Patricia Turner considers the depictions of white characters in The Help:
With one possible exception, the white women are remarkably unlikable, and not just because of their racism. Like the housewives portrayed in reality television shows, the housewives of Jackson treat each other, their parents and their husbands with total callousness. In short, they are bad people, therefore they are racists.
There’s a problem, though, with that message. To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.
Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.
But that wasn’t the case. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.
Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday.
Most of us are not moral islands, independently thinking though every moral belief based on first principles; for the most part, we rely on our peer groups’ standards to let us know what is and isn’t moral. A passionate ACLU liberal living in Amherst, Massachusetts, might instead be a passionate pro-life tea partier if they had been raised in the more conservative areas of Texas. That same person, raised instead in 1920s Germany, might think it only reasonable and moral to be a Nazi.
Of course, in every community there are also some moral rebels — and in hindsight, in some cases, those moral rebels are heroes.
I’m not saying that all moral codes are equally good. I am saying that these questions are not a matter of good character vs bad character, and when media presents an issue like racism as bad people versus good people — ignoring how bad community values can shape even good people’s beliefs — that is unhelpful.
(Hat tip.)
I totally agree–this is a great point, and something most people wouldn’t even notice because it is so pervasive in our media now (that good people are 100% good, and people who do bad things are always bad people). Also that people can make moral decisions (or any decision, really) independent of the culture they are embedded in.
The converse is also true–people in movies who do great things are almost always good people. One of the things I appreciated about Schindler’s List is that even though they prettied up a lot of the negative things about Oskar Schindler, he was still an opportunistic fuck-up who also saved over a thousand people.
I totally agree. I have had so many conversations with people about racism, and my family’s Southern roots, where people just did. not. understand. that there are (otherwise) decent and good people who have racist beliefs or feelings. Racism = personal evil, the end, no more. Yet in the real world it is always so much more complicated than that. The white guy who had sex with black prostitutes because they’re cheaper and if they get pregnant you don’t have to worry about it, is the same guy who went to the wall for school integration. Nobody is simple.
I haven’t seen the movie, but my mother and daughter both really liked it — even inspiring my bi-racial kid to read the book. To her, this time period is almost ancient history, but is still alive for her. To my mom, who grew up in the south during this period, it’s just like yesterday.
Sorry if that is not germane to the actual point of this post. Just noting that different audiences have had different reactions. Andrew O’Hehir has a pretty thorough piece on criticisms from various reviewers, some sympathetic, others dismissive, some hostile. I am curious to see the movie myself, but I might just read Katie’s book when she finishes it.
I agree that even good people can be racists — even liberals! (Read that last bit with intended sarcasm.) Good people continue to advance policies that keep people of all ethnic backgrounds poor, that strengthen the military-industrial complex at the expense of the rest of the world, that keep much of the world’s population wrapped up in disease, malnutrition, violence and shortened life spans. Sometimes those good people become presidents.
My Facebook friends ranted/raved about the the movie. It’s interesting that my white progressive friends pretty much unanimously condemned the film as being another in the long line of “heroic white people save the coloreds” movie.
My white conservative friends thought it was good.
My black friends (of various political stripes) thought it was wonderful. Perhaps there is some level at which the experience speaks to black people more than to white progressives.
I agree with everything Robert has said here. And I want to assure Robert that my faith that he is fundamentally evil has had nothing to do with his racism; honestly, that was just icing on the cake.
Going a bit off-topic, has anyone seen Gran Torino? Clint Eastwood plays … well, he plays the same character he always plays. Except instead of being a cowboy on the range, he’s a retired auto worker (and decorated Korean war vet) living in a Detroit suburb. No matter. He is gradually drawn into the role of defending his entire neighborhood from a gang, culminating in a shoot-out.
Among the wrinkles: Eastwood’s character is rabidly anti-Korean. The gang members are Korean, so that fits. But the neighbors he ends up protecting are also Korean. Eastwood makes no secret of his racism, but (with the aid of some cuisine) is gradually won over. Sort of.
Cuz it’s a Clint Eastwood movie, you pretty much know how it’s gonna end. Except that you don’t.
