Everyone Stop Telling Me To See "The Help"

I don't want to see that movie.  I don't want to read the book.  I haven't been articulating why very well, I just get an icky feeling from the commercial with the worn-out types: Sassy Black Maid, Hoity-Toity White Upper Class Lady, Sympathetic White Woman Who Will Turn Out Okay.  The white-person-as-hero feel-good flick that glosses over a host of problems that one person ain't solving is not my genre, which is also why I will not waste two hours on The Blind Side, not that I need a reason beyond Sandra Bullock (though Crash was awesome, and imho her only watchable moment).

This op-ed makes a related point:

To suggest that bad people were racist implies that good people were not.

Jim Crow segregation survived long into the 20th century because it was kept alive by white Southerners with value systems and personalities we would applaud. It’s the fallacy of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a movie that never fails to move me but that advances a troubling falsehood: the notion that well-educated Christian whites were somehow victimized by white trash and forced to live within a social system that exploited and denigrated its black citizens, and that the privileged white upper class was somehow held hostage to these struggling individuals.

But that wasn’t the case...

...Cultures function and persist by consensus. In Jackson and other bastions of the Jim Crow South, the pervasive notion, among poor whites and rich, that blacks were unworthy of full citizenship was as unquestioned as the sanctity of church on Sunday. “The Help” tells a compelling and gripping story, but it fails to tell that one.