Problematic Representations of Strategic Whiteness and “Post-racial” Pedagogy: A Critical Intercultural Reading of The Help

Abstract

The Help is argued to influence understandings of racial histories, racial in/equality, and interracial coalitions from a pedagogical stance invested in the re/production of white dominance. This essay mobilizes strategic whiteness to map the representational strategies utilized to secure the superiority of whiteness and further the momentum of “post-racial” ideology. Facilitated via white female characters, The Help's cinematic centralization of whiteness and redemption of white racists are illuminated as manifestations of strategic whiteness that operate at the expense of black women.

Keywords:

• Strategic Whiteness
• Media
• Black Women
• Domestic Work
• Post-racialism

Introduction

In recent decades, white authored and directed narratives presumably focused upon the struggles of people of color, including Mississippi Burning (Zollo, Colesberry, & Parker, 1989), Dangerous Minds (Simpson, Bruckheimer, & Smith, 1995), Crash (Haggis, 2004), and The Blind Side (Netter, Kosove, Johnson, & Hancock, 2010), have amassed immense popularity. Similarly, The Help (Stockett, 2009; Taylor, Green, Columbus, & Barnathan, 2011) earned extensive acclaim first as a fictional novel authored by a white woman, Kathryn Stockett, and then as a screenplay written and directed by a white man, Tate Taylor. For some, the film is a heart-warming story of two black maids and a white female socialite who unite to expose racism in Jim Crow Jackson, Mississippi, while others are offended by its representations of race, racism, and civil rights activism (e.g., Association of Black Women Historians, 2007–2012; Puig, 2011). Largely aligning with the latter as a biracial (black and white) black woman, I am drawn to the film precisely because of its popularity, and subsequent pedagogical influence, among everyday people.

Understanding popular culture as a site of public pedagogy¹ (Giroux, 2000; Sandlin, 2007), The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) cinematically influences public understandings of racial histories, racial in/equality, and interracial coalitions from a pedagogical stance invested in the re/production of white power, dominance, and superiority. By centering whiteness in this essay, I admittedly further the film's marginalization of blackness, particularly black women. Albeit a difficult choice, situating whiteness as a site of inquiry is necessary given the celebratory fanfare surrounding the novel and film. At the heart of my concern as a critical intercultural scholar is how the film centralizes, valorizes, and progressively redresses whiteness under the surreptitious guise of mass popularity and Hollywood glam.

Building upon scholarship that interrogates media representations of whiteness and racism (Chidester, 2012; Griffin, 2014; Holling, 2011; Moshin & Jackson, 2011; Rossing, 2010; Tierney, 2006), this essay mobilizes strategic whiteness (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Projansky & Ono, 1999) as a conceptual lens to expose The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) as a cinematic emblem of the “post-racial”² imaginary. Defined as “a belief that positions race as an irrelevant relic of the past with no viable place in contemporary thought” (Rossing, 2012, p. 45), mediated “post-racial” ideology not only antiquates racial oppression but also, in accordance with white domination, depicts white people, white culture, and racism palatably for white audiences (Moshin & Jackson, 2011; Ono, 2010).

To out The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) as a “post-racial” movie venture that circumvents progressive racial consciousness, I first summarize the plotline. Next, I position strategic whiteness as a conceptual lens to deconstruct the film's public pedagogy. Then, via a close reading of the storyline, character development, and dialogue, I argue that The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) not only centralizes whiteness but also functions as a site of apologia and redemption for white racists. I end with a discussion of the film as an endorsement of “post-racialism” that obscures the strategic labor of whiteness to “resecure the center” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 295) at the expense of black women.

Watching The Help

Set in 1962, Jim Crow Jackson, Mississippi, The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) chronicles the lived experiences of two black women, Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson, and one white woman, Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan. Aibileen and Minny are black maids while Skeeter, a recent Ole Miss graduate and socialite, is living on her family's plantation and troubled by the sudden absence of their black maid, Constantine Jefferson. Aibileen is Elizabeth Leefolt's maid, while Minny, at first, is Missus Walters’ maid. However, she is fired by Missus Walters’ daughter, Hilly Holbrook, and then becomes Celia Foote's maid. Linking all of the women together, Hilly, Elizabeth, and Skeeter are best friends and members of the elite Jackson Junior League that Celia, unsuccessfully, tries to join. Aibileen and Minny, also close friends, are “the help” in white households and at league functions.

Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter are united by Skeeter's desire to write a book about black maids’ experiences working in white households. Initially, Aibileen and Minny are terrified by Skeeter's idea, but eventually agree to participate. Upon their agreement, they emerge as co-authors of Skeeter's envisioned book since all three women eagerly work toward its completion. However, panic sets in when Miss Stein, Skeeter's New York editor, insists that Skeeter needs 12 interviews to complete the manuscript. Consequently, Skeeter and Minny entertain the impossibility of finishing the book since 31 maids fearfully declined to interview. In response, Aibileen shares that her son Treelore, killed by white men, had dreamed of becoming a writer. She tearfully pleads, “You stop this, everything I wrote, he wrote, everything he was gonna die with him” (Taylor et al., 2011). Newly resolved to succeed, they are soon met with the turning point that fuels their manuscript to completion.

The turning point occurs when Yule Mae Davis, Hilly's maid, is violently arrested for stealing. Following her arrest, Skeeter is summonsed to Aibileen's and met by several maids newly willing to interview. Nearly finished, Skeeter approaches her mother, Charlotte Phelan, to fulfill Miss Stein's demand to “put something personal in there. Write about the maid who raised you” (Taylor et al., 2011). Skeeter then learns that her mother fired Constantine when she was embarrassed by Constantine's daughter, Rachael, entering the Phelan's home through the front door while she was hosting the Daughters of America. Having finally learned of Constantine's fate, Skeeter adds her narrative to the book just before the deadline. As the film ends, the audience discovers how each woman is impacted by the book's publication. Skeeter decides to accept her dream job offer in New York; Minny is offered a permanent maid position at the Foote's; and, less fortunate, Aibileen is maliciously fired by Hilly. In the next section, I situate strategic whiteness as a conceptual lens to critique the film's problematic public pedagogy.

