Choosing between The Help or Faces at the Bottom of the Well: On Reproducing Racially-Easy Work or Constructing Courageously

By Guest Contributor Blanca E. Vega, cross-posted from Race-Work Race-Love

“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.” — Frederick Douglass

Writer’s block. This is how I woke up this morning. Confronted with the realities of beginning a dissertation and working full time as a college administrator, I came up with two words:

Writer’s Block.

I write about race and education. I research racial incidents on college campuses. Every day, in my inbox, I see some article about another racist incident, form of harassment, example of violence – I go to sleep with this, I wake up to this, I eat with this racial narrative.

I wonder about those folks who are color-blind. How do they wake up every morning?

So this morning I woke up with writer’s block. And I read on my twitter-feed that The Help received five Golden Globe nominations – a story about a young white woman who desires to become a writer and focuses her writing on her Black female housekeepers/maids.

Historians, sociologists, educators, and other writers have all critiqued the book that has turned into a movie. They have pointed out facts versus the fiction that one sees in the movie. Two very important critiques can be read here and here.

Essentially, The Help is a story about a color-blind, white woman who wants to be a writer. Someone who tells the story of Black women who are domestic workers. This is not the story of Black female domestic workers.

One need not look too far to see how the author’s standpoint affects her work. The movie’s title is a great example of the author’s perspective. An author who talks about Black women from a color-blind perspective wouldn’t be able to see her own white privilege in constructing the title. A color-blind author who writes about Black women won’t be able to see how she continues to reproduce a racist narrative.

She didn’t call it the ‘The Black Help”. She called it The Help. And I will add that when I caught a quick glimpse of a preview of the film and saw that the first person in the preview was a white woman, I thought “Wow. A movie about white female domestic workers. How interesting.”

Wrong. The Help implied The Black Help. Similar to using terms such as “disadvantaged”, “urban”, “Inner city” and “at-risk”, the title The Help is a manipulation of language to replace racial specifics. We use coded terms to mark bodies, construct race to make some bodies deficient (Black/Brown bodies) and others the norm (White).

This author, like many, is getting paid and rewarded to continue a cycle of racist reproduction. We are all involved in this kind of racist reproduction in one way or another. The Help is a great example of this: nominate Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer for their roles as maids in addition to having the author of the book get accolades, a movie deal, and a pat on the back for seemingly being racially conscious.

These kinds of stories reinforce the need to maintain a racial narrative that is pleasing for and thereby dumbs-down the audience. To see Black women, really wonderful actresses, reprise the role of Mammy from Gone with The Wind, and receive awards for it, is disturbing, but all too familiar. We are all in collusion with racist reproduction of who Whites are and who People of Color are. But some of us are more willing to fight this than others. These stories also lead some of us to think that racial progress is occurring, leading to a bifurcated understanding of racial progress. In fact, Richard P. Eibach and Joyce Ehrlinger (2006) found that there is a difference in perceptions of racial progress held by Whites and People of Color. They write:

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