A friend alerted me to the August 29 NY Times Op-Ed about the movie “The Help,” from Patricia A. Turner, a professor of African-American Studies at Cal-Davis, titled, “Dangerous White Stereotypes”. Turner pointed out that most of the white female characters in the film are mean and callous, in addition to being racists. And in portraying these people as horrible individuals, the movie makes it easy for the audience to assume that these bad Southerners were racists. And thus allows the audience to make the assumption that good Southerners were not racists. According to Turner, this was not the case:
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. The White Citizens Councils, the thinking man’s Ku Klux Klan, were made up of white middle-class people, people whose company you would enjoy. An analogue can be seen in the way popular culture treats Germans up to and during World War II. Good people were never anti-Semites; only detestable people participated in Hitler’s cause.
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.
Fascinating point. One of the issues I struggle with is the issue of “American Jewish responsibility” (as Jeff Blankfort, a Jew, has put it) for the Israel lobby and for Israel’s activities. And I see Turner’s dynamic: I have spent my life among many of these “good people” (and I do mean it- they tend to be generally good and kind people) who intentionally or unintentionally foster the Occupation of Palestinians and oppression of others. It’s why I’ve repeatedly described Palestinian statelessness as an American Jewish achievement.
And while I know many saintlike Jews who have spent many hours trying to get these people to find large and small ways to get right on the issue, they don’t. They are cowed, and they’re swayed instead by the conservatives and fearful dividers in our community. And they regard my beliefs and those of my friend as naive and simplistic, and so they ignore us. As he writes, “These ‘good people’ passively or actively allow the present oppressive dynamics to continue, but they don’t realize that there are many, many more people, from all walks of life, who are viewing these events with objectivity and compassion for all peoples. If only this ‘silent majority’ of the traditional pro-Israel world would take small steps towards the truth and justice that is intrinsically in their hearts, and away from the extrinsic fear, then the end of the Occupation and the oppression of people within Israel and the OPT would arrive that much earlier.”
This is a complex issue, I know. The same argument re social consensus is made about Palestinian communities approving suicide bombers. Daniel Goldhagen’s book Hitler’s Willing Executioners ascribed Hitler’s crimes to the German people. And I find Turner’s argument slightly blanket. I want to believe that there were many white southerners who knew it was wrong and went along with it because they were afraid or sought social approval, etc. Yes, consensus; but a consensus framed by forces beyond us, or a few powerful folks. And that’s why I think the Jewish community will change, that it takes just a few sticks in the stream to make a logjam, and with judicious intervention the logs will break up…