Strategic Whiteness and Media Representational Strategies

During slavery, racist ideology manifested as “a conscious effort to articulate, to justify, and to propagate a universal white supremacy based on the notion of an inherent black corporeal, intellectual, and moral inferiority” (Saint-Aubin, 2002, p. 255). Then, and still now, this dichotomous construction situates whiteness as a normative identity, discourse, ideology, and structure operating to preserve and magnify its dominant status (Kendall, 2013; Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Warren, 2009). In their landmark essay “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Nakayama and Krizek (1995) center whiteness to “identify and critique the assemblage of whiteness” (p. 294) and compel an acute awareness of how whiteness maneuvers to uphold racist logics. Spurred by Deleuze and Guattari, Nakayama and Krizek (1995) draw upon “deterritorialization” (p. 294) to reveal how whiteness secures its centrality, maintains its invisibility, and masks the racialized privileges afforded to white people. Simply stated, deterritorialization calls for establishing a blueprint to map the representational particularities of how whiteness deliberately functions. Conceptually, this is vital to challenging unmarked [white] stories about racial histories, racial in/equality, and interracial coalitions that are presented and/or perceived as objective, neutral, innocent, universal, colorblind, raceless, and/or “post-racial.” Exposing whiteness as strategic allows for a close reading of how whiteness toils to maintain its supremacy (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Projansky & Ono, 1999), particularly amid U.S. American society's censure against explicit racism coupled with contemporary declarations of “post-racialism.”

Extending Nakayama and Krizek's (1995) conceptualization of strategic whiteness from the realm of individual rhetoric to media representation broadens our understandings of how whiteness “establish[es] and defend[s] who and what Whites can be, what others can and cannot do and/or be, and what kind of feeling and action by others is allowed or disallowed in reference to Whites” (Tierney, 2006, p. 608). In this context, media as a social institution is positioned as a conduit through which whiteness is calculatingly preserved, fortified, and disseminated as superior (Brinson, 1995; Giroux, 1997; Madison, 1999; Moshin & Jackson, 2011). Ensuring the superiority of whiteness in media are white characters cast as saviors in films ostensibly about racism. This occurs when “a white person guides people of color from the margins to the mainstream with his or her own initiative and benevolence” (Cammarota, 2011, p. 243; Madison, 1999). Serving the same purpose are empathetic representations of racists, overly generous depictions of racially conscious white people, trivial depictions of what constitutes racism, and portrayals of racism as an individual pathology rather than an oppressive system (Madison, 1999; Moshin & Jackson, 2011; Projansky & Ono, 1999).

The aforementioned representational strategies “mark out and constitute the space of whiteness” as superior (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 298); they are also pervasive—even in mediated texts that outwardly oppose racism and/or presumably position the histories and experiences of people of color as central to the storyline (Madison, 1999; Moshin & Jackson, 2011; Tierney, 2006). Case in point—although public discourses overwhelmingly bill The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) as a film about black women (e.g., CBS, 2012; Puig, 2011; Tauber, 2011), conceptually implementing strategic whiteness reveals that black women are centered only to the degree that they enable a “post-racial” coming of age story enamored with white womanhood. Therefore, I approach the film asking, how does The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) strategically center and redeem whiteness amid its purported “post-racial” aspirations? To establish a blueprint of how whiteness invisibly works in the film, I first highlight how Skeeter and Stockett anchor white womanhood at the crux of the storyline. Secondly, I situate Skeeter, Charlotte, and Hilly as racist white women who, at the expense of black women, are ultimately redeemed via the film's culmination. Lastly, I highlight how the film falls in accordance with “post-racial” ideology and “shrouds racism … [while] subtly support[ing] racial hierarchies in and through narratives that claim to be antiracist” (Projansky & Ono, 1999, p. 156).

Helping Whiteness and Hindering Progressive Racial Consciousness

Centralizing Whiteness and White Women

Skeeter

I experience The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) unequivocally as a film in “which whiteness recenters itself—even in the face of explicit attention to blackness” (Projansky & Ono, 1999, p. 151). Skeeter, as the film's protagonist, serves as a pronounced example of this representational strategy via the array of life changes she experiences. Not only does Skeeter graduate from college and get her first news column, she also dates her first boyfriend, copes with her mother's illness, learns the truth about Constantine's forced departure, co-authors a book, fulfills her dream of getting published, and accepts a journalism job in New York. The drastic changes in Skeeter's life result in her character being more complex while the character development of Aibileen and Minny is flattened despite their appearance in multiple scenes. As a result, we know very little about their lives as black women beyond their connections to white women. That they are rarely seen out of uniform strengthens the centralization of Skeeter who is often shown navigating personal, social, and professional elements of her life in a variety of different contexts, outfits, and hairstyles.

Referred to as the “commodification of Otherness” by hooks (1992, p. 21), Skeeter can be further understood as the cultivated [white] subject of the film while Aibileen and Minny are the [black] objects of her desire—developed only insofar as Skeeter's needs require. For instance, the pivotal arc of Stockett and Taylor's storytelling depends on Skeeter's real and imagined access to blackness, which she finds alluring and useful as a means to realize her personal agency and resolve her personal struggles. Clearly objectified via this arc are Aibileen and Minny whose embodiment of objectified working-class black femininity is narratively prohibited from emerging as critical commentary on Skeeter's status as the upper-class white female protagonist. Consistent with Nakayama and Krizek's (1995) articulation of whiteness as a strategic rhetoric that functions protectively, this representational strategy safeguards Skeeter from acknowledging how her white privilege is contingent upon and necessitates Aibileen's and Minny's objectification. The film's use of motifs, defined as details that acquire significance in the plotline through repetition (Pramaggiore & Wallis, 2011), strengthens the interpretation of Skeeter as subject versus Aibileen and Minny as objects. For example, Skeeter often returns to a willow tree in her yard to remember the validation she received from Constantine as a young girl. Sitting together under the tree, Constantine reminds her of her beauty and potential despite not having been asked to a school dance. Later on, Skeeter returns to the same tree with Stuart (her soon to be first boyfriend) where he asks her out on a date, which symbolizes her growth and vindicates past romantic rejections. By comparison, fried chicken, a motif joined with Minny's character, symbolizes racist stereotypes and the relegation of black women to white kitchens.

