August 2011 – Page 3

Not liking The Help that much

(I know Jill posted on the movie. I read the book and I have thoughts, which I was finally able to edit today.)

I haven’t seen the movie The Help, but I did read the book. I wasn’t impressed.

First, I am sick to the teeth of feel-good, revisionist fiction. I am really fed up with the Nice White Lady trope. And I am stunned that people read shit like this and think it shows any sort of political awareness by the author.

The main character Skeeter is a big old rebel because she want to a four-year-university! Without seeking an MRS degree! So there! HA! (And yes, I know that was kind of a big deal back then, trust me, but she had that option. The Black women she “helps” never did.)

The actual plot—that Skeeter writes a book about Black maids and what they see and hear at work—is also teeth gnashingly infuriating. Not that such a book is written—hell, no (though really, a White woman speaking for Black women is gross. It just is). It’s that the Black women in the story are passive, they are so fearful they need to be coaxed by the Nice White Lady. Apparently, there was no civil rights movement afoot in the South. Oh, they recognize MLK and his work, there is mention of actions in seemingly distant places, but the Black women and men of this town don’t seem to be involved. They are passive, they are helpless, they do nothing, and are so very grateful to the Nice White Lady once she shows them the One True Way.

It’s frustrating because in these narratives—written by privileged Whites—Black people are always passive. Things are done to them or for them, but they are never the agents of their own liberation. (And sorry, but no, telling the Nice White Lady about your shitty boss isn’t being an agent of your own liberation—not when Black women were actually organizing against Jim Crow, segregation, lynchings and violence, and the intimidation of Black voters.)

Jo Ann Robinson had been organizing against segregation and for the bus boycotts for years. And she did this not on her own, but as part of the Women’s Political Council. They were the first group to call for a bus boycott in the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

And she is not the only one.

Ella Baker. Fannie Lou Hamer. Septima Poinsette Clark. Vivian Malone Jones. Dorothy Height. They worked their asses off, they took punches (Fannie Lou Hamer was damn near beaten to death), they dodged bullets, some lost their homes and livelihoods, they endured harassment and threats, and they were out there facing the brutality of White people who did not want to share the power.

And the thing is, these women are not outliers. They are not unusual. Women were active in the struggle—even the nice Black maid who was always so sweet to you growing up, who was always so quiet and polite to your parents, was likely working her ass off on her off hours, knocking on doors, preparing for meetings (or cleaning up after them), strategizing about what to do next, giving aid to other activists who needed it. Even small actions could be perilous, but know this: a lot of people were taking them. This movement was not built on the actions of a few leaders or some Nice White People. They weren’t waiting for the Nice White Lady to come and free them, they were doing that themselves thankyouverymuch.

And it’s why it infuriates me when Whites, or wealthy people, or men, or whoever, want to barge in and lay down the law and tell a community What They Need or What is Best for You.

This could have been a good, meaty book if Skeeter had done this thinking she was great and smacked right up against civil rights organizing in her own town. It could have been a much more compelling story if it showed that the Nice White Lady realized she wasn’t that nice or good for doing this and showed some actual growth on her part (as opposed to the bohemian makeover and move to New York because she’s a spunky independent girl). It could have been much better if the maids were shown more accurately, as actually active in their own lives, as agents of their own freedom, with no need for a Nice White Lady to show them how to do it.

But it was not that book. It was a book that exocitized the Black women (they speak in dialect in the book and their accents are literally spelled out—the dialogue of the White southerners—who ALSO SPEAK IN A DIALECT BY THE WAY—is not given the same treatment). They are pure, Bible-reading demure Madonnas or they are short-tempered “sassy” and mouthy (dear God can we kill that particular word, please? I hate the word sassy. It is right up there with spunky as a patronizing “compliment”), but they are ultimately there to serve as tools for a story about the fake growth of the White main character.

This is just a gross combination of theft and denial—stealing someone’s history and denying it even existed.

Kansas Should Serve as a Warning to Virginia Women

This is a guest post by Dr. James Kenley.
These regulations, which demanded precise sizes for janitorial closets, no-variance room temperatures, and other ridiculous requirements, were purportedly established to protect the health and safety of women, but in truth had one and only one purpose: to shut down the three existing abortion facilities in the state.

