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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

The Help....Here we go again!

I've been waiting for THE HELP to be released. To me, it had the chance to highlight an often overlooked theme within America's racist history: the dynamic between black women and white women. The truth is, white women have always received the best of both worlds when it comes to racism. There men commit violent acts, segregate society attempt to monopolize power, while white women get to experience the fruits of racist efforts executed by their men. Also, white women know how to be racist with a "smile" as they have been groomed for centuries around powerful establishments, so they know how to play the game around kings and rich men all while being serviced by the oppressed and placed on a cultural pedestal by their men. White women have countless positive role models in popular media culture so they are told daily that they are special, beautiful and worth extra praise and admiration- a prize or trophy with star appeal. All while black women clean their footsteps and accept secondary status as "the best friend", "confidant" and "personal life coach or assistant" to help soothe the white woman's woes. As a man, I can see this clearly. What undermines the possibility of black women ever establishing themselves as more than "angry hos, single mothers, groupies, maids and assistants" is when black women support crap like THE HELP and walk out with a smile as if it's really a "feel good movie." It's a lullaby aimed at putting black women to sleep as they foolishly accept the bare minimum amount of respect from white women that are groomed to hold entitlement complexes that make black women expendable in their world...but black women should be happy to see white women smile, right? That movie is nothing but a Public Relations effort to put a smiling, pretty white female face on racism. It's called 'sympathetic racism" and white women are the masters of it, saving black kids, saving troubled schools- but they raise white men.  I wonder would this movie be as popular if a black daughter of one of the maids set out to tell the stories of black maids in the south? Imagine that. A young black woman, out to become a writer and move to the big city who decides to tell her mother's and aunties stories by way of a book called The Help. What do you think?

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