Heightening the perceptibility of Skeeter as the “citizen of the center” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 293) is the film's resolute focus on her dream to become a writer. Aibileen and Minny arrive to the project fearful, suspicious, and invited by Skeeter. Moreover, the maids are fueled by their anger at racism in comparison with Skeeter being fueled by discontent and ambition as the perfect elixir for her emergence as a white heroine tinged with a radical (for their era) sense of race consciousness. Skeeter's cardinal status is effectively advanced by her position as the conduit through which Aibileen and Minny become known, albeit minimally, beyond their role as maids. For example, the first time we see Aibileen out of uniform she is hosting Skeeter for her interview. Leading up to the interview, the shrewd power of whiteness is conveyed albeit innocently masked as kindness. This occurs when Aibileen refers to Skeeter as “ma’am” and Skeeter replies with “You don’t have to call me ma’am. Not here” (Taylor et al., 2011).

Skeeter's comment must be read as more than kindness, an indication of her race consciousness, or interracial camaraderie. Rather, Skeeter's instruction enacts her white privilege since she sets the parameters for their interaction—even in Aibileen's home. Furthermore, the unnamed manifestation of Skeeter's white privilege keeps whiteness invisible, effectively “eluding analysis yet exerting influence over everyday life” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 293). Employing “the discursive power of whiteness” to police communication (Warren, 2009, p. 81), Skeeter's authorization also indicates the steadfast degree to which their relationship remains predicated upon white superiority and black inferiority—despite her “good” intentions. Lastly, Skeeter's “Not here,” implying that Aibileen should refer to her as “ma’am” everywhere else, indicates her unwillingness to publicly challenge racism. This, in turn, impedes her ability to fully humanize Aibileen and embody a genuinely progressive racial consciousness.

Troubling the interpretation of Skeeter as the foremost character is Aibileen's occasional voice-over as narrator, which outwardly centers her perspective and leads the audience to believe that we are engrossed in her lived experiences. However, returning to Skeeter as a conduit, it is important to realize that hearing Aibileen's voice is always contingent upon Skeeter's interest in writing her book entitled The Help. Therefore, Aibileen's voice is audible as a narrator only because her interest in sharing her experiences converges with Skeeter's interests in achieving her dream. Their “interest convergence” (Bell, 1980, p. 523), as one person with racialized power and the other without, illuminates the racialized complexity of their motivations to work together. While Skeeter certainly prioritizes her dreams without an expressed awareness of her white privilege, she is also sincerely troubled by manifestations of explicit racism. In comparison, Skeeter's book represents a means for Aibileen, joined by Minny and other maids, to subversively resist racism and they do so cognizant of the dangers at stake. However, amid the overlapping and complex motives among the women, what cannot be overlooked is the book's publication being ultimately dependent upon two white women: Skeeter and Miss Stein. This dependency for access to voice is exemplary of how whiteness strategically harvests levels of agency, power, and control for white women that are inaccessible to black women. According to Kendall (2013), white women can and do collude with white supremacy to secure status and access opportunity. Both Skeeter and Miss Stein do so, at minimum, via the absence of either woman overtly questioning the role of white privilege and black exploitation in their pursuit of literary success.

Absent consideration of whiteness’ strategic labor to convey “naturalized dominance” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 299), the interest convergence and interdependence between Skeeter and the black maids (most of whom are nameless in the film) appears comparable. Hence, Skeeter cannot write the book without the maids and the maids’ perspectives cannot be published without Skeeter. Yet a critical awareness of whiteness and racism necessitates the racialized consideration of risk and vulnerability, which reveals Skeeter as not only their conduit to voice, but also their lifeline since she protects the maids’ identities. As such Skeeter is positioned as a seemingly innocent, white savior. Elevated to savior status, Skeeter becomes emblematic of all that is “good” about whiteness without displaying the reflexivity and accountability that progressive racial consciousness calls for (e.g., Kendall, 2013; Marty, 1999). In this context, the “naturalized dominance” of whiteness “is not entirely hidden from view” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 299). Skeeter's whiteness as a site of power and protection is on full display in the film. However, because she fails to expressly problematize her access to white privilege, Skeeter's embodiment of whiteness ironically helps mask the racism her book labors to expose.

Exemplary of this failure, had Skeeter, Aibileen, and Minny been outed for authoring The Help, Skeeter reserved the (white, upper-class) option of being perceived as a white savior with “good” intentions opposed to being deemed traitorous. By comparison, the only discursive option for Aibileen and Minny under Jim Crow would have been that of defiant and dangerous “nigras” (Taylor et al., 2011). Equally significant are explicit references to civil rights history (e.g., the White Citizens Council, Freedom Riders, and the murders of Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy) that assist Skeeter's elevation to savior status. For example, when Skeeter is watching the news coverage of Evers’ murder with Jameso and Pascagoula (the Phelans’ “help”), Charlotte rushes in, turns off the television, and sharply says “Don’t encourage them like that … I won’t have it!” (Taylor et al., 2011). In response, Skeeter rebelliously walks away, marking her as the racially progressive white woman of the household in comparison with her racist mother. This repetitive contrast between Skeeter and Charlotte not only secures Skeeter at the center of the storyline as a “good” (i.e., progressive) white woman, but also locks what constitutes racism into only overt articulations (e.g., “us” versus “them” logics, racial epithets, “colored” seating, etc.). Limiting racism to the overt realm disregards progressive understandings of racism as both overt and covert (Essed, 1991; Projansky & Ono, 1999) and allows for whiteness to strategically create a “post-racial” illusion of racism as an outdated, politically incorrect, and individual pathology that self-declared “progressive” white women, like Skeeter, do not partake in—all of which shields the ongoing, systemic reproduction of whiteness as superior.

