depended on their white female counterparts as the only way to get their voices heard and their stories out and across America.

Another weakness of The Help stemmed from their s tereotypes of black women:

Mammy: “The Mammy stereotype developed as an offensive racial caricature constructed during slavery and popularized primarily through minstrel shows. Enslaved black women were highly skilled domestic works, working in the homes of white families and caretakers for their children. The trope painted a picture of a domestic worker who had undying loyalty to their slaveholders, as caregivers and counsel (NMAAHC)”. Stereotyped women who may have similar characteristics of mammies, just like Aibileen in The Help, are exploited and underpaid for all of their work.

The Help portrayed Aibileen Clark as the perfect stereotypical “mammy”. Widowed and heartbroken after the manslaughter of her son, she was portrayed as compliant, complimentary, and cordial to her white counterparts and their friends. These negatives behind this stereotype tell more about the alignment with slavery and the notion that domestic workers were grateful and happy with their arrangement, which could no farther away from the truth. As seen numerous times throughout the film, Aibileen breaks down and looks to god for a better life for her and the community.

Sassy Black Woman with an Attitude: This stereotype is less ancient than the mammy stereotype, it is up and coming from a newer generation and still has a noticeable impact on the Black community today. Minny Jackson, fit this black stereotype perfectly. The character involved in arguably the most famous scene in the film, “Eat my Sh**,” Minny proved the downfalls of this stereotype, and the cost of being a defiant domestic worker, it cost Minny her job.

The inaccuracies of this stereotype loom large in many heads, especially those critiquing the movie for historical inaccuracies, such as myself. Along with the inaccuracies of a defiant, sassy domestic worker, we only saw the tip of the iceberg when it came to the white backlash. Yes, she lost her job, but the film neglected to show the audience the domestic violence and harassment from the white employers, and how that was commonplace at the time.

Through analysis of the intersections between black women and domestic violence, some patterns stem from when black women were still enslaved. As mentioned in the article Rape and the Inner Lives of the Middle West, “ Rape has always involved patriarchal notions of women being, at best, not entirely unwilling accomplices, if not outwardly inviting a sexual attack. The links between black women and illicit sexuality consolidated during the antebellum years had powerful ideological consequences for the next hundred and fifty years” (Hine). As mentioned in the article, Rape is not uncommon for black women. By failing to show a more realistic picture of these domestic black workers’ lives, the film fails to provide an accurate depiction of black history and change the story to be more lighthearted than honest.

In addition to my initial response to the portrayal of this stereotype in The Help , I gained a greater understanding of the social implications of this stereotype through an open statement from the association of Black Women Historians. They have an overwhelming interest in portrayals like this because they help create a more extensive and warped narrative of black women. In the statement, they write: “Furthermore, African American domestic workers often suffered sexual harassment as well as physical and verbal abuse in the homes of white employers. For example, a recently discovered letter written by Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks indicates that she, like many black domestic workers, lived under the threat and sometimes the reality of sexual assault. The film, on the other hand, makes light of black women’s fears and vulnerabilities turning them into moments of comic relief (AALBC)”. The open statement helped my understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of a black “historical” movie in Hollywood, even though the pressures of oppression faced on these domestic workers were overwhelming, the movie neglects to address impacts on these women, only through witty responses. Could this be due to the uncomfortable acknowledgment from the white audience of their own doing in this oppression?

What is the purpose? Why write the movie in this way?

T he Help is tailored to all audiences; the film keeps the white audience in their seats by downplaying or distorting some of the power relationships that the domestic workers had with their white counterparts. Yes, we should reiterate that the book and the film adaptation is strictly fiction, but the voices and the lives of the women and domestic workers they portrayed are as real as ever. By neglecting to address their truthful histories, we are painting a broader picture more fitting from the white man’s perspective than of the intersectional view of those who dealt with those circumstances as reality.

Works Cited

American Public Media. “American RadioWorks – Say It Plain, Say It Loud.” APM Reports – Investigations and Documentaries from American Public Media , americanradioworks.publicradio.org/features/blackspeech/mx.html.

Hine, Darlene Clark. “Rape and the Inner Lives of Black Women in the Middle West.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society , vol. 14, no. 4, 1989, pp. 912–920., doi:10.1086/494552.

“An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help.” An Open Statement to the Fans of The Help by Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH) , aalbc.com/reviews/the_help_historical_context.html.

“Popular and Pervasive Stereotypes of African Americans.” National Museum of African American History and Culture , 19 July 2019, nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/popular-and-pervasive-stereotypes-african-americans.