I finally pinpointed what exactly irritates me about The Help

I’m used to the magical Negro trope, so that’s not it. It was a sympathetic movie too.

What’s wrong with The Help is illustrated in this post over at Dear Author where Jaili wrote that she thought Cajuns were part black, and liked the stories because they were written as if the Cajun characters were real people, not minority tags and stereotypes.

It was almost all about sex where mixed race characters were concerned. Authors did used this to their Cajun characters as well. Such as describing Cajun characters – especially heroes – as tall, dark, exotic, and black-haired. Oh, and let’s not forget sensuality.

They however went further than with the usual mixed race crowd. While they occasionally referenced a history of discrimination and bigotry against Cajun people, they treated Cajun characters as everyday people with ordinary problems and needs. It had the kind of balance I liked. An acknowledgement of what those characters had to deal with while still leading ordinary lives.

That was how I came to believe Cajun people had black and white heritage. The moment I understood my understanding of ‘Cajun’ was wrong, my mind was so blown. It had also completely destroyed my almost only line of defence.

That’s it exactly. Stockett writes a bit about the black main characters in The Help’s past and tosses off a few words about their lives, but it is sparse in comparison to how she fills out the lives of Skeeter, her mother, and her friends. The colors are reserved for the white character’s inner lives. The black characters, while noble and sympathetic, exist mostly to support the white characters. and even the villain Hilly is a far richer character than the heroic Abilene as far as her interior life.

Real characters have fully drawn inner lives and interact with the people within their lives in an intimate way. Props only interact with the main characters. Real characters have complex motivations. Props are motivated by the real character’s needs and desires. Props rarely have color to their lives, romance, intimacy, excitement, inward confusion or other qualities of humanity that makes a real character. Props serve a few or one function as a foil for the real characters.

Apparently, Cajun people were real characters in romance. That should have been the dead giveaway to Jaili that Cajuns weren’t black if several American majority authors were writing Cajuns as real characters and real people having real romance.

This is one of the reasons why black readers want to read in the niche. They want to read about real characters who are black, not black people as props for the other real people.

The Help presents black people as props for white people’s lives, and it doesn’t draw the black characters as real people in their own right with intimacy and inner lives that have nothing to do with whites. The black actresses were very good props and emoted well in relation to their relationships with white people. We have little idea of their inner lives though. It’s as of they depended on the white characters for their reality.

Yeah, that’s what irritates me.

LINK