The Butler: The Help and Social Inequality

by Christopher Barr

“America is war and you are on the other side.  How’s a black man ever going to get a fair trial with the enemy on the bench and in the jury box?  My life in white hands?  You Jake, that’s how.  You are my secret weapon because you are one of the bad guys.  You don’t mean to be but you are.  It’s how you was raised.  Nigger, negro, black, African-American, no matter how you see me, you see me different, you see me like that jury sees me, you are them.  Now throw out your points of law Jake.  If you was on that jury, what would it take to convince you to set me free?  That’s how you save my ass.  That’s how you save us both.”  - Samuel L. Jackson’s character, Carl Lee Hailey from the 1996 film A Time to Kill

The Butler is a film about a African American boy, who grew up on a cotton field in the southern part of the United States and went on to become a butler at the White House for several decades, serving under a number of presidents.  But it’s mainly about the Civil Rights Movement that was going on, predominately in the south but in most parts of the United States, between the years 1954-1968.  The focus of the movement was on noted legislation and organized efforts to abolish public and private acts of racial discrimination of African Americans and other disadvantaged groups.

The real célèbre for the civil rights movement was the senseless murder of 14 year old Emmett Till in 1955. An African American boy from Chicago visiting family in Mississippi, who was kidnapped, brutally beaten, shot and then dumped in a river for allegedly whistling at a white woman.  Two white men were arrested for the murder and later acquitted by an all-white jury.  Later that same year Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger at the front of the ‘colored section’on a public bus.  After her arrest for defying the southern custom of blacks sitting at the back of the bus, a bus boycott, led by Reverend Martin Luther King. Jr., lasted more than a year.  In 1963, about 200,000 people joined the March on Washington where Dr. King delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech, leading to President Johnson signing the Civil Right Act of 1964 which prohibits discrimination of all kinds, based on race, color, religion, or national origin.

The Butler culminated with the election of Barack Obama in 2008, solidifying an equal chance at a future for all races.  As I watched this film, I was horrified at how one group of people could treat another group of people.  The thing about racism is it’s grounded in such ignorance that it can’t be easily defined by those that practise it.  Psychologically speaking, there is no logic in it.  But yet groups like the Ku Klux Klan felt completely justified at harassing, ritualistically burning crosses and murdering African Americans.  Attitudes like this are something that people are taught and not born with.  Young children, before racist’s mommy and daddy begin to brainwash them into thinking they are a superior race, don’t discriminate.  Young children don’t care about race and who is supposed to be ‘better’.   The problem with racism is it’s birthed out of socio-political agendas that are powered by economics and elite capitalist.  It’s also birthed out of fear, the original fuelling force behind all that’s wrong with the world.

Religion is also responsible for limiting a person and groups ability to overcome their fear of death.  The granddaddy of fear, lingers in the minds of mostly every man and woman on this planet in spite of what race and group they are from.  Our narcissism powers our egos and convinces some of us that we are better than others; we are not going to die.  It deludes us into thinking we are superior, so we stay within groups that follow such delusional beliefs.

But white people are not the problem and black people are not the problem, the problem is our psychological inability to understand our brains beyond the capacity of our narcissism.  We need to see the world beyond our very limited understanding of it.  This is way Albert Einstein advocated using your imagination so often, when he spoke about intelligence and understanding the world and universe.  He knew like, Ludwig Wittgenstein, that ‘the limits of your language are the limits of your reality’. 

Why does this kind of thinking persist in a time in our history where many, more than ever, are of the belief that every person is born with inalienable rights.  The right to live their lives with liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Knowing that civil rights frees us from discrimination against all forms, whether it’s gender, religion, race, sexual orientation, or disability and it helps define that proclamation by ensuring a person’s physical integrity, safety and well being.  Yet thanks to a lack of education and a nurturing global understanding, there are many of us still living under medieval notions of superiority.

Films like The Help, 2011, educated its audience of a time in our history that discrimination was a daily practice by groups of people, for the most part, that seemed like they didn’t even know better.  They just did what they were told.   That film spoke of a time when the white people of the south inherited the tradition of whites ruling blacks.  It was just the way it was.  Stick with what you know mentalities we pervasive at this point.  Hopefully the film reminded people that this problem is one that still exists today.  Like The Butler, The Help wants us to get the picture and stop this way of thinking for the good of this generation and future generations.  Both films are quick to point out the absurdity, stupidity and danger of thinking this level of ignorance.  But I argue that this problem isn’t a racial one but rather a mentally narcissistic one.  Put frankly, we need to grow up and get over ourselves.  We need to actually learn from these embarrassingly stupid mistakes in our history and elevate human consciousness to new level of understanding.  We need to overcome our stereotypes by cutting down the mental borders that we and our environment have so solidly built up in our minds.  We need to be free from discrimination against our gender, race and religion, but more importantly, for the sake of the future of the human race, we must not define ourselves solely based on these differences.

“A vast family of human beings generally of common blood and language, always of common history, traditions and impulses, who are both voluntarily and involuntarily striving together for the accomplishment of certain more or less vividly conceived ideals of life.”  The civil rights activist and historian W.E.B. Du Bois said this while defining race.