I remember watching it on a little TV I used to keep by my bed, because the living room was twice as far from the my room as thee kitchen, and going back and forth twelve times a night was making my thighs chafe. At about one or so, CNN or FOX or some kind of news or whatever said Obama was projected to win; a cheshire smile spread across my face like butter across a big piece of ham, and a small palpitation of joy erupted within my heart. I got up and walked over to my mother's room, where she was sleeping. I gently shook her shoulder and said, "My guy won, you owe me five bucks".
Since then, the impact of the first half-black president has waned; nowadays the President can't even lengthen the lifespan of the citizenry without the Republicans literally taking the ball and going home. But there is one way B-Hussein has indelibly changed America: by making racism completely acceptable.
You remember how old people became a trend in film making recently? White superiority is another genre on the rise. What's worse, these racist pieces of shit are scooping up awards left and right. It's as if Hollywood only cared about making money and exploiting the white man's fear of black people for profit. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that these movies are praised as modern classics when they really should be razed as modern crappics. Get it? Did you get what I wrote?
SECRET LIFE OF BEES
Anyway, the real groans come from the trite portrayal of black women, namely that they are somehow more in touch with nature than white people. This movie screams out, "We have so much to learn from them! Clearly I'm not a racist, because I've acknowledged that!" Let's be frank: black people are not treefolk, here to drop wisdom on the white protagonist they were written solely to advise. This movie is in no way about a black family struggling to start a honey business, or their trials and tribulations living in the south in the sixties; it is about Dakota Fanning having the courage to hang out with black people, and what a radical, new thing that was. This film celebrates white ineptitude, and the stigma placed on blacks by white people osmosing themselves into black culture. If movies were people, this movie would be Robin Thicke; a white person taking a stab at black culture. Interpret that however you like.
RACISM RANK: 6/10
THE HELP
Clearly this move doesn't give a fuck about that last paragraph! I can't even say this movie is about black people dropping wisdom on the whites; it's about a white woman taking advantage of working class black women for her own personal gain. Emma Stone, not playing a high school student for once, is a journalist looking for her big break when she finds out her parents fired the black nanny she had been raised by. Go back and give that sentence a second lap. Notice I didn't say Emma Stone had any problems being raised by someone who was not her parent, nor did she have any problems with her parents practically owning a geriatric woman to do their housework. In fact, her only problem is that they let the old lady stop working. As part of her grieving process, Emma Stone pitches a book of stories about the help (her verbatim line, and one I've always found disturbing. These women you think so highly of are still just the help when you're talking to another white woman). Note that this isn't a non-profit book. Emma Stone isn't starting a charity or relief fund for older black women who have had to struggle in the south during the sixties. She's keeping all the cash for herself, splitting up only her advance check from the publisher amongst the women who, you know, wrote the book for her. We never even see the actual check from the publisher, either; Emma Stone could be shorting those ladies and we'd never even know.
I hate this movie. It portrays black women as fools to be taken advantage of by white women, and how this arrangement is the best for both parties. The one time a black woman shows ambition by taking revenge on her abusive matron, she is wracked with guilt for the rest of the film. Why? Justice was served. Shouldn't she be proud of herself by standing up to the woman who made her life hell? Oh, wait, black people are treefolk who feel only purity within themselves, and taking revenge would shatter the audience's acceptance of that fact. Silly me!
RACISM RANK: 8/10
THE BUTLER
This movie is a gigantic middle finger to black culture from start to finish. Forest Whitaker's character is how every white person sees black history: full of treefolk moments. But this movie goes above and beyond those tired old Uncle Remus stereotypes and into newer, much worse stereotypes. What's worse, Whitaker is told at every opportunity to abandon his black culture in favor of the more affluent white culture. He is told not to say the n-word as young man. "That's their word," explains an indoctrinated Uncle Tom in the first act. I laughed aloud when I heard that line. The cultural impact of hip-hop, the gangsta and g-funk movements, the careers of people like Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and the work they did together as N.W.A., possibly the greatest hip-hop group of the eighties, undone in a sentence fragment by this movie. Oy vey!
Then Forest Whitaker becomes a man and marries Oprah Winfrey. Not really a racist thing, but still a head scratcher: why would Forest Whitaker marry his grandma? Makes no sense. Anyway, they have kids, one of whom I thought was a terrific character, and one of whom is barely a character at all. Older son Louis works hard through high school, gets accepted by a prestigious HBC, and becomes involved in the civil rights movement of the early sixties (okay, we need to stop making movies about black people in the sixties; black people were culturally relevant for more than one decade). Meanwhile, Whitaker sits at home, watching the revolution on TV, ruminating aloud, "I don't know what to think of this Malcolm X character." That's yet another verbatim line, btdubs. One of the most influential civil rights leaders of all time, a brigadier for black Americans, and our hero just doesn't know what to think of him. Wow, what a role model. Also, that's the only time the film brings up Malcolm X, probably because most white people don't know much about black culture beyond Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, two people who, objectively, did little for black Americans. The movie doesn't even bother to bring up H. Rap Brown or Huey P. Newton, even though the Black Panthers are brought up, albeit for one scene and in a negative light.
As for the younger son, Charlie? He dies in Vietnam. That's it.
This movie is terrible. It promotes lackadaisicality amongst black people, saying that the greater reward is in waiting for white people to give you your reward. That's right black people, don't stand up for yourselves, don't demand anything from society as reparations for eighty-six years of slavery and inhumanity, just wait. Sit around, be quiet, and fucking wait for your revolution to come. To add one more piss stream to the dumpster fire that is this film, most of it isn't even true. For one, Charlie, a character who serves almost no purpose in the film other than staring at a woman's hairy armpits and dying, never existed. I'm guessing the producers were like six minutes short of their desired run time and said, "Fuck it, he'll have another kid." This movie blows
RACIST RANK: 10/10
So what have we gleaned from these three shit stains on the underpants of black culture? Namely that white people love throwing awards at movies starring black people that behave how they want them to. Did Jamie Foxx win anything for Django Unchained? Did Denzel win anything for American Gangster? Would you be surprised to hear that Secret Life of Bees won two people's choice awards? And how the hell did the shit-pie lady from the Help nab an Oscar? She only has one good scene, and the rest of the moving is her waxing remorseful about the awesome dump she took.
Even my white half is feeling guilty having dedicated an entire article to films that ruin black culture. To rectify that, I leave you with this.
