Books- Bad Feminist

9/3/15

I have to start by stating the obvious: I am a terrible blogger. All day I have ideas of blog posts running through my head, but beyond time being an issue, I also struggle with the lack of an answer or of hope. I have been reading a ton, and so I am going to start putting some book favorites into posts.

Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gaye because she is a bad-ass who is self-deprecating, funny, accessible and insightful, but she also has a knack for writing about issues without needing to come to any sort of answer. She has a terrific chapter on the kinds of friends women should be to each other and a number of other chapters on race. One chapter in particular is about The Help which I never saw or read.

She confesses that when she thinks about the white author, white screen-play writer and white producer, she thinks "How dare they?" (Gaye 216). She challenges herself to not dismiss the abilities of these white professionals, but there is a difference between being white and black in America and writing this difference is not easy.

A couple of years after The Help came out, our family had read an article called "Oscar loves a white savior" that was published in Salon Magazine. And a couple of weeks after, we went to 42, the movie about Jackie Robinson. As we walked out of the movie with Alex, her boyfriend, Julia and Solana, Alex turned to me and said, "another white savior movie." It took me a moment, and then I realized, she was right. Of course, the real problem is there are so few movies about black people that don't include the white hero. First, a movie acknowledges the plight of being black in America, and then, instead of focusing on what whites have done to get race relations to this spot, there is a white hero who comes to help the black person or persons pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

There is so much more that Gaye writes about The Help, Djano Unchained, 12 Years a Slave and more, and I think you should read her book. It is in the Barnes and Noble employee recommendations or challenge your thinking section.