As a conservative, I find myself thinking in a different language than liberals. Listening to them on various news programs, I often find myself searching the bottom of the screen for subtitles. Many times, I just can’t understand them at all.
The same thing happens to me when I read their articles. This one, from Slate, caught my eye yesterday, because it criticised the movie The Help for not being progressive enough. It went so far as to call the film, and I quote, a “Barbie band-aid on the still-raw wound of race relations in America”. Nice.
Now, I’ll grant you this: some conservatives (and some liberals) I know are insensitive when it comes to race. Some make stupid comments. Some are flat-out jerks to people of every color of the rainbow, and they even personalize their jerkiness to perfectly fit their intended targets. But, none of them are wishing Rosa had never sat down in the front seat of that bus. Trying to convince some of these liberal thinking types that being a jerk is universal is an exercise in futility. They are convinced that only cruel conservatives are mean hateful racist bigots.
Another plastic gem from the Slate jewelry box is whining that The Help is a horrible set-back in the civil rights movement because…get ready for this…black actresses play the parts of the black maids in the film. I swear I am not making this up. They are heartbroken that the best roles for black actresses this year are the roles of Aibileen and Minny. On some level, I can see where they are coming from, but I don’t see a bio-pic of Condoleeza Rice coming to a theater near you-the libs hate her. On the other hand, how beautiful is it that the simple and often ignored lives of the maids of 1960′s Mississippi were written so thoughtfully, so fully, and with such respect for those women that they are seen as the best characters a black woman could portray this year?
The author also bemoans the fact that the main protagonist is a white privileged woman. Apparently, if a white person with any sort of education or privilege seeks to right any racial wrongs, be they fictional or actual, they are merely patronizing the people to whom they are seeking to help. Which, I imagine, would be highly offensive to all those protestant white males who died to free the American slave during the War Between the States.
The fact that Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer have had to actually defend their choice to portray Aibileen and Minny is astonishing to me. These characters are beautiful people, and their strength and courage are heroic. They are characters with layers and depth, characters I would imagine it would be a thrill to play. But they are maids in 1962 Mississppi, and apparently progressive types don’t think such people should be portrayed onscreen or anywhere else, and certainly not by black women, because it will set back racial progress in our country.
Who, pray tell, should have played these women, if not strong talented black actresses?
The truth that these two writers from Slate fail to see is that when one group is discriminated against, and belittled and held back with the force with which many whites did blacks in our history, those that are the victims of such injustice were rarely in a position in which they could have changed their circumstances. They were trapped in lives they did not deserve and did not intend. The help they needed to change their lives often came from people outside. People in better circumstances. People of (shudder) different races. In the 1960′s, that help was occasionally white. Having white skin does not preclude some from being able to see that a wrong must be righted. People of all shades can have the strength of their convictions and the courage to act on them.
Atticus, a white protesant male, defines courage.
Liberals are upset, it seems, because this movie (based on fiction, albeit fiction written from life) brings modern-day black women back into the world of 1962 black women, a world of overlooked bigotry, of callous hatred, abuse and usury. The Help movie puts the modern day white actors back into the position of controlling the lives of their domestic help with an astonishing cruelty that was accepted as just “the way things are”. Liberals do not want to ever go back there, even in a movie, and that notion is admirable. Liberals’ problems with The Help range from it not being gritty enough in its portayal of the racial evils of 1962 Mississippi to showing in techni-color that black women were subjected to such indignities at all. But, if we follow this line of liberal thought to its logical conclusion, we will never make any movie or tell any story that involves an honest depiction of racial injustice, because to see an evil, it must be portrayed honestly. A two-hour film simply can not chronicle every relevant event that occured during that time, but it can show some things.
Christians have exactly the same problem making movies, and writing books, too, for that matter: either our stories are not “Christian enough”, or an actor is cast in a Christian film who might not be a blood-bought-premillenial-missionary-minded-tithing-suit-wearing-hair-above-his-collar-Christian, and therefore the film must be boycotted, or we believe we are living in some sort of altered reality where it’s possible to portray evil without actually getting their hands dirty or saying any bad words, and then we expect people to be moved by the redemption that seems as shallow as the sinners we write are.
Looking at our history through the eyes of our country’s writers, and seeing these overlooked souls brought to life in such vivid color makes us notice them. It makes us think about them. And talk. And, if we will take the time to look both them and ourselves in the eye, and see, we might be able to make some progress. Many brave black people fought for equality in the sixties, but only a handful had a national affect on the situation, and most of them were assassinated. The truth of the matter is this: to alleviate racial bigotry, the human race must work together.