Telling other people's stories

I mentioned last week that I had managed to slip my hatred of racism into a lunchroom conversation about The Help. This is a battle I didn't pick wisely, as I've now discovered that everybody loves The Help. 'How couldn't you love it?', they asked, 'It's about racism, and racism is bad!' The worst part was the awkward looks that followed, and I felt they now imagined me riding around on horses, cutting holes out of pillowcases and calling myself the Grand Wizard.

I haven't read the Help or seen the movie, so perhaps am unqualified to comment here, but I understand the story is based in 1960s Mississippi, where a young white writer decides to reveal the truth about black domestic workers by writing a book exposing this. It includes such gems as the following, where our heroine describes her childhood friends:

Sometimes two girls from next door would come over to play with me, named Mary Nell and Mary Roan. They were so black I couldn't tell them apart and called them both Mary.

What a woman!

The Help has bafflingly won rave reviews from critics and fans alike, with one critic writing that the Help has its cake and eats it "and makes short work of the fried chicken, grits and sweet potato pie too" - charming! People I meet almost uniformly love it and gushingly recommend it to me, and my colleagues sometimes quote it in the way my friends and I used to say 'Orange Mocha Frappuccino!' when Zoolander first came out.

I don't get it. Before I could speak in the language of appropriation, I knew something was off about these movies and books. I knew there was something I didn't like about Crash, and something that rubbed me the wrong way about Dangerous Minds (more than the Nice White Lady trope - seriously, watch that video, it's gold). And now that I'm more well-read on the topic, I can generally enunciate my views on these kinds of Oscar-baiting movies (the Academy loves a good tale of white rescue) a little more clearly.

The problem with these books and movies is while claiming to be inspiring tales of fights against racism, they really achieve nothing more than replace one form of oppression with another, the oppression of silence. The oppressed - the help, the poor minority students, the homeless talented black footballer - are the vehicles for the tales of the white rescuers. We're not interested in hearing these people tell us their own stories, and we're not interested in stories where they rescue themselves from oppression, as is the case in basically all history. We want more stories of the bravery and kindness of wealthy privileged people who look like us.

It's something that's also been playing on my mind a lot recently. I've just finished reading Nickel and Dimed, journalist Barbara Ehreinreich's account of a few months she spent undercover trying to survive on the minimum wage. I was intrigued by the concept, but I couldn't quite place why I disliked the book so intensely. And then it clicked, yet again we are being fed the stories of the oppressed (the overworked and underpaid) by somebody who was doing this as an experiment. Ehrenreich constantly mentioned trying to educate her fellow workers, she drew on her own funds once or twice when things got tough and generally portrayed a sense of being above it all. And I lapped it up. I was desperate to read this book and even put my name down on the library waiting list, hoping to gain new insights. But why can't we hear this from the people who actually live this life? Why do we need a buffer, a guide, a translator for oppression and suffering? 

It's a hard one to grasp, because it seems so contrary. I know I felt like a card-carrying leftie as I proudly carried my expose on poverty home on the tram. These works do such a good job of pretending to be against the very thing they perpetrate. But isms today are a lot more subtle than the isms of days now past. There are no more laws and little segregation. Instead, the most insidious racism is the kind that is done under the guise of integration, or of anti-racism. The term 'One New Zealand' springs to mind. 

So I won't be reading the Help, or watching the Blind Side, or reading any more stories of weekend flings with poverty. I don't think I have many other options though, as there aren't too many people out there willing to fund stories where the oppressed speak for themselves. And Oprah can't keep carrying the baton alone forever...