August 2011
“The issues that face African-American women were not kind of Real Housewives of Jackson, Mississippi, Mean Girls behavior. That’s not what it was. It was rape. It was lynching. It was the burning of communities. What this movie does, in 2011, is it completes the work that happened and started in 1923 when the Daughters of the American Confederacy, along with Sen John Williams from Mississippi, found money in the federal budget to erect a granite statue of Mammy in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, which had just been dedicated in 1922. This is the same Senate that refused to pass the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. In other words, a Senate that allowed black men to be lynched without federal oversight, but had the time to pass a bill that said we could erect a statue to Mammy. Now this is not granite and it’s not on federal land, but it is the same notion that the fidelity of black women domestics is more important than the realities of the lives and the pain, the anguish, the rape, the lynching that they experienced. And for that reason, it’s not artistic, it’s ahistorical. And it’s deeply troubling.”
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Melissa Harris-Perry, talking about the messages in the new movie The Help on Lawrence O’Donnell’s show last night. Watch the full clip here. (via thepoliticalnotebook)
Da-Yum. And this moment right here is why sometimes, sometimes, I really love history. Because I had never heard of the statue of Mammy (gtfoh), but it puts in relief the imaginary feats, being incorrectly understood and portrayed as truth, being promulgated in this novel and other places as people attempt to whitewash the holy hell out of the racial terror faced by African Americans in the South and elsewhere.
(via femmenoire)