Plus, the film’s pretty funny.
Actually, the neighbors and the gang members are supposed to be ethnic Hmong and are mostly portrayed by Hmong actors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gran_Torino
Walt does not seem to presume that the neighbors or gangmembers are Korean. He is generically racist and uses generic anti-Asian epithets whenever he encountered the neighbors or gangmembers. He does not even know what “Hmong” means until one of his neighbors explains.
Robert, so many beautiful online essays about what’s wrong with The Help have been written by black women (Roxane Gay, Bernestine Singley, The Association of Black Women Historians, Andrea Hairston, Dana Stevens, and many others) that I don’t think your generalization holds up.
WHAT? Hmong? Then … why not make the guy a Vietnam War vet?
I had simply assumed that the author would have created a kind of unity by having the protagonist damaged and made whole by the same instrument. So what would prompt the author to make Eastwood a Korean War vet, but then put him in a Hmong neighborhood? Hmmm….
Maybe because people can be racist without the “excuse” of having fought a war argainst the country of origin of the people they are racist agaisnt? It goes back to the o.p.- not only bad or damaged people are racist. If the racism were the consequence of him being damaged during the war, that would give us a nice little explanation to why an otherwise “good” person might have become a racist. The story would be about him overcoming war trauma instead of getting over his inherent, unjustifyable racism.
I understand the idea of unity that you talk about, and clear story arcs are nice, but I am glad they didn’t go for this. Racism isn’t something that fits into a nice story arc. It shouldn’t. Far too often, whenever they want a character to be racist but still sympathetic or at least someone people are willing to empathise with, movies give their white protagonists a “reason” for becoming racists. War trauma, a loved one killed in a gang shoting etc. The audience reacts with “Well, that’s not an excuse but at least it makes it understandable. Ze just needs to see the error of hir ways and then all will be allright”. and once again, they can go away with the feeling that, as long as they deal with their traumas “correctly”, good people are not racist.
Clint Eastwoods character is just racist. There is no story behind it other than the fact that he grew up with white privilege in a world that is full of casual racism. We need more of those, because for the very vast majorit of people who are racist even though they are “good” people, that’s the background.
It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,”….. that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.
I thought the point Harper Lee was making was that they were “held hostage” by their interests in that very system. Poor white people were supposed to be (in part) kept in check by having a stake in that at the expense of black people-that seemed to me what Mayella Ewell was saying during her infamous “I’ve got something to say…” speech.
Lee seemed to be puncturing the element of humbug in Atticus Finch’s how could things possibly have come to this attitude.
There were elements of Gran Torino that I didn’t love (because it’s yet another movie about the white person rescuing people of color, though it’s more convincing than most about why these particular people of color couldn’t rescue themselves), but it does a good job of showing how racism and “basic decency” can exist in the same person. Plus the scene of the Hmong kid showing off his American tropes of cars, beer, and cursing to get a job was deliciously funny.
I led a racially sheltered life in Massachusetts when I was a kid – there was only one black family in town. I had no daily contact with anyone who wasn’t Caucasian. The only racial or ethnic rift I was exposed to was Italians (a.k.a. “Wops”) vs. those of us of Irish/English/Scot descent. But my dad’s sister had married an Italian man and I had a bunch of Italian cousins, so that kind of thing wasn’t heard in my house. I did finally hear “ni***r” when I was in 5th grade, and, not knowing the context of the word, used it innocently at home. Mom literally washed my mouth out with soap, and I got a bit of education.
Then, between my sophmore and junior year in high school, we moved from there to the SW suburbs of Chicago. And I got shocked by the racism I encountered. A lot of people who lived in the area were white people (or the children of white people) who had moved out of Chicago neighborhoods as black people moved in. What shocked me the most, I guess, was that outside of their racism these people were not caricatures. They were working people and professional people that worked hard, went to church and pretty much displayed the entire panoply of human behavior that one would expect in a community filled with families where pretty much everyone lived in a single-family home and had at least one job. All very decent people who loved their kids, supported the local civic institutions and helped their neighbors when they needed it. Friendly and decent people. But let race come up and racism was the order of the day, and having any other attitudes made you stand out. I played “Meathead” to a bunch of “Archies” for quite some time – especially to my girlfriend’s father – until I finally realized I was not going to change anyone’s mind.
