After we published Roxane Gay’s essay on the Help last week, it launched a major discussion not only about the shortcomings of the movie and the book, but on how pop culture negotiates and regenerates historical movements, tired slave narratives, the “burden of racism,” and more.
Critical opinions on the film have been abounding. This one provides some perspective that’s been absent from the dialogue—an actor’s opinion. Wendell Pierce saw the Help with his mother and called it, “a passive version of the terror of Jim Crow South,” noting that it undermined the experience that his mother had as a caretaker for a white family, which was notably harsher than what was depicted in the movie.
