Who Does ‘The Help’ Help? A Curt Critique
Just like we can ask in 2023 who feels free in watching “Emancipation,” we should also ask who “The Help” actually helps.
The Future is Another Country
Just like we can ask in 2023 who feels free in watching “Emancipation,” we should also ask who “The Help” actually helps.
The BOOM exhibit successfully erases the Black experience in Montgomery County during the 1950s.
There is a conversation about race that white families are just not having. This is mine.
Whatever the demographic make-up of these groups of agitators, the overarching idea that communal protests and battles over white supremacy and race are anathema to Charlottesville could not be further from the truth.
White Americans have appropriated and closely guard what used to be a typically southern variant of U.S. history to protect their privilege. The current political climate in the United States seems to be congenial to these kinds of defense.
Life and cultural expectations in East Texas continue to promote segregation in both personal and social relationships. Although white supremacist marches like the one in Charlottesville grip American headlines, neo-Nazis and Klansmen supporting the same doctrine in the open are not uncommon behind the Pine Curtain.
By his own admission, film creator Gottlieb was able to spend most of his life in Silver Spring shielded from the community’s past that included widespread discrimination in the community’s businesses, public buildings, and housing. Even after completing the film, Gottlieb appears to have learned little about the substantial role racism played in shaping his community.
From the Jim Crow era to the present day, discrimination has obstructed equal access in attaining greater wealth and upward mobility for marginalized people.
The American Vision falls short of many important historiographical trends. Political history, or more accurately Presidential history, is important for students to learn—our democratic government operates (or is at least supposed to) on a legalistic basis. But history is a discipline that at its best seeks to understand the human experience. It studies human beings doing things. A more comprehensive textbook would necessitate more space be given to history “from the bottom up.”
Removal without consideration of the historical context that led to their placement and the social wounds inflicted by white supremacy that are continually reopened in communities around the nation does nothing to resolve structural racism and heal those wounds.