It takes a special kind of talent to take a civil rights novel about black maids to Hollywood. But do you also have to be Caucasian?
It 'Helps' To Be White
by Natalie Hopkinson
In one scene in the best-selling novel The Help, a spirited black woman has second thoughts about sharing the gory details of her life as a Mississippi domestic with a white writer who is part of the town's bridge-and-tennis-playing aristocracy.
"What am I doing?" Minny says, in an uncharacteristic attack of self-doubt. "I must be crazy, giving the sworn secrets a the colored race to a white lady." Later, she justifies speaking out in 1960s Jackson, even though she faces violence and never getting work again. "I ... just want things to be better for the kids. But it's a sorry fact that it's a white woman doing this."
I am kind of with Minny. I absolutely loved The Help, Kathryn Stockett's wonderful book-within-a-book about segregation in her native, Mississippi. Here was a novel that tells the heroic story of black women who nursed white children and cleaned white homes while never missing a church tithing on Sunday. These women did the literal and figurative dirty work of the civil rights movement, sitting silently in the pews while the men in front of the pulpit made the magazine covers.
But with the movie version of The Help coming soon via Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks and the book making best-seller lists from Biloxi to Boston, Minny's troublesome observation about white privilege is still relevant 50 years later. In the world of publishing and Hollywood, it helps to be talented, as Stockett clearly is. But it also helps to be white. The book's title referred to 1960s maids, but the "sorry fact" is that in 2010 if colored people want to have a voice--and more importantly one that carries far and wide--you still need white help.
Read the Full Review @ The Root
It 'Helps' To Be White
by Natalie Hopkinson
In one scene in the best-selling novel The Help, a spirited black woman has second thoughts about sharing the gory details of her life as a Mississippi domestic with a white writer who is part of the town's bridge-and-tennis-playing aristocracy.
"What am I doing?" Minny says, in an uncharacteristic attack of self-doubt. "I must be crazy, giving the sworn secrets a the colored race to a white lady." Later, she justifies speaking out in 1960s Jackson, even though she faces violence and never getting work again. "I ... just want things to be better for the kids. But it's a sorry fact that it's a white woman doing this."
I am kind of with Minny. I absolutely loved The Help, Kathryn Stockett's wonderful book-within-a-book about segregation in her native, Mississippi. Here was a novel that tells the heroic story of black women who nursed white children and cleaned white homes while never missing a church tithing on Sunday. These women did the literal and figurative dirty work of the civil rights movement, sitting silently in the pews while the men in front of the pulpit made the magazine covers.
But with the movie version of The Help coming soon via Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks and the book making best-seller lists from Biloxi to Boston, Minny's troublesome observation about white privilege is still relevant 50 years later. In the world of publishing and Hollywood, it helps to be talented, as Stockett clearly is. But it also helps to be white. The book's title referred to 1960s maids, but the "sorry fact" is that in 2010 if colored people want to have a voice--and more importantly one that carries far and wide--you still need white help.
Read the Full Review @ The Root
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