Is Viola Davis Character In The Help Just The Stereotypical Black Mammy?

 

I cannot contain my anger and disappointment  that  Viola Davis decided to star in the  new film The Help. Hollywood produces very myopic representations of black women. Black women are either whores like Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball or maids like Viola Davis in The Help. The social construction  of black female sexuality is very limited. Black women are placed into the binary and not depicted in Hollywood movies as three dimensional people. The film roles available for black women tend to be two dimensional and not nuanced.  Black women in North America are still presented as inferior to white women. The white woman is still placed on the pedestal as the true image of womanhood.

The Help was developed through a white lens about the civil rights movement. I am not suggesting that white people did not have a role in ending America’s apartheid regime. However, I do believe The Help was really made for white audiences and not black people. First, the star of The Help is the young white actress Emma Stone. Stone’s character is at the center while Viola Davis character is in a secondary role.

I noticed a couple of things while watching the trailer for The Help. First, the white women are presented as the stereotypical pristine, upper class, and feminine. However, the black women in The Help speak in a Southern dialect, and  constructed as  inferior to the white women. The black domestics in The Help are overweight,  unattractive, speak in Southern dialect, and presented as asexual.

Of course, the white woman saves the day since the purpose of The Help is to promote the narrative that black people we cannot save ourselves.

The genesis of The Help is, in order for white people to be interested in movies about black people a white person must always be the protagonist.

The Help is just another form of the classic white  saviour movies. Usually in a white saviour movie the white protagonist has an epiphany and decides to help the

black people that are constructed as victims.

I am so tired of the racist white saviour narrative that black people need to be saved by whites.

Another problem, I have with The Help is the film  promotes the racist narrative that black women have no agency. The only purpose black people have is to serve white folks.  Black womanhood is constructed as just to be loving and nurturing. The Help does not present Viola Davis or Octavia Spencer’s characters as three dimensional women. Hollywood consistently promotes the discourse that a black woman’s purpose in life is to exist in an anterior time. I cringed when I heard the line in the trailer “we love them and they love us.”

Yes, black women love working in the domestic sphere and serve rich white women. Of course, The Help ignores the fact in America,  black women were  blocked from higher educational opportunities for decades.  Black women worked in the domestic sphere because this was the only work to make a living in America prior to the civil rights movement. Of course, there were black women such as Zora Neale Hurston that became a writer. However, the majority of black women had to work in domestic work because that’s the only form of work they were offered!

Two years ago,  Sandra Bullock racist film The Blind Side also promoted this abhorrent narrative disavowing black agency.

The Blind Side also made over $200 million dollars at the North American box office. Hollywood will continue to make racist movies such as The Help because

the public supports this bigotry. Would the general public really want to see an honest movie about black female domestics that were raped by white men?

Would white people like to see movies where they are presented in a negative light during the civil rights era?

I understand Viola is a black actress, and she needs to work. However, time really has not changed for black women in Hollywood.

I wish Viola Davis had more pride and decided NOT to take the role in The Help!

In the year 1940, Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award for her role as mammy in the film Gone With The Wind. The black mammy stereotype of black womanhood is so pervasive in racist Hollywood!

McDaniel did not have a choice because in the year 1940 there were a paucity of good roles for black women in Hollywood.

I remember McDaniel made a famous quote that she would rather be paid “$700 dollars a week to be a maid in a film than $7 dollars a week” in real life.

McDaniel was actually a civil rights activist during her era and she definitely fought for black women rights.

I understand Viola Davis needs a pay cheque but taking on the role of a maid is demeaning in The Help because of the history in the Jim Crow south.

It seems being a maid is the best role Hollywood has to offer the very talented Viola Davis.

The trailer for The Help is so racist and sexist against black women. I just feel so sick watching this racist garbage!

It is so sad that the best role Viola Davis can get since her Academy Award nomination for Doubt is just being the black mammy!  It is so  so deleterious and abhorrent  that Viola would take this disgusting role as a maid to a white woman!

The Help engenders the discourse that a black woman purpose is to be subservient to white folks. I also find the racist narrative of the white saviour in The Help problematic. In the 1960s, civil rights movement my black elders helped themselves they did not sit and wait for white folks to gain freedom!

Why Can’t An Editor Just Be Honest About Rejecting My Poetry Manuscript?

Dear Orville: thank you for thinking of ECW. I apologize for sitting on your manuscript for so very long. It’s a fine book—lovely and engaging. And that part of the problem. I’ve been swamped. It’s easy to get rid of the bad and middling manuscripts. The good ones? They, unfortunately, sometimes sit in a pile and wait for me to get off my butt and make tough decisions. I get to do so very few books I force myself to be absolutely sure. Like I said, I really like your book—I’m afraid, however, I’m going to have to pass. I wish I was writing with better news.

Best always,

Michael Holmes
—
ECW Press