I've been aggressively watching the coverage of the protests at Occupy Wall Street unfold and I've seen a lot of people say that this is not a legitimate movement because there isn't an easily defined list of demands, just a bunch of people making signs and sitting around outside. Obviously, I disagree. Yes, the fact is, there isn't a concrete list that anybody can point to. But the thing that we're all watching unfold is so much more powerful than that. I think that it's worth recognizing the people that are standing up for all of us. It's worth noticing that there are people doing more than standing in an echo chamber and repeating the same armchair punditry that the media has been rife with for years. Something is not quite right, and someone is willing to sacrifice a lot to start working on righting it.

People are openly sharing their stories about poverty and being the working poor without shame. People are advocating for general assemblies all over the country. Instead of being mired in pessimism, cynicism and hopelessness, they're standing up as an example of what democracy can look like. It's changing the picture that we've seen in America for so long. The people in Zuccotti Park are moving our eyes away from the the faces of our elected representatives and showing everyone the power of a group that has the best interests of the public in mind, instead of the best interest of a corporation or the bottom line.

It's going to be a long road ahead. I think it's pretty ridiculous to think that any of the protests in this nation are going to cause some kind of instant change. This is going to take time, and work. This is one of those movements that isn't going to be immediately boiled down to a talking point that the mainstream media can latch on to. I don't think that there is anything wrong with that. Maybe it'll force someone to get out there and do some investigative reporting and cover the people that are out there teaching, sharing, creating, and working tirelessly to come up with a solution to the problems that are plaguing so many of us right now.

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I'm not even sure that it's worth it to say anything about The Help, since so many people have said what I feel, far more eloquently than I ever could, but, I'll give it a shot. I've been feeling around the Internet to see how bothered people are by The Help, since there seems to be that familiar Oscar buzz surrounding it already. I've been consistently disappointed by what I've read, especially on Tumblr. I've seen a lot of reviews that say that my viewpoint is incorrect. I vehemently disagree. I see a lot of people saying that Skeeter is not a savior figure, and then in the same breath utter things like, "without her, the maids wouldn't have been able to tell their story and fight for equality". Really now? First off, which is it? And secondly, know your American history. Black people in America did not need the agency of whites to fight for equality and basic human rights. The civil rights movement in America was not started by forward thinking liberal white Americans, no matter what rose colored visions Hollywood would have you believe. Of course whites did participate, but ultimately, it wasn't their fight. I know that popular culture makes what I just said an unpopular opinion, and especially in light of this film, an oft derided one, but more people need to say this. Hollywood has been plagued by films that reframe the experience of people of color in harsh times into a "white savior" or, "white experience" story. Take a look at The Last Samurai (I for one have a hard time believing that Tom Cruise was in fact, the last samurai), Mississippi Burning, The Last of the Mohicans, hell, even Disney's Pochohontas reframed that story to make the invading whites less threatening and fundamentally changed Pochohontas's story to have a happy ending.

It's absolutely insane to me that people aren't up in arms about the ridiculous dialect used exclusively by the maids. The author of the novel claims it was for authenticity. Really? I've seen tons of archival footage as well as pretty recent footage of people from the south that actively participated in the civil rights movement or cleaned houses or just plain existed during the Jim Crow era, and I have heard nary a 'I's a this or that". Language like that serves to divide. It plants the seed in the reader's or viewer's mind that says, "these people are different than me. They are uneducated, and have no quarter. Their speech, their skin color, their station in life makes them separate from whites". Its topical, disgusting and unnecessary. It harkens back to the mammy that was oh so popular in films just a few decades ago. Mammy. Another dirty word that people on tumblr don't want to be reminded of. When I see that one quote being reblogged over and over, mammy is the first word that pops into my head. The comforting, mystical powers of the sexless black domestic slave, snuggling a white child to her bosom and imparting knowledge that is accessible only to the "magic negro". It's a trope, ladies and gentlemen. And it is undeniably racist.

I think that the issue here is privilege, as it so often is. So many young white liberals think that they are living in a post racial society. It's easy to marvel at the bright, shiny future that lays ahead when The Help exists. A whitewashed fantasy of something so far removed from reality it could have never happened. Let's break down the logistics here. In the Jim Crow era, Skeeter's book could and probably would have spelled death to the maids involved in the telling of that story. Men and women were beaten, raped and killed for looking at someone the wrong way, walking on the wrong side of the street, drinking from the wrong fountain, anything. Just because of the color of their skin. Skeeter runs off to New York for her big break, she wouldn't have had to watch a woman be lynched because she baked a shit and chocolate pie for her employer. What about the constant threat of sexual and physical assault that domestic workers faced? And the fact that opening your mouth about an assault could get you beaten, fired, killed, harassed, the list goes on. Where was Medgar Evers? Where were the positive depictions of black men and black families? Where were the stories of the push toward desegregation?

Now, this is the part where I'm gonna be told that The Help is fictional, so of course it's going to miss out on details. Or that it's one story in a larger tapestry of stories. To that I'll say this: bullshit. I say that because it's a restructuring of history. You can't tell a story that is inexorably linked to all the things that I mentioned and cherry pick the things that you want. It was an ugly time and I guarantee you, if you look into the real stories you won't find one domestic worker that didn't come face to face with some kind of assault in the home she worked in, or have a child that might be getting bused into a white school district, or have a relative or friend or neighbor that was jailed or had a hose turned on them or an attack dog turned on them for protesting. The Help doesn't exist in a microcosm. To believe that it's just fiction or couldn't possibly be expansive enough to include very harsh realities shows a scary combination of naïveté and privilege. To think that it's okay to gloss over the unpleasantness of the real story so that it can tug on the heartstrings or provide easy laughter is intellectually lazy.

(cross posted from my tumblog)

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So, I recently had a fucking terrible nightmare. Near as I can tell, I was forced into a socialite role. There was a family sort of like the Murdochs. A ruthless baron of a father and his son that was my age. I was charged with entertaining the son, and he didn't seem to care less about how short my dress was or how expensive my shoes were. Things fell apart when I suddenly and violently found out that the money was gone. I discovered that a famous painting was fake, as well as the very expensive designer shoes I was wearing. I was living in a flat with these two people that were apparently my parents. My father (who bore a striking resemblance to Colin Firth) knew all along that this family was going broke and he covered it up. The no longer rich dad came for his son and whisked him away with nary a word of thanks to us for keeping an eye on him, nor keeping him entertained.

Things sort of descended into madness at that point. I found out that I was being raped by my Firth-dad, as he tried to come after me, but was thwarted by my mother. He backed off but tried again. When my mother turned around to stop him this time, it was revealed that he had cut her mouth somehow, to keep her quiet. He said to me, "see, now it'll be better because she can't warn you that I'm coming". I felt sort of strangely electrified by that statement. He had a knife in his hand that he was brandishing, and at one point he was bouncing it like a ball. He would throw it down by it's point, and it would bounce back up into his hand. He did this a couple of times as I backed away from him. And then, out of nowhere, my mother jumped up from behind him with a much larger knife and stabbed him in the arm and the neck/shoulder area. He collapsed and died. She was able to struggle out some words about how she saved me and things were better now. I picked up the knife from his hand and killed her with it. I said something about how she didn't save me because I liked having asexual something something disorder better. Then I woke up. I don't know what weird dream disorder I had, nor what I meant by telling her about it, so yeah.

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