DAILY CHALLENGE WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 10, 2011
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Civil rights lite: Or how fiction and fact become one By LINDA TARRANT-REID I know, I know, everyone loved the novel The Help by Kathryn Stockett. It’s been on the NYT’s Best Seller’s List for combined print and e-book fiction for 24 weeks, and is #1. Now the book is a movie. Robin Roberts of Good Morning America recently interviewed the four lead characters in the film – Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Emma Stone and Bryce Dallas Howard – about their roles in this crazy, funny, dramatic movie about maids in the south during the Civil Rights Movement. Really? The movie by Dreamworks Pictures has received massive amounts of publicity. With the prerelease hoopla including the trailer, interviews and the strategically placed articles stoking the flames of a box office blockbuster in the making, folks are going to love the movie as well. They don’t have any choice because that’s how the marketing machine works, priming the film for the Academy Awards and for the across platform tie-ins, like The Help Event featuring a product line inspired by the film and sold on the Home Shopping Network, HSN. For the record, I’m delighted that African American actors – Davis, Spencer, Cicely Tyson and the other 11 or so Black folks in the film got some work in Hollyweird, and got paid. That’s a beautiful thing. My concern is the trivialization of a period of painful transition in African American history. The Civil Rights Movement was no joke; folks died, bled, and were maimed and jailed in pursuit of equality. A fictional
account about African American domestics set in Jackson, Mississippi in the 1960s written by a white author who uses dialect and vernacular for the Black maids, while creating inauthentic dialogue devoid of southern ticks for her white characters, does not capture the essence of the struggle. The Help is not the first novel about African Americans by a white author adapted to film that has stirred controversy. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin although written to promote an antislavery message ended up solidifying Black stereotypes. Stowe, a white abolitionist, populated her bestselling 1852 novel with pickaninnies (the ragamuffin, uneducated, ill-kempt children of slaves), mammies (oversized, dark skinned females, desexualized caretakers of white children) and Uncle Toms (obedient, docile and malleable man servants who put the slave master and mistress first) whose negative impact reverberates today in popular culture. As a historian, I am very disturbed by authors playing fast and loose with the serious business of history. Libraries and archives are filled with erroneous, lopsided, fictionalized accounts of the African American narrative. Some of these accounts are written by self-serving authors who are more interested in preserving their legacy and perspective than researching and verifying facts to produce a complete and accurate history. The Help, albeit fiction, is an illustrative example of one aspect of the race problem in America. Blacks get it, but whites don’t. Because we have
Potter: The return of Tarzan Continued from page 4 human rights for all. The second aspect of Tarzan: Whenever there was a dispute among Africans, they would send for Tarzan. When he arrived, all of the Africans would obey whatever he said. The attempt here was to inculcate in the minds of people of African ancestry to always look to whites to settle their differences. I think all of us, who have been around for any length of time, have witnessed this phenomenon. One of the most tragic and painful exercise of Tarzinism is in the United States of America’s court rooms. When Black families can no longer settle their disputes, they go to “Tarzans” wearing Black robes today. They, especially Black men who try to evade their responsibilities, have to be taken to judges who are mostly white. In the book entitled, “The African,” (the author’s name escapes me), there is an incident of two Africans who left their village in Africa and registered for school in London, England. One day, as they
walked the streets, they saw a sight that “blew their minds.” They saw a white man picking up garbage. They couldn’t believe their eyes. They had to get closer to believe that what they saw was what they saw. Back home in their village, they had never seen a white man in that role, in fact, in any menial role. All they had ever seen was a white man in charge as a boss, ruler, master, owner, etc. That was the way whites wanted to appear. Across the world, and yes, right here in the U.S.A., people of African ancestry and others are inundated with a flood of images of white dominance and Black subservience, and experience the same in their lives. They have come to believe that white men are supposed to be rulers, masters, superior, etc. …to be continued. ** Join Reverend Daughtry in Jersey City for the weekly Thursday Evening Educational, Cultural, and Empowerment Forum from 6pm8pm for an evening of information,
cleaned their houses, raised their kids and prepared their meals, we have been privy to their private conversations and know exactly what they think about Black people. They, on the other hand, are largely ignorant of African Americans – who we are, what we are capable of and how we live our lives. Beecher Stowe’s stereotypes gain a new 21st century life in Stockett’s The Help. Aibileen is the large, loving caregiver to the white Leefolt children, while Minny is the defiant, rebellious non-conforming troublemaker who works for the social outcast Celia Foote and her husband. Skeeter, the white woman who gets a book contract based on the maids’ stories, is portrayed as the savior of sorts of the abused Black maids. She is introduced as someone interested in changing the segregationist practices of her community, but Skeeter’s real ambition is to go to New York and get a job in publishing. The other side of the story of the powerful and the powerless is the abuse. Fast forward to New York City, 2011, where the media has dubbed a recent news story, the DSK Affair, in which a West African maid who worked at a midtown Manhattan hotel accused a European banker of rape. The maid, Nafissatou Diallo, and the former head of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, are at the center of a battle being waged by their lawyers of “he said, she said.” DSK was arrested on his way out of the country on an international flight after Diallo reported that she was accosted as she went about her maid’s duties. The coverage has gone viral. Charges against
the powerful French economist and lawyer were on the brink of dismissal after a smear campaign was waged in the press against the maid and her credibility. But the tide seems to be turning since Nafissatou Diallo shed the cloak of anonymity and has decided, with her lawyers and supporters, to go public and tell her side of the story. In an ironic twist, the other story making the media rounds involves a six-page essay found among the personal items of Rosa Parks being auctioned off by Guernsey’s, a New York-based company that handles the archives of celebrities and historical figures. The essay, which some friends and associates of Parks are calling a fictional account written by her but meant to remain private, details an encounter that Rosa had with her white, male employer. Working as a housekeeper for a neighbor in 1931, Parks describes a near-rape experience. Again, this account exemplifies the caste and class struggle of a young Black woman who bravely rejects the advances of her white employer. The alleged abuse at the center of the DSK Affair and the discovery of Rosa Parks’ essay are certainly at the far end of the power spectrum, but are part of the same continuum experienced by domestic workers like the maids in The Help. Encounters between domestic workers and their employers or guests in a hotel can be a dicey proposition. What Diallo and Parks experienced is an important counterpoint to the fictional storyline of The Help and those experiences are a reminder that real life, not reel life, inspires movements.
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