Angela Davis is interviewed in 2017 in Ava DuVernay’s Netflix documentary “13TH.”
As activists take to the streets nationwide to protest the murder of George Floyd, it’s long past time for white Americans to educate themselves about white privilege and systemic racism in America.
Watching “The Help” on Netflix is not the way to do that.
It was reported that the 2011 Tate Taylor film last week became the most-watched movie on Netflix. Their hearts might be in the right place, but well-meaning white people trying to learn about race relations shouldn’t be turning to a movie made by white filmmakers about white women in the South during the civil rights movement — and their African American maids. Even Bryce Dallas Howard said she doesn’t want people watching “The Help” right now, and she starred in it.
“The Help” is probably marginally better than “Green Book,” but both films are part of a long line of Hollywood films about African American issues that somehow manage to overlook or marginalize African Americans. The most egregious example to me was 1988’s “Mississippi Burning,” a revisionist drama that suggested that white FBI agents were on the front lines of the civil rights movement. J. Edgar Hoover would disagree with that one.
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