What just struck me was how commonplace and accepted it was. In my home I’d been raised to see that racism was the mark of ignorance and stupidity, of people who were low class, people that I should avoid and not expect to have to work or socialize with. But what I ended up living in was an environment where avoiding working and socializing with racists was impossible. The banality of it was almost what was most evil about it. It wasn’t something that you could isolate and push aside – it was part of the very social fabric.
It took me a long time to process that. I can see where people raised in that environment would naturally pick it up without understanding why it was wrong.
Dad once made a joke of it. He worked in Chicago for the Boy Scouts and had an area that was about 90% black. He invited them over to the house from time to time as he’d invite anyone that he worked with. One time we were sitting outside and noticed that our neighbor was eavesdropping while he was trimming his hedge. So did our black guest, who was well known to have a pretty lively and dry sense of humor. So Dad, in a very natural voice, said “So do you think that your wife will like the house?” Our guest answered “Yeah, the price is right and there’s plenty of room for our 5 kids!” They ad-libbed this conversation for another minute or two and we were all kind of snickering without being too obvious. Especially when we noticed our neighbor noticing that he’d pretty badly gouged up his hedge due to his inattention.
We stopped laughing a couple of days later when someone shot out the rear window of Dad’s station wagon in our driveway. And, after we got it fixed, shot it out again..
7 Josh:
It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a black anti-racist blogosphere which speaks for a lot of black people, but not for all of them.
*****
Current news from Chicago:
http://rippdemup.com/2011/08/23/black-college-student-beaten-for-speaking-to-white-female-by-racists/
@ nobody…the film was originally set in Minnesota, where one of the screenwriters was from, (wiki here, however it misstates the neighborhood as nordeast in Minneapolis when really it was pretty obvious it was based on frogtown in St Paul); the neighborhood dynamics, history and racial makeup make a lot more sense in that context as well as the age of Eastwood’s character, for which being a Korean war vet makes more sense than Vietnam.
Going a bit off-topic, has anyone seen Gran Torino?
Yes! Worth it just to watch a very-long-in-the-tooth Clint Eastwood rasp these words: “Get off my lawn.”
Grace
Ask the screenwriter. As previously mentioned, perhaps because the Korean War would be more appropriate for Clint Eastwood’s age. And perhaps because Clint Eastwood actually served in the military during the Korean War (he did not actually go to Korea, but remained stateside).
Even if the war exacerbated (or even created) Walt’s prejudice against Asian persons, he is still generically racist. He expresses his contempt for persons of other races throughout the film, persons whose countries of origin were not involved in any war that he fought in.
Does Walt “get over” his racism? He bonds with the Vang Lor family. Does that mean he has overcome his racism against all races that he disparaged? Had he lived, would he have stopped telling racist jokes in the bar with his friends?
Don’t forget the part when Walt teaches Thao that real men complain about their wives and greet each other with insults and ethnic slurs.
Yes, certainly, people are products of their environment. And yet, some people manage to see past their environment, while others don’t. And the people who do quite properly hold the rest to the standard:
http://www.viruscomix.com/page474.html
RonF:
I was sheltered in a similar (thought not identical) way. And, I currently live and work in an area which is easily over 90% white. Recently, I have several times visited a new friend who lives in Rochester, New York. He is black. During our conversations, it came up that he lives and works in a black neighborhood. I have seen racially segregated neighborhoods before, but I had never talked about them with a local resident, and it gradually dawned on me that, without consulting notes or maps, he could rattle off which streets were the current borders, and how those borders were currently changing, and how they had shifted over the years, and where the Polish neighborhood was, and the other ethnic-and-racial divides (the city was essentially divided in four, but I can’t remember what they were; I’m told that I’m white (apologies to Stephen Colbert)). The lines of the neighborhoods were razor sharp: they ran down this street, and turned a corner there, and went between those two houses, because a few years ago that house had become a Polish house, and they had had their window smashed out several times, but they were still living there, and so on.