Skeeter as Stockett's Surrogate

Mirroring the centralization of Skeeter, Kathryn Stockett as the author of the novel received a great deal of congratulatory attention (e.g., Couric, 2011; Denby, 2011; Tauber, 2011) that rooted her white perspective at the center of conversations about “post-racialism,” rather than igniting progressive conversations about race, racism, and whiteness. In fairness, Stockett should be credited for her hard work and commended for having her novel turned into a successful film. However, her success as a white author injecting a white character at the center of black women's lives is worthy of critical attention; particularly since Skeeter functions as a surrogate for the native Mississippian in numerous ways. Stockett's articulation of her purpose in writing The Help (Stockett, 2009) clearly insinuates that she, like Skeeter, is a conduit through which her family's maid, Demetrie McLorn, can be known. In her epilogue entitled “Too Little, Too Late,” Stockett (2009) says:

I’m pretty sure I can say that no one in my family ever asked Demetrie what it felt like to be black in Mississippi, working for our white family. It never occurred to us to ask … I’ve spent years imagining what her answer would be. And that is why I wrote this book. (p. 530)

Living between the black and white worlds Stockett transports her audience to, I struggle deeply with her motivation for doing so. Thus, similarly to Skeeter, Stockett leverages her real and imagined access to blackness to realize her personal agency (e.g., she rectifies not having asked Demetrie about her experiences by creating them herself) and resolve her personal struggles (e.g., processing childhood memories of racism, being rejected as a writer, etc.).

Bolstering my interpretation of Skeeter as Stockett's surrogate (i.e., Stockett's pathway to securing the center) are stark similarities including their dreams of becoming writers, memories of a close relationship with their black maids, books entitled The Help, and decisions to move to New York from Mississippi in their 20s. Additionally, Stockett wrote her memories of Demetrie into Aibileen, Minny, and Constantine's characters. For instance, Aibileen validates Mae Mobley Leefolt and Constantine validates Skeeter similarly to how Stockett remembers being validated by Demetrie as a little girl (Stockett, 2009). Also Minny, like Demetrie, is famous for her cooking and married to “a mean, abusive drinker” (Stockett, 2009, p. 525), and Aibileen and Minny, like Demetrie, had colored bathrooms outside of the white homes they worked in (Couric, 2011). Perhaps most indicative of Stockett's desire to center herself, alongside the immortalization of her memories, is the appearance of her daughter Lila in the film as a young Skeeter.

The aforementioned instances of white imposition testify to how Stockett, from the peripheral of black women's lives, exercises her white privilege to reckon with being a benefactor of racism by speaking for black women. In this context, whiteness is strategically leveraged to confine black women into the white imaginary while masking the injurious nature of doing so. Stockett does so with her whiteness as power on full display, and “the recognition of this power is often masked” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 298) because Stockett, like Skeeter, fails to interrogate the implications of her white privilege. This is not to mark Stockett's memories of Demetrie, memorialized in the book and film, as false or trivial. Rather it is vital to underscore the political differences between a black maid speaking her truth versus the white woman she served speaking for her. Alcoff (1991) reminds us that “the practice of privileged persons speaking for or on behalf of less privileged persons has actually resulted … in increasing or reinforcing the oppression of the group spoken for” (p. 7). With this in mind, engaging a film supposedly about black womanhood, the following questions surface: Does Stockett's storyline capture a plausible depiction of black womanhood? Yes. Does Stockett publicly acknowledge that the plausibility confines black women to the white imagination as an anesthetic for white women's guilt? No. Does Stockett publicly recognize the dangers black women face when white women speak for black women? No.

This signals Stockett's failure, accompanied by the public's failure, to remember “that a speaker's location is epistemically salient” (Alcoff, 1991, p. 7). To be clear, Stockett commonly offers all of the dis/qualifiers that whiteness strategically draws upon to appear innocuous. For example, she makes assertions such as “I don’t presume to think that I know what it really felt like to be a black woman in Mississippi” (Stockett, 2009, p. 529) and, in reference to Demetrie, “it's obvious how little I knew about her … I never once wondered what she was thinking” (Tauber, 2011, p. 103) and “I would hope if she was alive today, she would see The Help as a thank-you” (Tauber, 2011, p. 103). Masking the presence of whiteness as a universalized means to strategically police the representation of people of color is Stockett's inability, on display in her comments above, to reflexively center her whiteness as a site of inquiry. To counter the absence that whiteness strategically facilitates, I want to know: Why does Stockett feel the need to ameliorate her guilt about how her family treated Demetrie? Why does Stockett turn toward her real and imagined access to black femininity for relief? Why does Stockett assume that had she asked Demetrie about her experiences that Demetrie would have felt safe and comfortable enough to freely respond?

Avoiding the pitfall of criminalizing Stockett, what makes her insertion of herself and her memories monumentally problematic does not enter the debate over whether or not a white woman should have written The Help (Stockett, 2009) and authorized a white man to direct and produce the screenplay. Rather, I take issue with Stockett's and Taylor's failure to advocate for the novel and film to be pedagogically understood for what they are: a white man's interpretation of a white woman's interpretation of black women's lived experiences. As the author and director, Stockett and Taylor instruct the audience to understand black women in accordance with their white perceptions. What is sacrificed via Stockett's and Taylor's choices is the rich and ambivalent complexity of racial histories, racial in/equality, and interracial coalitions. In essence, they whitewashed the more fulsome narrative in favor of one that renders 1960s Jim Crow Mississippi more innocent, comfortable, and palatable for white people like themselves. Furthermore, the representational strategies deployed in the novel and film invoke “the historically constituted and systematically exercised” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 302) power of whiteness without marking whiteness as oppressive which is peculiar given the narrative's purported “focus” on people of color and racism.

With regard to the centralization of whiteness channeled via Stockett, it is also important to mark her manipulation of whiteness as valuable property (Harris, 1995) that doubly functions as social capital (Bourdieu, 1997). More specifically Taylor, also from Mississippi, is Stockett's childhood friend. Their relationship is worthy of critical attention because, while permissible for friends to partner in business, understanding whiteness as strategic necessitates understanding business networks as racialized. Therefore, Stockett's choice to grant Taylor the screenplay rights is racialized as a business decision in which, once again, the “naturalized dominance” of whiteness “is not entirely hidden from view” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 299). Mindful of how whiteness strategically facilitates access and opportunity for white people, while its “social functions remain hidden from analysis” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 297), I aptly question whether or not Stockett realizes that her business decision was racialized. Likewise, I wonder if producers and directors of color had access to Stockett's social network to be considered, or if the opportunity was offered only to Taylor. According to DreamWorks Studios (2010), “Taylor and Stockett's longtime, trusting friendship formed the basis of the film's journey and along the way they added another friend, Jackson native Brunson Green.” Followed by, “And it was only natural that Taylor would take the project to Producer Chris Columbus as he had known him for some time” (DreamWorks Studios, 2010). Adding a visual element to how Stockett and Taylor's social networks racially influenced who chiefly produced and directed the film is a picture of Viola Davis (Aibileen) and Octavia Spencer (Minny). In the picture, they are posing with the 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Motion Picture flanked by four of the white men who produced and directed the film.³

