Emma Stone and ‘The Help’: Does liking this movie make you racist?

[M.D. Rawlings]

By Maud Dillingham
This is getting to be a bit much
August 31, 2011
Jewish World Review


'The Help' features galvanizing performances by Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, and breakout newcomer Emma Stone. It is a film about black people made by white people. Perhaps inevitably, charges of historical inaccuracy and even racism have been leveled at the well-meaning Civil Rights-era drama about privileged white Southerners and the African-American nannies who take care of them.


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[thetruthseeker]

Simply liking a film does not make you a racist. BUT, fawning over it and saying its the best movie you have seen, funny, witty etc and FAILING to notice the repetition of the same old tired stereotypes and themes DOES suggest that you are perhaps too "comfortable" (and thus not challenging enough) of those images and the status quo.

That unfortunately DOES make you complicit in maintaining the veneer of living in a "post racial" world despite the glaring inequalities (if you care to look) that still exist.

To put it bluntly, Its been done ... nothing new is presented in this film. A movie purportedly about racism afflicting an oppressed community, but actually about the experience of the affluent white person defending that community. "To Kill a Mocking bird", "Cry Freedom." "Mississippi Burning.", "The blind Side" the list goes on ...

To see why white people tend to like these films see simply Google "stuffwhitepeopledo" and the phrase "warmly embrace a racist novel (to kill a mockingbird)"

You will find a few eye openers there that may help take off the blinkers most of us on, when we choose to fail to see what is happening around us.

 

[thetruthseeker]

I haven't quite got the hang of this commenting system - so excuse the repost.


Simply liking a film does not make you a racist. BUT, fawning over it and saying its the best movie you have seen, funny, witty etc and FAILING to notice the repetition of the same old tired stereotypes and themes DOES suggest that you are perhaps too "comfortable" (and thus not challenging enough) of those images and the status quo.

That unfortunately DOES make you complicit in maintaining the veneer of living in a "post racial" world despite the glaring inequalities (if you care to look) that still exist.

To put it bluntly, Its been done ... nothing new is presented in this film. A movie purportedly about racism afflicting an oppressed community, but actually about the experience of the affluent white person defending that community. "To Kill a Mocking bird", "Cry Freedom." "Mississippi Burning.", "The blind Side" the list goes on ...

To see why white people tend to like these films see simply Google "stuffwhitepeopledo" and the phrase "warmly embrace a racist novel (to kill a mockingbird)"

You will find a few eye openers there that may help take off the blinkers most of us on, when we choose to fail to see what is happening around us.