“Ideology is a representation of the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” – Althusser
by Marco McWilliams
What is required for an empire to maintain the subjugation, if not the compliance, of its darker subjects? The Imperials must manage their subject’s collective memories about, not only who they were, but who and where they politically are. Hegemony of narrative of both the subject and subjugator is an indispensable tool in the hands of the colonizer.
With the release of the film “The Help
The cultural danger in this film (and others like it) is that, via cinemagraphic nostalgia, they so often succeed at (re)inscribing ahistorical notions about racial inequality that, at best appear to be matters of mere social misfortune often at the hands single individuals, or “persons unknown”, and at worst completely obscure the visceral thrust of triune forces which bell hooks calls “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. The result of this? We enjoy a film’s romanticized representations of bad days gone by while being anesthetized into indifference toward the economic and social plight of our modern day “Help”.
Lest my disapproving criticism of the film stand alone, I join it with the chorus of other thinkers on these matters. Nelson George, filmmaker and author, wrote in the New York Times:
Or professor Rebecca Wanzo:
Yet, a more thorough critique is rendered in an open statement from the Association of Black Women Historians (ABWH). They speak to a problematic socio-aesthetic binary which emerges in the feature adaptation, and is patriarchal both in its asexual Mammy-gendering of Black women and its stereotypical portrayals of Black men and community.
And,
where most of the black male characters are depicted as drunkards, abusive, or absent. Such distorted images are misleading and do not represent the historical realities of black masculinity and manhood.”The film’s distortion of narrative, on its own, could stand as an eruption on the terrain of sound historiography on the period. But this tragedy, as suggested by the ABWH, is deepened by class cues which sketch “the most dangerous racists in 1960s Mississippi as a group of attractive, well dressed, society women, while ignoring the reign of terror perpetuated by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Council, limits racial injustice to individual acts of meanness.”
In 1935 a crucial piece of worker legislation, the National Labor Relations Act, was passed. Known as the “Wagner Act” after New York Sen. Robert Wagner, who in sponsoring the bill, reasoned that “Men versed in the tenets of freedom become restive when not allowed to be free.” The National Labor Relations Act constituted a seminal democratic moment in American labor and union organizing. Wagner’s bill, among other things, guaranteed protections for union organizing independent of company domination, the right to strike, boycott, and demonstrate against recalcitrant employers, and banned firing as a coercive tool to control union ranks.
The constellation of its lofty achievements notwithstanding, where the Wagner Act failed in its attempts to enhance the democratization of American labor was in its shameful exclusion of Domestic Workers. Southern senators, in an effort to safeguard their own economic greed, saw to it that no domestic worker could ever unionize under the legal indemnity of the Act. Political cooperation was contingent upon the prohibition of the domestic labor force, of which 90 percent were Black women in the South. Hegemony of dominant narratives create sinister silences around this issue via its omission. That domestic workers were left outside of the protective legal umbrella of the Wagner Act often goes under/unmentioned even in college lectures and text.
Possibilities of protecting the collective interest of our modern day “help” must be central in the overall struggle for workers rights, understanding that domestic labor, unlike other labor, is isolated work. At this writing only one state, New York, has passed a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. California’s state government is under increasing pressure from organized domestic laborers and their allies to follow suit. In the context of the film’s ahistorical misrepresentation of the politics of Black women’s domestic labor there are existing ways to support private home worker’s economic rights. By organizing you can press your state legislature to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights law.
Links to organizing:
“Naiveté is often and excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake.”
~Michel-Rolph Trouillot
Marco McWilliams is an educator, writer and Pan Africanist. He writes from Providence and will pursue a Ph.D. in 2012.
Alongside the Wagner Act of 1935, the Social Security Act was also passed. And, just as in Wagner, most women and “minorities” were excluded from social security benefits including unemployment insurance and old age pensions. Employment definitions in the Social Security Act reflected typical white male categories and patterns. Job categories that were not covered by the act included workers in agricultural labor, domestic service, government employees, and many teachers, nurses, hospital employees, librarians, and social workers. The Social Security Act also denied coverage to individuals who worked intermittently –”temps” in today’s parlance. These jobs were dominated by women and “minorities.” For example, women made up 90 percent of domestic labor in 1940 and two-thirds of all employed black women were in domestic service. Exclusions exempted nearly half of the entire working population. Nearly two-thirds of all African Americans in the labor force, 70 to 80 percent in some areas in the South, and just over half of all women employed were not covered by Social Security. At the time, the NAACP protested the Social Security Act, describing it as “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.”
Some have suggested that this discrimination resulted from the powerful position of Southern Democrats on two of the committees pivotal for the Act’s creation, the Senate Finance Committee and the House Ways and Means Committee. Southern congressmen supported Social Security as a means to bring needed relief to areas in the South that were especially hurt by the Great Depression but wished to avoid legislation which might interfere with the racial status quo in the South. The solution to this dilemma was to pass a bill that both included exclusions and granted authority to the states rather than the national government (such as the states’ power in Aid to Dependent Children). Others have argued that exclusions of job categories such as agriculture were frequently left out of new social security systems worldwide because of the administrative difficulties in covering these workers. In reality, however, in 1935 most Blacks were still in the south as sharecroppers and/or tenant farmers. That’s why social security excluded farm workers — and stil does.
Thank you for this well-written and well-thought out article. It certainly mirrors my sentiments as well as those of my family. Again thanks!
Thank you Heru Sa!
Once again, I am reminded of why I tend to shun mainstream films which attempt to tell stories about America’s long and sordid history of institutionalized and culturally sanctioned anti Black racism. Unlike movies about the Holocaust, movies about the oppression of Black people in the United States, or in other places such as South Africa, tend to omit and to sugar coat even the most horrific events in order not to offend White audiences. I have rarely seen a film even try to wrestle with the how the issue of how a nation founded by immigrants who were allegedly seeking freedom became as racist and oppressive for Blacks as it has been for most of its history. Without even seeing it, I am willing to bet that “The Help” either downplays or totally omits the issue of sexual assaults on Black women and girls who worked in the homes of Whites.
The Wagner and the Social Security Acts are yet two more examples of why President Obama’s dogged insistence that “bipartisanship” is a magical cure all for the short-comings of the American political system isn’t based on any reality or on any sense of historical perspective. Like the slavey and Black codes which preceded them, and the Jim Crow laws which existed along side of them, both acts owed their existence and their racist intent to “bipartisanship”.