He could also tell a number of amusing anecdotes about these divides. (I’m sure he could have chosen unamusing anecdotes, too, but he chose the amusing ones during this conversation. They seemed to amuse him more than they did me, and horrify him less, but at its root that may have been an if-I-don’t-laugh-I’ll-crack sort of thing.)
I’m sure this will seem hopelessly naive to many people here, but there it is.
I’m reminded of a story which I heard on NPR. In 2008, the storyteller was working as a Democratic volunteer, canvassing neighborhoods somewhere in Pennsylvania (I think in Philadelphia, but I’m not sure). She knocked at one door, and a white woman answered, and the canvasser asked how they were planning to vote. And the woman said, “I don’t know.” Then she turned and called out to nearby room with a TV going, “Honey, who are we voting for?” The answer came back: “We’re voting for the n****r.” The woman turned to the canvasser, smiled brightly, and said, “We’re voting for the n****r.”
It induced vaporlock in the canvasser, and I can appreciate why. There’s so much wrong in that conversation, and yet, the actual vote result was the one the canvasser wanted, and … where would you even start?
I can’t remember what she did. I think maybe she said, “Thank you” and walked away.
Because, you know. Vapor lock. And … stuff.
Grace
Somebody in a comment on another website recently reminded us that the Jim Crow regime was statutory. It was the law baby. Last time I checked, the blue collar, working class hoi polloi don’t become state legislators and write laws y’all.
Yada yada yada. People are not always good or always bad. Everyone struggles, even schmucks with questionable values. I liked the movie. To me, it was about courage. You don’t have to belong to a particular group to be impressed by the courage shown by members of that group.
Houston – I think you missed the point of the post.
I actually liked the movie “The Help”.
Basically what it dealt with was the sort of “everday indignities”. The movie was not about The Civil Rights movement per se. It was not about the worst things that happened in the Jim Crowe South from lynching to employers who raped their maids. But it did show how even when you aren’t dealing with the obvious abuses, that these maids often were regarded as second class citizens, and were subjected to a lot of very strange insults and ridiculous situations.
I disagree with the claim that there were not otherwise moral people with racist views, depicted in the movie “The Help”. The main character’s mother was the most obvious counterexample, but there were many characters revealed to have racist attitudes, but who weren’t portrayed as entirely nasty.
Also the relationship between the young journalist and the maids, was clearly (at least to me) more complex than the simple formulas that it has been accused of emulating.
Other issues that this movie dealt with which few films or popular novels do, is the complexity of the relationships under that Jim Crowe system. Too often this complexity was used as an excuse for Jim Crowe or to paint Northern Civil Rights activists as “clueless Yankees” who were sure to do more harm than good. But the reality is that the relationships between these maids and their employers often WAS more complicated than either her “being one of the family” or being someone who silently but unambiguously hated the children. Very often taking care of a child does mean one gets attached to the child, even if the kid’s parents view you as a second class citizen and the child more often than not grows up to adopt his or her parents’ views.
It also raises questions about how it worked that these kids were raised by black maids and mostly grew up to be bigots. What was the psychology of that? The movie raises the question without pretending to have the answers.
In a way, I think this is a good movie for those of us who society deems as white, but who don’t have Southern roots. Because most African Americans do have roots in this Southern system (look at the demographics and migration statistics) not many generations back. But a very high percentage of “white” America was never part of the South-even if bigots exist everywhere. Certainly as an Irish American whose family was primarily from New England, I’ve often felt that white Southerners (progressive to reactionary) and most African Americans seem to understand a certain shared (however unequal!!) scorecard, that I had no sense of at all, until I spent some time in the South. And to this day, I don’t think I will ever understand it completely.
Finally, I think the movie never claimed to tell the whole story about that time period. To paraphase one reviewer “The wisest thing about the movie ‘The Help’ is that it never claimed to be the final word on that time and place. Both Skeeter and the makers of the film seemed to understand that the story they were telling was but one small slice of the full story.” And I’m inclined to agree with that assessment.