Amplifying the exposure of strategic whiteness in The Help (Taylor et al., 2011), the next section demonstrates how the film's centralization of whiteness allows white female characters to repent for racism without liability for their white privilege. Read closely, these redemptive opportunities become visible as a façade of white apologia opposed to genuine atonement or progressive race consciousness. Rhetorically, apologia manifests as a self-defense strategy that “enables rhetors to defend their moral character against accusation and attack … as they deflect any recognition of wrongdoing or of the need for accountability” (Marty, 1999, p. 52; Ware & Linkugel, 1973). Additionally, apologia “allow[s] white rhetors to reject responsibility for racism and reassert their good moral standing” (Marty, 1999, p. 52). A close interrogation of Skeeter, Charlotte, and Hilly reveals how the film foregrounds whiteness and functions as a site of apologia and deliverance for racist white women.

White Women, Racism, Apologia, and Redemption

Skeeter

As the heroine of the film, Skeeter is depicted as eager to right wrongs but is never held accountable for her role in perpetuating the racialized injustice she unveils in her book. In effect, since Skeeter is the film's primary antiracist protagonist, this signals that “no representational strategy”—even an “antiracist” storyline that “centers” people of color—“is immune from the potential recuperation of white power” (Projansky & Ono, 1999, p. 152). During the opportunities for her white accountability to shine, the film instead turns toward Skeeter's exempted white savior status. For example, when Minny voices her suspicions about Skeeter's intentions, Minny quickly (in a matter of seconds) decides to interview too. Soon after, Minny, Aibileen, and Skeeter are shown laughing and cooking in Aibileen's kitchen. Quite symbolic of Aibileen and Minny's trust in Skeeter is their willingness to comically imitate white women and appear casual with their hair pinned and wrapped in Skeeter's company. Mindful of how whiteness operates strategically to shield its presence (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Projansky & Ono, 1999), such representations communicate the erasure of Skeeter's whiteness as a threat. Equally as troubling is The Help's (Taylor et al., 2011) message that three friends led by a white woman—opposed to a social movement led by people of color—can dispel racism.

Alongside the neutralizing blossom of their “remarkable sisterhood” (DreamWorks Studios, 2010), minor black characters also affirm that Skeeter has been pardoned from her role in Jim Crow racism. For example, Henry, the waiter at the diner, risks quietly passing on the message to Skeeter that she “best head on over to Miss Aibileen's house” (Taylor et al., 2011). When Skeeter arrives, she is met by several maids who are newly willing, following Yule Mae's violent arrest, to tell her their stories. In effect, each maid's willingness representationally exempts Skeeter from white racists and the danger of white supremacy and thus “reconstitute[s] a space for white dominance without calling explicit attention to this act” (Projansky & Ono, 1999, p. 152). Another instance exempting Skeeter and heightening her savior status is when she receives the same beholden gift as Aibileen from Aibileen and Minny's church. As Aibileen presents Skeeter with a copy of their book, she says “churches over two counties signed our books. All for you and me” (Taylor et al., 2011). Functioning as a filmic parallel that emphasizes their sameness (Pramaggiore & Wallis, 2011), Skeeter's signed copy also signifies approval and that her obligation to the maids has ended. This scene, ignorant of whiteness as a strategic force, appears commonsensical since the film is winding down and must end somewhere.

In opposition, a critical stance compels a return to interest convergence to discern that the end of Skeeter's obligation to the maids conveniently mirrors the fulfillment of her interests in getting published and departing for the Harper Row position in New York. Starkly unfulfilled are the interests of Aibileen and Minny who, like all of the maids who interviewed, will remain in Jackson at risk for extreme punishment. Moreover, the maids are without tangible indication of how racist circumstances have improved. For instance, the film itself questions the significance of their book in its parallels between Aibileen, Minny, and Minny's daughter Sugar. Early on we learn that Aibileen became a maid at 14 after dropping out of school to help pay bills. Echoing her own story Aibileen's voice-over explains, “Leroy … made Sugar quit school to help him with the bills” (Taylor et al., 2011) just before we watch Minny sternly advise Sugar, “No sass-mouthin’. I mean it” (Taylor et al., 2011). Exposing the cyclical strength of racism safeguarded by whiteness (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Projansky & Ono, 1999), these parallels serve as an indication that little to nothing has changed since the next generation of black women, represented via Sugar, is destined to serve as maids.⁴

Also representative of Skeeter's privileged, redemptive status is her choice between staying in Jackson or accepting the New York position. Via Miss Stein, the audience understands New York as far more progressive than the South; for example, she has her own office and staff and she uses “Negro” opposed to “colored.” When Skeeter decides to accept the position, I interpret her not as a white woman who has deconstructed her white privilege and is moving forward to combat racism but rather as someone who has been offered a means to escape her racist southern town after using the experiences of black women to launch her career. Before accepting the position, Skeeter feigns refusal with “I can’t just leave you two here when things are getting bad from the mess that I created” (Taylor et al., 2011). Yet once again, she is rescued from white accountability and reaffirmed as the “citizen of the center” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 293) when Aibileen and Minny quickly intervene. Aibileen says:

If bad things happen, ain’t nothing you can do about it. And now it's for a reason we can be proud of. I don’t mean to rub salt in your wound but you ain’t got a good life here in Jackson. (Taylor et al., 2011)

Followed by Minny who offers:

You ain’t got nothing left here but enemies in the Junior League. You done burned every bridge there is. And you ain’t never gonna get another man in this town … So don’t walk your white butt to New York, run it! Looky here Miss Skeeter, I’m gonna take care of Aibileen. And she's gonna take care of me. (Taylor et al., 2011)

Nodding in agreement and taking Skeeter's hand, Aibileen finalizes their definitive stance to ensure Skeeter's happy ending with, “Go find your life Miss Skeeter” (Taylor et al., 2011).

