Why I Won't Watch 'The Help'

Or at least go out of my way to see it, which inevitably means upturning the sofa for loose change.  Or jump onto the bandwagon of raving reviews.

For the last couple of weeks, I couldn’t quite put a finger on what bothered me about 'The Help,' especially considering how I’d been so excited when I first saw the trailer. There was just something about it that gnawed at my racial consciousness over time.

And then I found this article "Why I'm Just Saying No to ‘The Help and Its Historical Whitewash" by Akiba Solomon that exactly articulated my reservations--it’s another typical white guilt project that places the white protagonist at the very center, and colored folk at the sidelines to advance the white protagonist’s (or other white folks’) personal journey or enlightenment. Says Solomn:

I just can’t bring myself to pay $12.50 after taxes and fees to sit in an aggressively air conditioned, possibly bed bug-infested New York City movie theater to watch these sisters lend gravitas to Stockett’s white heroine mythology. I’m sorry, but the trailer alone features way too many group hugs to be trusted.

Aside from the lovely snark, she’s completely right. It might be premature of me to pass judgment without having seen it, but really? If you’ve see one white guilt movie, then you’ve seen a dime and a dozen. They all have the same characters and plots, with endless variations as long as it’s about the white person, of course.

Scenario 1: Unerringly _______ (fill with adjective of your liking: optimistic, determined, disenchanted, etc.) white protagonist enters the dangerous world of colored people (replace with ‘inner-city school’ or ‘impoverished third-world village’ of your liking) to improve their lives, but along the way finds her/himself reborn from the experience.

Scenario 2: See Scenario 1.

How uplifting.

Meanwhile, colored people are almost always one-dimensional in these films. Reticent, angry, wary at first, but then the character of the white protagonist is revealed as a messiah to lend them a hand out from their hovel. Or better yet, they realize that the white protagonist ‘gets’ them and suddenly, they’re living in a postracial world. Just peachy.

C’mon, fuck that.

If you want to deal with your white guilt, check the things you say and do every day. Open up a book written by people of color, not a book about them.