Reflections

The New York Times ran this article on Sunday about, of all things, transgendered women. And while mocking the Grey Lady was my rainy day activity over at my blog–oh, Ross Douthat, keep chasing that rainbow!–I have to give them credit this time: they actually called trans women women, with nary a birth name to be seen.

That’s progress, I guess, or what passes for it in these times.

The article is about pumping, having liquid silicone injected into your body in order to enlarge things you want enlarged and contour the things that have the wrong contours. If you are lucky, you will get injected with medical-grade silicone by someone with medical training. If you are not, you’ll get industrial-grade silicone squirted into your flesh by someone who has seen it done a few times.

Pumping is one of those things you learn about when you are trans. Something that people will cluck over, if you’re on the right side of the tracks that day–because it is dangerous, and potentially disfiguring, and with money and the right doctor you can have all those things done nice and neat. It’s a class boundary, a lot of the time–because so many trans people aren’t on the right side of the tracks, have about as much hope of navigating a hostile medical system as being called up to read the lottery numbers on Channel 5, and despair of ever assembling the thousands of dollars at one time just about any procedure that has the modifier “trans” attached to it would cost. In a world of bad ideas and lousy options, what’s one more?

But that’s not what I want to talk about.

Strength in cupcakes

“Women are girly. Again,” she says. And apparently, that sucks.

Writing for the Huffington Post, Peg Aloi bemoans the death of the “tough gal,” as evidenced by blogs about cupcakes, gardening, Hello Kitty, and knitting. Women write about cuddly kitties. BUST is sponsoring a craft fair, holy shit! Feminism has not only come to an end but is actually regressing, and it’s all because of heirloom fucking tomatoes. Thanks, ladies.

It would appear that the world, as seen through Ms. Aloi’s TV, has become squishy, pink, and birthday cake-scented. (Oh, my God, how cool would a birthday cake world be, at least for a few hours?) The view from my window looks nothing like delicious baked goods, though, so I thought I’d share some of that view with Ms. Aloi.

Before we begin: Ms. Aloi, most of the examples of “tough gals” you provide hit somewhere around the mid- to late-’80s. Blogs, in the form we enjoy today, didn’t really come into popularity until the late ’90s. Women in the Age of Ripley still were knitting and baking cupcakes–they just weren’t blogging about it, because, y’know, no blogs.

Moving on:

Those “tough gal” examples cover a fairly vast range: leather-wearing rock rebels like Joan Jett and Courtney Love*; supernatural kickers of ass like Xena, Buffy, and Ellen Ripley**; iron-spirited fighters for right like Norma Rae and Erin Brockovich. You identify them as “strong, sexy, and take no crap.”

Step into my film school! The importance of casting in breaking open movie stereotypes

Did any of you catch Matt Zoller Seitz’s pieces on underrated actors and actresses? Given that the purpose of “top ten” lists is to make people argue about who should really be on the list and obviously there are great people not on the list who are underrated, I’m going to say that any list that makes the argument that Wendell Pierce should be in everything is a list I can be happy about. I was especially pleased to see a nice variety of ages among the actresses.

The brilliant Wenhwa Ts’ao taught me to cast actors (with a little help from Judith Weston), and she taught me to look at every actor who came into the room to audition and ask myself “What will kind of character will this actor create in my story?” vs. “Does this actor fit the idea of the character I had in my head?” First, because as a low-budget filmmaker, you have to be flexible and sometimes rewrite your story to take advantage of the talents and resources you have around you. Second, for creative reasons, the actor you want is the one who makes you re-imagine your film. He or she makes your film possible in a way that it wasn’t before, just by existing and walking into the room.

I wanted my first-year film students to understand what happens to a story when actual human beings inhabit your characters, and the way they can inspire storytelling. And I wanted to teach them how to look at headshots and what you might be able to tell from a headshot. So for the past few years I’ve done a small experiment with them.

