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

January 5th, 2012 by Guest Contributor

They use Critical Race Theory, Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, Testimonios, Street Lit, to construct a more robust racial narrative.

Work like The Help is racially-easy. And we all know the recipe: Develop code words and people may call you complex. Add “heroic” Black characters and you will be applauded for being well-intentioned. Add a couple of white characters that then find their souls and you just may get a movie out of it. Tell a sanitized Black story through the eyes of an innocent White woman — will get you an Oscar.

So is being a race-conscious writer/researcher really writer’s block? Or is it constructing courageously, constructing outside of the racist narrative that we inherited, that we continue to privilege, that we continue to reward? What some like to call “thinking outside the [racist] box?”

I think I prefer writer’s block now than to be racially-easy. Any day.

The challenge throughout has been to tell what I view as the truth about racism without causing disabling despair. ~ Derrick Bell

Page 3 of 3 | Previous page

Posted in academia, african-american, books, movies, race & representations, women of color | 14 comments

Previous post:
Next post:

  • STaylor in Austin

    Very well said and thanks for the Melissa Harris-Perry link, I missed that one. 

     It should upset me more that people of color don’t demand ( boycott) film, tv, and other media  rather than my being upset by white people making media for other white people.

     Why would they change.  The media industry doesn’t suffer one bit by making the Help or Blood Diamond or Glory or the Last Samurai ( basically every Zwick film that uses whites to tell the story of POC’s) and in fact they clean up at the box office by creating a safe kind of white guilt right before the happy or “noble” ending 

  • http://mclicious.org/ McLicious

    I’m sending this to everyone who wonders why I don’t have the slightest interest in reading that book or watching that movie when I am “so interested in racial issues” or when I “like reading so much.”

  • Anonymous

    As a WOC who struggles with writer’s block all.the.time, I just have to thank you whole-heartedly for this post. Writing courageously, as you put it, takes a long process of mental decolonization, and there aren’t very many resources that allow for that (go figure). A challenge I’ve had is avoiding moulding my own story/stories into racially easy narratives; even when a story is drawn from my own life-experience, it took a while before I could avoid shaping it through white-colonial eyes.
    Anyways, thank you again. And best of luck in your writing! :)

  • PatrickInBeijing

    Umm, very well said!!!  But this doesn’t really count as writers block, when you can write so beautifully and powerfully!!  We need a new name for it??  Got any ideas??  Anyway, thanks so much, this was very very well said (I spend a lot of time explaining to my students why Gone With The Wind, and now The Help are not okay) I will link those who might get it here. 

  • Anonymous

    jen*, I wouldn’t be surprised if he tries to give you the Gone with the Wind/The Help gift set for your birthday or next Secret Santa. #EyesNotOnThatPrize

  • Pingback: more on white privilege and challenging racism with humor | (Making / Being in / Staying in) TROUBLE

  • Anonymous

    The fact that films like The Help are being made in the 21st century, and are being critically acclaimed, is a sign of how truly pathetic American culture has become.  Generally, some of the most popular entertainment among black people (Tyler Perry’s films and TV shows, VH-1′s rampage of blackface, The Real Housewives of Atlanta, etc.) is the kind of programming that black people were picketing 40 + years ago.  

  • Mickey

    Maybe you should send him the DVD of “In the Heat of the Night” and tell him that your favorite part is when Sidney Poitier slaps the white man senseless after the white man struck him because he might like it as see what he says. :P

  • Mickey

    I suggest we petition the powers-that-be  (NBC, ABC, CBS, etc.) and tell them to bring back quality shows featuring Blacks in a more positive light: The Cosby Show, Cosby, A Different World, Family Matters, The Jeffersons, 227, Amen, Gimme a Break (although my mother hated this show because she saw Nell Carter as a modern-day mammy.)

  • http://www.facebook.com/matt.pizzuti Matt Pizzuti

    I think you’re totally right about who should be telling whose stories; I don’t think a white writer could ever be as good or as appropriate as a PoC writing a story about PoC experiences.

     But if a white author does end up with cultural influence, is there not some responsibility to move the bar? I guess on one hand the white author could use her/his status to promote PoC writers and work, but that by itself seems like cop-out; white people need to also address their (our) own privilege and take responsibly for it. They (we) need to depict, in culture, what it looks like for a white person to unpack white privilege. Although there’s clearly nothing wrong with PoC writing the white characters addressing white privilege, I think the real-life author who is white has a personal responsibility to join that effort through the author’s own creative work. 
    Maybe by asking that question I’m unwittingly defending The Help because, as many commenters have pointed out, The Help was not really a story of black maids but about a white Southern girl addressing her white privilege – and perhaps any kind of financial gain a white author can come to by publishing such a story is intrinsically exploitative. But I’m still not sure if it’s THAT the story was written by a white writer but WHAT was in the story and what was left out of the story that makes it problematic. IS there a good example of a white writer dealing with race? Or is it more like having the work be criticized is an intrinsic part of the privilege-unpacking process (although this too seems like a cop-out suggesting white writers don’t have to bother trying to do it right)? Or is it that all works directly addressing privilege should be co-written? 

  • Pingback: MHBLabs » The Help

  • Onyx

    Hi Matt,

    Off the top of my head I’d say Richard Price. He wrote the novel “Clockers” which Spike Lee directed. He also wrote a number of episodes of The Wire. Dennis Lehane’s The Given Day had a diverse cast that was done well imo.

  • Sean C.

    Two of the three works you cited there are by black female writers, and both of the films based on them were made by black male directors.

  • http://twitter.com/sofiaquintero Sofia Quintero

    Yes, I immediately thought of Richard Price, too. But read his novels and do start with CLOCKERS then FREEDOMLAND. The film adaptations of his work failure to capture their nuance and complexity.  You would also be supporting a novelist who teaches free creative writing workshops to young people in Harlem.  

    I find the work of Russell Banks,  Adam Mansbach and young adult novelist Paul Volponi interesting as well.  As far as film, I recommend John Sayles whose treatment of class is also compelling.