The Help

Looking back, I should have followed my initial black feminist inclination to skip out on seeing a Tyler Perry approved film about race and gender in America. I feared that The Help would follow the trite “white person saves poor black person/people” storyline that characterizes too many Hollywood films. Ultimately, I realized that it wasn’t fair for me to critique a film that I had never seen before. Given that truth, I went against my gut. I caved in to the voices around me that were describing in the film in a neutral or even positive light and walked into Regal Cinema in DC Chinatown and took a seat.

The vast majority of movie goers in the theater that Friday night were white women, the target audience for the film. The trail of trailers shown before the film set the stage for the film itself. My friend described the previews as a sign that we were entering “romantic comedy Hell”. Lol.

Once the film began, I braced myself to see a white person rescue seemingly powerless black people from their miserable existence. Instead, I witnessed a 23 year old white woman, Skeeter, chronicle the stories of her own black maid and those belonging to her friends. As heroine of the story, she bravely picked up a pen and wrote down the stories of the oppressed domestic workers in Jackson, Mississippi during Jim Crow. Perhaps a full on rescue would have been too much for a genteel young white woman of those times.

The black maids in the story were literate; however, they did not write their own stories. Instead, they spoke them to Skeeter, a white woman half their age, so that she could document them. Skeeter’s motivation to share the black women’s stories was born in her pity for her own black mammy from childhood, who was suddenly fired after 30 years of hard work because of an unwritten rule in wealthy white ladies superficial social club culture.

Looking intently at the screen, I patiently waited for a plot turn that included an act of serious resistance by one or many of the black maids. I thought that maybe the black women would stand up for their rights as workers and go on strike or maybe they would start a letter writing campaign to their state legislators. After all, acts of civil disobedience were central to the civil rights movement. Much to my dismay, the most powerful act of resistance involved a maid baking a pie for her white boss lady.

Once I heard about the lawsuit initiated by Ablene Cooper, the maid whose story inspired the book from which the movie originated, I became even more remorseful for buying tickets to this movie. The black woman who told this story is not receiving her fair share of the royalties gained from either the book or the movie. Cooper’s painful story has been appropriated to generate profits that she may never see.

NAACP is slippin

Wow! I felt so disappointed to learn that the NAACP supported the Tea Party in their push to fire a black woman from her job for reverse racism. Of all groups, I would have thought the NAACP would be more critical of Tea Party and extremist right wing claims, especially those made against African-Americans. After all, it was barely a week ago when the NAACP called out the Tea Party for harboring racist elements among its factions. And for the record, anyone who's been near a Tea Party protest and seen their swastikas and heard their racist chants can attest to fact that some of their supporters are racist.

Why then, would the NAACP rush the Tea Party's aid at the expense of a hard working black federal employee? The answer is politics. The political pendulum is shifting to the right and conservatives are gaining popularity and credibility, even in the eyes of race-based social justice organizations like the NAACP.

During the late days of the Bush Administration, progressives had a powerful grassroots political voice and were able to succeed in securing the election our nation's first African-American president. However, now that Obama has been getting things done as president, conservatives have begun a spirited movement in opposition to his policies. The passage of health care reform legislation and other big government initiatives has fired up fiscal conservatives and the fringe elements that follow their lead.

Hopefully this incident will serve as a wake-up call for the NAACP and other progressive groups. Tea Party accusations may be hyped up by the media because of their current level of political hotness, but media coverage doesn't always equate with legitimacy so it's still important to investigate the validity of right wing claims before backing them.

Black America Shares Statistics with African Countries

The Black AIDS Institute has released a shocking new study comparing rates of HIV infection among African-Americans with those of the hardest hit nations in Africa. The study revealed that black Americans are just as likely to come down with the virus that causes AIDS as citizens of Uganda and South Africa. The Centers for Disease Control determined that black women are contracting HIV from heterosexual sex and injection drug use at 23 times the rate of white women and AIDS is the leading cause of death for black women between ages 25 and 34. The United States may be one of the wealthiest nations in the world, but this goes to show that money cannot buy good health and nor can it undo centuries of oppression against African people. There are many different theories as to why blacks are disproportionately affected by HIV and AIDS, but in my opinion, even all of them taken together cannot explain the dire nature of the statistics at hand.