It works like this: I bring in my giant file of head shots, which include actors of all races, sizes, shapes, ages, and experience levels. Each student picks a head shot from the stack and gets a few minutes to sit with the person’s face and then make up a little story about them. I wanted to know:

What kind of story or genre do you think of when you see this person?

What character are they playing in the story?

Is there a specific role or type that comes to mind?

What is their job?

Maybe describe an environment, or period, or style of dress that you associate with the person.

The students then show off their actor’s photo and pitch their stories to the class and then we talk about the results. I’ve run this experiment a few times, and the students are very excited and creative with stories/genres and have a lot of fun with it. “I picture him in a Western. He’s the lone cowboy who rides through town and gets caught up in the trouble that’s going on there.”

However, some troubling shit always occurs.

8/23, Never Forget.

OMG you guys did you feel it? There was a 5.8 earthquake in Virginia, which we felt as an earth-shaking 2.2 here in New York. WHERE WERE YOU? I was walking to the copy machine, it was pretty crazy. Apparently all of DC is evacuating their office buildings. Folks in my office have been told not to leave the building in case of aftershocks (which I imagine could be as high as 1.5). Shit is getting REAL.

East Coast you are so cute.

So I grew up in Seattle, which isn’t the most earthquake-prone zone in the world, but gets quakes every few years (usually pretty small ones). But Seattle is on a fault line, and there’s a city-wide understanding that some day, probably soon, we are all going to be obliterated by The Big One. We learn about it (and are duly terrified about it) in school. We have “earthquake drills” the same way that Americans used to have atomic bomb drills — get under your desk, hang onto the leg with one hand, protect your head with the other (alternate earthquake life-saving advice: Stand in a doorway). At the beginning of the year, we would all have to assemble “emergency kits” in case of a big quake — granola bars, a blanket, a flashlight, etc etc. My mom would also include pictures of our family and a hand-written letter in which she told me how much she loved me, and that she would probably be stuck at the hospital (she was a nurse) but that she or my dad were on their way, and that I should listen to my teachers and stay safe and try to find my sister and that everything was going to be ok and that she loved us very much.

She would cry at the kitchen table writing that letter anew every year, and would cry again when school let out and she had to re-read it while we ate the emergency-kit granola bars.

If there’s ever a real earthquake in New York, at least we know Twitter will be on it, since #earthquake is the #1 trending topic right now and everyone is sharing their stories of survival against all odds. And I’m sure that various fundamentalist groups will come out any minute to blame this quake on the abortionists, the lesbians and the feminists, so I apologize on behalf of all of us for interrupting your day with a slight tremor. I know, we really had it coming. I suspect this is actually God’s response to the tragic news that Will and Jada are getting divorced — the timing is just a little too close to be a coincidence, you know? — but what do I know, God works in mysterious ways. (Although to be real for a second, if a big earthquake actually does hit? We’re all going to die.)

But guys, let’s not make this about ourselves. A 2.2 quake is EXTREMELY SERIOUS, and I hear your bed even shook a little bit? But really, it’s Virginia that has it the worst. They actually felt the ground shake for, like, ten seconds. Which is basically like being in Japan for the tsunami. VIRGINIA I HOPE YOU ARE ALL OK AND SURVIVING AN EVENT IN WHICH NOTHING WAS DAMAGED AND NO ONE WAS INJURED. OUR PRAYERS ARE WITH YOU DURING THIS EXTREMELY DIFFICULT TIME.

Today, we are all Virginians.

Virginia Prisons Will Strengthen Policy Against Shackling Pregnant Inmates

This is a guest post by Katherine Greenier.
The DOC will now strengthen regulations that protect a pregnant inmate’s dignity and health, and the health and safety of her pregnancy. Ankle restraints or restraints that in any other way restrict the woman’s movement will not be used during transportation outside the prison, or during labor, delivery and post-partum recovery.

Love, Sex and Interracial Dating

Over at Racialicious, Latoya is hosting some amazing roundtable discussions about race and dating. You can find them all here. Our own Holly is featured in the Asian roundtables (parts one, two and three), and Lauren and I will both be contributing to the white roundtable, which I believe will go up at some point later today. Check ’em all out.