In this scene, with black people on a nearby porch signaling Skeeter's accepted presence in a black neighborhood, a critical interpretation highlights the manipulation of Aibileen and Minny as agents of strategic whiteness. In effect, Skeeter is let off the proverbial racist hook by two black women relegated to subservient positions and destined to continue to struggle against racism. This scene is strongly reminiscent of historical mammy caricatures (Anderson, 1997) alongside the contemporary “mammification” (Omolade, 1994, p. 54) of black women who, although no longer caged by legalized racism nor solely confined to white households, are still expected to defer to and support the interests of white women (Beauboeuf-Lafontant, 2009; Omolade, 1994). Watching Aibileen and Minny smile and nod approvingly to protect Skeeter's dreams, without a hint of concern for themselves, confirms that loyal mammification retains a stronghold in the white imagination of black womanhood and bonds the exhilaration of building a new life and chasing dreams to white womanhood. Exposing the representational strategies of whiteness “to renegotiate the centrality of white power and authority” (Projansky & Ono, 1999, p. 152) allows the audience to question why we are encouraged to root for Skeeter's bright future. Thus, if the film was genuinely concerned with Aibileen and Minny, the audience would be encouraged to root for the Civil Rights Movement, or at least wonder if Aibileen and Minny can safely remain in Jackson.

Overall, although Skeeter appears relieved from her responsibility to combat racism having published her book, I argue that she can be more accurately understood as having reproduced white supremacist exploitation. First, she benefitted from Aibileen's work experience to write the Miss Myrna column without publicly crediting Aibileen. Then, she published The Help without public accountability or lasting commitment to the everyday struggles of black maids in Jackson. In both instances, Skeeter personally and professionally benefits from white superiority and black inferiority without outward pause. To be fair, she does thank Aibileen and rightly divides her book advance among all of the women who interviewed, but her actions are concentrated at the micro level. This allows her to quietly repent for racism without facing the hazards of antiracist activism. Take for instance the grave sacrifices endured by white female civil rights activists Viola Liuzzo and Anne Braden. According to hooks (2013), the whitewashed representations of white femininity in The Help (Stockett, 2009; Taylor et al., 2011) “erase and deny the long and powerful history of the individual radical white women active in the civil rights struggle” (p. 68).

Charlotte

Another white female character afforded the opportunity to redeem her racism is Skeeter's mother Charlotte. More overtly recognizable as racist than Skeeter, there are several scenes in which Charlotte is cringeworthy. For instance, we see her physical revulsion when Skeeter, in response to Charlotte's homophobic inquiry about her marriage potential, says “Mother, I want to be with girls as much as you want to be with Jameso!” (Taylor et al., 2011). Also, when Skeeter has a date with Stuart, Charlotte chases her down their driveway to offer advice on etiquette. She screams “Don’t mope! Smile! And for heaven's sakes don’t sit like some squaw Indian!” (Taylor et al., 2011). Most offensive to Skeeter is when her mother explains why Constantine disappeared. Teeming with guilt, Charlotte admits having lied to Skeeter and then explains via a flashback why she fired Constantine.

During Charlotte's flashback, a troubling parallel between Skeeter and Rachael is communicated by the focus on Constantine's closet door as she packs her suitcase. Moving up the height of the door, the camera tracks the growth of both children etched over the years in pencil. Resting near the top, Constantine's aged hand regretfully pauses as it did on the screen just before Charlotte shut the Phelan's door in her face. Stripped of the anger that “‘mothering’ white children” (hooks, 2013, p. 63) often brought forth, this depiction dismisses the realness of race and racism by symbolizing Rachael and Skeeter as equal “daughters” on Constantine's door. This scene also leaves the audience with the impression that everyone's suffering is equivalent since Constantine, Skeeter, and Charlotte are all shown in emotional pain. Juxtaposed against Skeeter's cherished memories of Constantine, Charlotte's racist dismissal is exceptionally callous especially since Constantine died soon after being fired. In this scene, Skeeter is once again accentuated as racially progressive in comparison with her mother's cruel, overt racism.

The aforementioned scene also leverages Charlotte's bedridden desperation to resolve her strained relationship with Skeeter as an opportunity to atone for her racism. In the absence of Constantine, Skeeter needs motherly support as she navigates the life changes that position her as the main protagonist. Seizing this opportunity, Charlotte becomes a heartened protector of her daughter, which tacitly allows her to compensate for her racist maltreatment of Constantine and Skeeter's subsequent loss of a “motherly” maid. Embodying her desire to mother her daughter, Charlotte rescues Skeeter when Hilly arrives on their porch incensed by the potential of Skeeter's book to out her for having eaten Minny's shit. Charlotte says:

Is everything okay you two? Hilly, you’re a sweaty mess. Are you ill? Darling, oh, no husband wants to come home and see that [referencing her stress cankered lip]. You know Hilly, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you’ve been eating too much pie … Now you get your raggedy ass off my porch. (Taylor et al., 2011)

Visibly impressed, Skeeter follows her mother inside after Hilly leaves and Charlotte, for the first time, outwardly admires her daughter. Offering Skeeter her blessing to move to New York, she says “Courage sometimes skips a generation. Thank you for bringing it back to our family” (Taylor et al., 2011). Charlotte's compliment functions paradoxically: If indifferent to whiteness, the audience can easily applaud her for finally supporting her daughter. Yet, mindful of whiteness as strategic, Charlotte's defense and support of Skeeter recompenses for her racist dismissal of Constantine without her being accountable to or confronted by a single person of color.

Sustaining this redemptive reading is Skeeter's memory of Constantine, the foremost target of Charlotte's racism, rationalizing Charlotte's behavior. Encouraging Skeeter to accept her mother, Constantine says “she didn’t pick her life. It pick her” (Taylor et al., 2011). Read similarly to Aibileen and Minny's insistence that Skeeter must accept the New York position, this scene portrays another black woman being used as a communicative vehicle for strategic whiteness. Hence Charlotte's redemption, emblazoned by Skeeter's newly warm demeanor toward her, is eased by Constantine's lasting influence on Skeeter despite her being publicly humiliated and ousted from the Phelan's home. Furthermore, Charlotte also recuperates the virtuousness of white womanhood by protecting Skeeter from further pain (e.g., Hilly's rage and the absence of a mother figure) and ministering the fulfillment of Skeeter's dreams (e.g., encouraging her to go to New York). In effect, Charlotte's racism is forgiven, without an ode of reflexivity or a conscious nod toward white supremacy, because Skeeter's happiness is secured.