Some people say that white people are just more responsible when it comes to sex than blacks, but somehow I'm just not buying that one. White people have plenty of unprotected sex. Others say that black men are contracting the disease in prison and spreading it to multiple women once they're released. I say that, yes, this may happen sometimes but there are not enough black ex-cons out there to account for a HIV rate among black women that's 23 times that of white women. Black men are only a few times more likely than white men to have a record. And others say that black men are more likely to be on the down low, but CDC research shows that closeted black men are no more likely to catch HIV than out gay black men.

I am no conspiracy theorist so I don't think the government is secretly infecting blacks with HIV. However, I do find some validity in new scientific research that points to a gene that makes people with sub-Saharan origins more likely to catch HIV when they are exposed. The gene in question is thought to have been developed as a natural evolutionary defense to malaria. It's just too bad that the same gene that results in an evolutionary advantage in the face of one disease can be a catalyst for infection in the case of another. As we all know, modern science is far from perfect and more research is needed to confirm these findings. Nonetheless I think this a very important and overlooked aspect of the worldwide black AIDS epidemic.

Black Patriotism and President Obama

Right wing extremists, with the support of mainstream media outlets, have begun to challenge the presidential candidates on patriotism. In Barack Obama's case, suggestions of his alleged traitor tendencies are based in racism and xenophobia. The dominant narrative of American history largely privileges white people and ostracizes immigrants.

The pages of common textbooks will tell you that whites founded this nation and that all American presidents have been of European descent. From the same books, you'll learn that blacks were generally servants and had no role in the prosperity of this wealthy nation. Even today, ordinary immigrants are being associated with vicious terrorists. Thus, President Obama is being subjected to a double whammy. Not only is he black, but he is also the son of an immigrant.

Millions of West Africans were brought to the so-called New World against their will and subjected to involuntary servitude for hundreds of years. They were exploited workers who never benefited from the fruits of their own labor. Would it be extreme for the relatively recent descendants of these forced migrants to be a bit unpatriotic?

Although Mr. Obama does not carry the same historical legacy of the majority of African-Americans in this country, dominant culture still places him within the broadly defined racial category of blackness. In America, everyone with one drop of black blood is considered black, regardless of country or ethic origin. For President Obama, that will mean that he is part of a history that is not directly his, but is that of his kindred people of African descent.

Chastising is Counterproductive

Even though I plan to vote for Obama in November, I was deeply disturbed by his remarks on Father's Day. I know that he is running for President of one of the richest and whitest countries in the word, but I don't think it's acceptable for him to abandon his alliance with all people of African decent.

We are all one group, a diaspora, with one origin and many present whereabouts. In the United States, the community of people of African descent is very diverse. A majority of us were brought here as captives in chains, while still a sizable minority chose to immigrate here on their own free will in search of the American Dream. President Obama's people are from the latter group, characterized by their willingness to immigrate to the West on their own terms.

On Father's Day, Barack Obama was oblivious to the plight of African-Americans who were forcibly transported to this Hemisphere. Audre Lourde taught us that the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. In this case, that means that people of African descent should not succumb to the old tactic of divide and conquer. President Obama should not have berated other black people in his attempt to get into the Oval Office. As we have learned from Dr. Rice, opportunism can override grassroots activism as easy as a bomb destroys a village.

Black fathers are not the principal cause of the many social ills affecting African-Americans, more over, there are institutionalized forces that negatively impact many people from different walks of life. Mr. Obama's speech conveniently excluded major barriers to a stable middle class two parent household including, but not limited to: the prison industrial complex, inadequate reproductive health services, unfair representation in the media, prohibitive health insurance costs and racially based educational disparities.