Reason No. 5,234,108 to Hate KBR

They are now seeking to recover the costs of defending rape and hostile work environment claims brought by Jamie Leigh Jones. They assert that her rape claim was frivolous, unreasonable, and groundless and that she brought the claims in bad faith.

Their proof? Essentially she did not act like we expect a rape victim to act, she’s a liar, and it was consensual (because a medical doctor said so!).

The fact that my tax dollars continue to fund this company makes me want to vomit.

Class war? Or one-sided attack?

If I don’t have it, why should you?

It’s the basis of the resentment I hear and see on the part of people who snarl about those unions (who get so! much!) those striking Verizon workers, those students on the J-1 visa, teachers, public service workers, and others. Instead of thinking, “Hey, that’s fucked. We should both make a living wage and be treated with dignity and respect by the places we work for, your fight is my fight,” a lot of people seem to think, “Why should you get this when I don’t?” or “You should be grateful for what you have.”

One thing that struck me about the foreign exchange student protest in Pennsylvania is that they were quite clear in their desire to not take jobs away from Americans. Our fight, as far as they were concerned, is their fight. They’re linked.

So when I hear lectures from yet another person who embraces Voluntary Simplicity (something I practice as well, by the way, though I am ambivalent about some aspects of it), I have to roll my eyes at the preaching–“You all are too materialistic. The people in many Global South nations are poor but happy.” And I think to myself, Really? Have you been to an EPZ? I mean, without the official minders flanking you? Have you actually bothered to talk to some of the people there, who are trying to unionize in the face of sometimes brutal repression?

I think sometimes it’s too easy to snark on people and roll our eyes when we perceive ourselves as having less. But the thing is–like with the Verizon workers–what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another, and a living wage is more than the bare bones minimum. These jobs are not easy, the people who do them work hard, and it should make us all livid when pundits declare that CEO’s make so much because they work hard (and imply that the striking workers–or any worker–isn’t working hard and that’s why they aren’t making about $6M a year in salary and bonuses). I mean, not for nothing, but the people who teach our kids work hard, the nurses and assistants who care for us in the hospital are working their tails off, the people who pick up our trash and vacuum our offices are not exactly slacking, and the people who ring up our sales and make our coffee do not have what I’d call cushy jobs.

What you get when you point this out is a boatload of contempt–These people could just start their own business, and then they’d be fine. They should work harder! They all have flatscreen TV’s and rip off the system–I know because my sister’s coworker’s cousin saw someone buy steak with their food stamps five years ago. I don’t have the pay they want/their benefits/their job protection, so why should they?

It’s another side to the “I got mine, so screw you,” attitude that poisons the atmosphere. These folks who complain so bitterly about these supposedly spoiled workers never bother looking at the C-level executives, who make millions (I am not exaggerating. Check out their proxy statements sometime–it is eye-opening.) and who get very generous exit packages when they’re fired. The pay of CEO’s went up 27% in 2010, compared to 2% for the average worker. And they aren’t taxed at a particularly high rate on their stock assets or stock sale profits, which are classed under capital gains taxes (which have been slashed since the Regan era). The ultra-wealthy aren’t paying nearly the percentage that any of us do, and asking that they start is making conservatives in the US hyperventilate. Oh, it’s fine for us to pay our share, but it’s horrible and awful to ask that someone who’s making six or seven figures to do the same.

It used to be that US citizens prided themselves on the fact that you could build a good life for yourself–work hard and save, and you could have a decent quality of life. But no more–our income disparity is growing here–and nothing good ever comes from such severe wealth inequality. You want to hear people singing The Internationale? Keep that shit up.

Now, I suppose that makes me a class warrior. Which is funny, since I’m seeing a class war, but it’s more of an all-out attack on poor, working-class, and even middle-class people. And if we want a more just and a more equitable society, we have to know that we cannot stop striving for that if we get a victory for ourselves. As long as working-class people are squeezed out of jobs and denied the right to collectively bargain, my life and my security is at risk. As long as poor people are shamed and vilified for being poor, we’re all at risk for being cast out the minute something catastrophic happens, we lose our money, and we make one “unwise” choice.