Category Archives: Books

The Help: A Harmful Fairy Tale

Posted by Judith Katz on March 8, 2012 2 comments

The Help has certainly garnered its share of attention and awards. Many critics, including some highly respected reviewers, have unreservedly praised the film. The performances of Viola Davis and others mesmerized many moviegoers and are indeed outstanding. Some people have complained about the trite and oversimplified plot—that it is more fairy tale than history but these comments often get lost among the raves and award mentions.

 I agree that it is a fairy tale. More than that, it is a harmful fairy tale.

As in many movies with historical settings, it is easy to be seduced into thinking that the plot at least echoes the actual history.  That is what makes The Help harmful. For African Americans living in Mississippi and elsewhere in the South during the early 1960s, “history as it actually happened” was an unending sequence of terror and violence. Perceived—let alone actual—offenses against white people most often had disastrous and life-ending consequences. (From 1882 through 1968, Mississippi experienced the most lynchings of any state in the Union.)

Consider one of the film’s most important scenes. When Minny, a domestic worker, served up a pie full of excrement to the most vicious of the white women, she lost her job. If she actually had served up such a pie during that time, there is a very high probability that  she would have lost her life, family members would have lost theirs, or—at a minimum—she would have been “taught a lesson” more severe than job displacement.

In an era that produced the brutal assassinations of Medgar Evers (a Civil Rights activist in Mississippi, who was killed in 1963) and many others, are we so naïve as to believe that losing one’s job would be the ultimate penalty for offending a white employer in such a manner?  And while Medgar Evers’ death was mentioned in the film, it seems strange that its impact on the African American characters was largely ignored. The true story, of course, would not make an award-winning Hollywood movie, but instead an R-rated film full of lynchings, constant fear, and brutal beatings. That would be shameful as opposed to celebratory, and shameful doesn’t sell in Hollywood!

Also missing from the movie version of The Help (it was addressed in the book) is the rape of African American women by the “master” of the house. Why was that left out? In the film, the worst indignity involves the unwillingness of some white women to give their African American domestic workers—who cleaned for them, cooked for them, and cared for their children—permission to use their toilets. This is indeed a fairy tale version of what life was really like for those women.

In this context—with its pervasive fear, the constant threat of brutality, and the justified resentment it engendered—it is nearly inconceivable that African American women who worked as domestic workers in the early sixties would “rise up” to tell their stories to a white writer, even if it was someone they knew. They would have been putting their lives and their families in harm’s way. True, many brave African Americans did put their lives and families on the line to gain their civil rights (with the support of some white allies), and The Help does give us snapshots of the women’s fear of talking about their experiences. Ultimately, though, that fear—like most of the realities of that time—is downplayed.

Why does this matter? Because this false rewrite of history provides a false sense of what happened in the United States. By making the U.S. and Mississippi look better than they were at the time, the film joins a movement that is already too much in abundance: glossing over or erasing the true description of the plight of people who have been oppressed by systems that are still impacting millions today.

The movie’s conclusion leaves viewers content with the sense that the system of white privilege has been breached: that “the help” are the victors. As such, it obscures two facts that are critical for us to understand if we are to appreciate and advance the cause of dialogue about race. First, the struggle for civil rights went on far longer (indeed, it still goes on) and was far more perilous than the early 1960s as portrayed in The Help. Second, what The Help tells us is that we still live in a society that wants to underplay the role and impact of racism. Clearly, we have a long way to go.

Three Profound Books

Posted by Frederick Miller on July 24, 2007 None comments

Fred MillerOver the last 25 years there have been three books that have profoundly changed the way organizations operate, the way they engage people inside the organization and how they collaborate with the global community.

Kenneth H. Blanchard and Spencer Johnson in The One Minute Manager (1981) discussed the traits and behaviors of successful managers, which include talking to your people, establishing challenging, but attainable expectations and rewarding individuals when they achieve those expectations. The aspect we tried to introduce to that thinking was diversity. It was, and still is, important to recognize that the people with whom managers speak will not always look like them, act like them or even come from the same cultural background. Managers not only need to communicate with their people, but they also must recognize the diversity of these individuals and appreciate how that diversity can influence the interaction and the individual’s success.

Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman in In Search of Excellence (1982) redefined the characteristics of organizational excellence. Based on a study of some of America’s best-run companies, it established the basic principles that when implemented would almost guarantee a higher probability of success. The fundamental message I took from the book, though, was the concept of zero defects and achieving higher levels of performance. At the time quality and excellence, to American companies, meant “good, but with acceptable defects.” The book challenged that norm and insisted that excellence meant “zero defects,” even pointing to Japanese manufacturers who were achieving this goal as an example. The sea change caused by this book resulted in “zero defects” being the only measure of organizational quality and a new standard for operational performance excellence in organizations. They established a new operational performance bar for organizations.

A monumental shift in how we as humans will interact differently than we have in the past and how this will change the way we do business was predicted in 2006’s Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams. Knowledge is no longer exclusively internal and organizations that do not tap the global knowledge existing outside their four walls will not survive in the 21st century, according to the authors. In this new era of innovation the concepts of open-sourcing, mass collaboration and co-creation are inseparable and can establish every business as a global business. In the past, the giants of industry could make it difficult and expensive for a start-up to establish itself, essentially blocking competition. However, the Internet has flattened the world and has become the key tool of globalization. It has so decreased the price of entry for businesses establishing themselves in the global marketplace that every organization must now operate as if competitors are being born every day.

The messages in The One Minute Manager and In Search of Excellence are as relevant today as they were 25 years ago while the projections in Wikinomics are as revolutionary and groundbreaking as any I have seen. If you are part of an organization that is ready to learn about the necessary mindsets, skill sets and competencies that will prepare you for the demands of business in the 21st Century, then I encourage you to pick up a copy each of these books.