"The Help"

I enjoyed reading The Help, but I didn't love it. There was something about it, some niggling feeling inside me, that objected. Maybe it was simply my objection to a white woman (the author, Kathryn Stockett) presuming to speak for black women, as many others have said. Or maybe, and this is a small distinction, it was an objection to a white protagonist as hero to those poor black women.

Now, of course, the novel has been made into a movie (some writers have all the luck!) and so there is a fresh batch of reviews of this story. Today in the New York Times, a criticism that rings true for me. Patricia A. Turner (a black woman) wrote a piece called "Dangerous White Stereotypes" that gets it right. Ms. Turner didn't hate the story either. But she put her finger on what was missing, and therefore how "The Help" can be misleading. In short, "The Help" portrays a group of unsavory white women treating their help badly. As Ms. Turner so perceptively points out...

"To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not. Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud... In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday. “The Help” tells a compelling and gripping story, but it fails to tell that one."

Read the book, see the movie (I plan to), just keep a clear eye. And let me know what you think.