Hilly

Drawing upon the film's use of bathrooms and toilets as another motif, Hilly serves as a third example of a white woman delivered from her racist proclivities. Hilly also exemplifies how “whiteness attempts to elude critical attention by always remaining on our visual periphery” (Projansky & Ono, 1999, p. 156) because, like Charlotte, she is overtly racist and offers the audience opportunities to witness and decry racism without drawing critical attention to how whiteness systemically fuels racism. Unlike Charlotte, Hilly visibly enjoys the fruits of her cruelty. For example, explaining her refusal to use Elizabeth's bathroom because Aibileen uses it Hilly says, “It's just plain dangerous. They carry different diseases than we do” (Taylor et al., 2011). Embarrassed, Elizabeth then has a colored bathroom built outside that is hot and bug infested. Smugly satisfied, Hilly basks in Aibileen's discomfort when she asks “Are you enjoying your new bathroom … Nice to have your own, isn’t it Aibileen?” and purposefully waits for Aibileen's forced “Yes ma’am. And I thank you” (Taylor et al., 2011). Additional scenes where Hilly's malevolent racism surfaces are when she fires Minny for using the inside bathroom and when she watches Yule Mae's violent arrest from afar as a satisfied voyeur. Each instance offers an exemplar of how “Whiteness, stated or unstated … leaves one invoking … historically constituted and systematically exercised power relations” (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995, p. 302). Hilly's racism remains poignant up until the very end of the film when she punishes Aibileen for helping Skeeter.

This scene peaks just after Hilly falsely accuses Aibileen of stealing silver she lent to Elizabeth. When Elizabeth leaves the room, Hilly nastily says, “Maybe I can’t send you to jail for what you wrote, but I can send you for being a thief” (Taylor et al., 2011). Calling upon their insurance, Aibileen “talk[s] back” (hooks, 1989, p. 9) to Hilly and says “All you do is scare and lie to try and get what you want. You a godless woman. Ain’t you tired Miss Hilly? Ain’t you tired?” (Taylor et al., 2011) This confrontation reflects Hilly's redemptive opportunity, albeit less obvious than Skeeter's and Charlotte's opportunities. Hence, opposed to exercising her white privilege to annihilate Aibileen, Hilly emotionally crumbles and allows her to leave the Leefolt's. Through Aibileen, we are invited to read Hilly as a pathetically racist individual while she sobs conceivably in response to her depraved behavior being exposed. Reading this scene solely as empowering is tempting since Aibileen boldly confronts Hilly, yet doing so is complicated by understanding whiteness as a strategic force that is always invested in its own propriety (Projansky & Ono, 1999). Of importance is that Hilly, despite her tearful shame, maintains all of her racialized power and Aibileen's self-determination is literally (i.e., walking out of the house and not being jailed) and figuratively (i.e., taking her first steps toward her dreams) dependent upon Hilly letting her go. Moreover, a critical interpretation frames Hilly's actions as an investment in keeping her consumption of Minny's shit (i.e., blackness as a contaminant according to dominant ideologies of whiteness) a secret. Cognizant of the labor of whiteness to secure superiority on multiple fronts (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995; Projansky & Ono, 1999), even Hilly—the most repugnant racist in the film—has an admirable, albeit self-serving, final act when she lets Aibileen leave without calling the police.

Critiquing whiteness as strategic locates the redemption of Skeeter, Charlotte, and Hilly in the realm of white apologia, which discursively valorizes white culture and restores the virtue of white racists (Marty, 1999). Each woman's fulfilled opportunity to atone for racism beckons forgiveness for the pain each has inflicted upon people of color without explicit accountability toward whiteness, racism, or the people of color they have hurt. Voicing the film's decided “post-racial” shift away from accountability, actor Bryce Dallas Howard (Hilly) says, “It's not necessarily vilifying anyone, but rather vilifying certain mentalities and belief systems” (DreamWorks, 2010). Echoing Howard's stance, with an insinuation that black and white women were equally victimized in the Jim Crow South, is Taylor who, in response to public criticism, says, “People are being too critical of this film … [Stockett] wrote a book about four women that were victims of circumstances of their surroundings. The book is about courage and love and integrity, and talking to whom you consider to be your enemy and finding common ground” (Witherspoon, 2011). Directly contradicting their sentiments with regard to the cinematic reproduction of whiteness, Projansky and Ono (1999) assert:

Whiteness itself is not the central problem; the problem … is representations that successfully strategize a maintenance of privileged power and the concomitant marginalization and disempowerment of highly visible “others”—while seeming to do otherwise—hence recoding domination as a virtue. (p. 171)

Challenging the Power of Whiteness and “Post-racialism”

A focus on strategic whiteness situates The Help's (Taylor et al., 2011) cinematic public pedagogy firmly within the “Anti-Racist-White-Hero” (Madison, 1999, p. 399) genre of films that centralize and redeem whiteness via storylines, character development, and dialogue—despite their professed focus on people of color. Additionally, Stockett and Taylor's purposeful decisions not to explicitly challenge whiteness or racism⁵ situate the film as a perfect, and profitable, revisionary “post-racial” narrative. Working against the film's romanticism of white racial consciousness and interracial coalitions in the Jim Crow South, Branch (2011) importantly articulates that:

Domestic service for many Black women was a lifelong occupation that was physically demanding and equally, if not more, emotionally taxing … Whites made it clear to Black women that domestic service was their highest calling and that it was to be performed with humility and deference. They were to know their place and gladly occupy it. They were expected to hide their anxieties and frustrations about serving a White family while temporarily deserting their own families with a smile and a willingness to work. (p. 69)

This reality compels curiosity as to why the novel and film became so vastly popular when previous literary, scholarly, and filmic works addressing the lived experiences of black mammies and maids did not spark such frenzied white intrigue (e.g., Anderson, 1997; Branch, 2011; Childress, 1986; Clark-Lewis, Nelson, & Nelson, 1990; Neely, 2000; Sharpless, 2010; Tucker, 1988). Drawing attention to Obama's 2008 election and the timing of Stockett's national success in the wake of 60 rejection letters (Tauber, 2011), hooks (2013) offers a politicized explanation. She says:

Seen within the political culture and social backdrop of our time, wherein the greatest symbolic challenge to imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy has occurred (the placement of a biracial black male in the White House and his black wife and children) the publication of The Help can only be seen as a backlash, both against the movement to end racism and the feminist movement … had the book not been supported and fully backed by a conservative white-male-dominated publishing and advertising empire no one would have ever heard of this work. (hooks, 2013, p. 59)

Building upon hooks, I interpret the film as a congratulatory “post-racial” salute for white women who, like Stockett and Skeeter, are on the verge of progressive racial consciousness but never fully aware of racism, how their whiteness ensures its continuance, and the difference between being a savior versus an ally. These same white women tune closely into the argument that Stockett, via Skeeter, “helps” at least some black women as perhaps she has, but fail to serve as allies who expose whiteness and fail to advocate against institutionalized racism. Thus activism, like racism, “remains individualistic, not social and certainly not structural” (Projansky & Ono, 1999, p. 158). In essence, The Help (Stockett, 2009; Taylor et al., 2011) is about Stockett, Skeeter, and white women like them who crave to be “good” white women minus the grueling labor that being a racially progressive white woman requires.

Absent the blueprint of how whiteness strategically functions, The Help's (Stockett, 2009; Taylor et al., 2011) popular success appears innocent; merely an indication of creative genius. Yet the appeal for U.S. American society to be “post-racial” (Ono, 2010; Squires et al., 2010), coinciding with Obama's election/re-election, more complexly reveals the film as a mediated pacification of white guilt and reassurance of white superiority. More expressly, The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) “disavows history, overlaying it with an upbeat discourse about how things were never really that bad, are not so bad now, and are only getting better” (Ono, 2010, p. 227). As such, challenging The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) as a purveyor of “post-racial” public pedagogy is imperative because the film allows white people to remember an era of white cruelty more favorably, and forecasts a future where “[r]ace becomes an antiquated signifier that marks only how far the nation has come in redressing racial injustice and ignores how far we must go” (Rossing, 2012, p. 47).

The definitive moment where The Help's (Taylor et al., 2011) unremitting commitment to “post-racialism” became clear is when Aibileen leaves the Leefolt home after Hilly's accusation of theft. Walking down a paved street saturated with tall, green trees and sunlight, she says:

Mae Mobley was my last baby. In just ten minutes, the only life I knew was done. God says we need to love our enemies. It hard to do. But it can start by telling the truth. No one had ever asked me what it feel like to be me. Once I told the truth about that I felt free … My boy, Treelore, always said we going to have a writer in the family one day. I guess its gonna be me. (Taylor et al., 2011)

This final representation of Aibileen as discovering her liberation through the feats of white women (i.e., sharing her truths via Skeeter's book and getting fired by Hilly jointly lead to her feeling free) must be troubled. In short, this scene privileges whiteness as the means through which a black woman achieves empowerment and severely undermines the autonomy that Aibileen is depicted as having achieved. Amid this peaceable ending, we must ask: What is a black woman in her fifties making less than minimum wage, whose work history reflects only domestic labor, without Social Security benefits going to do for income? How is she going to realize her dream of becoming a writer to support herself in the Jim Crow South? Furthermore with regard to Minny, is it adequate to assume that she is satisfied with her permanent maid position at the Footes’ and her 14-year-old daughter working as a maid? Amid these critical questions, and innumerable others, I remain troubled by the mass celebration of the novel and film. Given their lack of transformative power, each signifies how far we have yet to go with regard to progressive racial consciousness, especially given how easily the masses ascribed to the “Obama-inspired optimism” (Teasley & Ikard, 2010, p. 413) beholden in both storylines. Of vast importance to assert is that The Help (Taylor et al., 2011) is by no means a film concerned with the pride and pain of black women.

Acknowledgments

The author offers sincere thanks to the reviewers and editors for their thoughtful and wise insight.

Notes

[1] Public pedagogy “refers to the education provided by popular culture; popular culture teaches audiences and participants through the ways it represents people and issues and the kinds of discourses it creates and disseminates” (Sandlin, 2007, p. 76).

[2] I place “post-racial” and “post-racialism” in quotation marks to highlight their contentious falsity in accordance with critical intercultural scholarship (Ono, 2010; Squires et al., 2010).

[3] Please see CBS (2012) for a link to the photo. Also, DreamWorks Studios (2010) lists Tate Taylor as the Director and Brunson Green, Chris Columbus and Michael Barnathan as Producers. The Executive Producers listed are Mark Radcliffe, Tate Taylor, L. Dean Jones Jr., Nate Berkus, Jennifer Blum, John Norris, Jeff Skoll, and Mohamed Mubarak Al Mazrouei. Using online resources and images, at least eight of the above appear to be white; however, I was not able to access and/or verify pictures of Jones, Blum, and Al Mazrouei.

[4] Additionally significant is the use of Aibileen's voice-over to position Leroy, a black male, solely at fault for Sugar's entry into the workforce without mention of Hilly's racist decision to fire Minny or the larger system of white supremacy that severely limits the income of black workers and their employment options.

[5] There are several examples of the purposeful choices that Stockett and Taylor make to avoid (i.e., whitewash) the realness of white supremacy and racism. Had Stockett or Taylor been invested in a racially progressive project, they could have deeply problematized the irony of white women entrusting their children to the same black women they degraded and humiliated from the perspectives of black maids rather than the safety of Skeeter's character. They also problematically relegated white men (e.g., Stuart, Robert Phelan [Skeeter's father], and William Holbrook [Hilly's husband]) to the peripheral of Southern racism which undermines the historical era the narrative attempts to speak to. Likewise, via several parallels between Aibileen and Minny and Minny and Celia, their characters seem to genuinely speak to sisterhood, but Stockett and Taylor instead forefront the “sisterhood” between Aibileen, Minny, and Skeeter. Their choice reeks of the profitability of “post-racialism” in that they cater to racially unconscious white women by fostering identification with Skeeter rather than the “colored” maids, “white trash” Celia (Taylor et al., 2011), or racist Hilly. Lastly, starkly absent is the sexual abuse that black maids endured in white households; representations of “the help” being threatened, beaten, and harassed; and discussions of what constitutes love between white children and their black female caretakers in a relationship always imbalanced by racialized power.