So to continue my blog’s jarring juxtaposition of entirely unrelated posts (racial tensions one day, high-end dining the next, I mean, there’s a reason this thing is called The Dilettantista), I bring to you a statement from the actor Wendell Pierce, who is on HBO’s Treme.  He tweeted:  “The movie The Help was painful to watch.  This passive segregation lite was hurtful.”  He took his mother, who was once herself “the help,” to see the film and wrote in another tweet:  “[I was] watching the film in UptownNewOrleans to the sniffles of elderly white people while my 80year old mother was seething.”   You can read the rest of the statement here.

Oh and in case you forgot, here are my thoughts on The Help.

Lately the women I respect in my life, my mother, my grandmother, etc., have been telling me I should read The Help.  Put down all those long science-fiction and fantasy novels, they say, and get some “real world.”  Read The Help.  It is such a great book!  And I say I will but that I have a fairly long list of books in my Kindle waiting to be read, so I’ll get to it eventually.  But, really, I probably won’t.

Because, here’s the thing, I find the whole idea of The Help a little terrible and, well, racist.  And since nobody wants to hear me say or explain my feelings in a short phone call or a Skype conversation, I figured I’d put them all out on my blog, so any and all awkward conversations could be avoided in the future.

I currently work for a prominent African American artist who grew up in Greensboro during the 1960s.  She lived in the projects and witnessed the KKK murder several people at a civil rights rally right outside of her house.  Her mother was a maid.  When I mentioned to her that my mother told me that I should read The Help and if she had read it, she looked at my like I was crazy and said: “I don’t want to read that shit.”

I don’t want to read that shit.  That statement got me thinking.

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