Jen and I just got home from watching the star-studded movie The Butler:
The thing I’m struck most about the Civil Rights Movement is how recent it was, yet how my generation and the generations younger than mine have such limited consciousness of the things that went on, and how these things have shaped American culture.
In school, I remember learning about Martin Luther King Jr., the KKK, and Jim Crow “whites” and “colored” sections of restaurants, buses, and drinking fountains. But I never received an education (or don’t remember it) on how blacks were refused educational and job opportunities, and when they did have jobs, were grossly underpaid in comparison to their white co-workers. This is a huge educational oversight as it relates directly to race relations today (only a few decades later), white privileges that still exist, and the general social divide between blacks and whites.
I think of how I know the words to almost every Beatles song, yet I’m only now learning the surface level of how bad things were for black people prior to and during the Civil Right Movement (the same time the Beatles were rocking out), and how we all still need to be intentionally a part of the solution of racial reconciliation, from both sides of the fence, rather than furthering our culturally embedded division.
This is not an exhaustive list by any means, just a list of recent movies I’ve seen that I think can help people who grew up in white suburban America, and have been born into the privileges therein, to see that the experiences of our black brothers and sisters’ families were very different than ours. I found all of them to be excellent movies.
HBO’s Something The Lord Made – Set in the 1930’s – 1960’s, chronicles the life of Vivien Thomas, who ends up pioneering heart surgery, even though he was denied education and career advancement due to the color of his black skin.
42 – The life story of Jackie Robinson, the first black baseball player in Major League Baseball in 1947.
The Help – An aspiring author during the civil rights movement of the 1960s decides to write a book detailing the African-American maids’ point of view on the white families for which they work, and the hardships they go through on a daily basis.
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Oh I wondered if you would list The Help — I read the book and then learned more about the author and how the book was being received by many African Americans and couldn’t bring myself to support the movie.
As a parody poster says “The Help: White People Solve Racism.”
It has a whole host of issues in and of itself when you get right down to it, unfortunately.
Hi Cara, I haven’t heard the critiques of The Help and it’s been a while since I’ve seen it. Race is such a tricky issue to address because you can never cover every angle and yes, it is bad when the African American community doesn’t receive something well (sort of defeats the purpose of what you were trying to do)! What I’ve noticed as I attended an Understanding Racism workshop and then wrote some blog posts about the issue of race is that often the fear of not doing something perfectly when it comes to race prevents us from saying or doing anything at all and we just keep the status quo. I think there are both black and white people who dismiss anything regarding race if it isn’t 100% perfect, and these people dismantle a lot of positive efforts and opportunities for learning and growth. At the same time, critiques to racial reconciliation attempts are how we grow so as long as those critiques can be communicated with grace and patience, they can be very valuable. For what it’s worth, the reason I included The Help is that it shows with clarity the employment disparity of blacks vs. whites during the 60’s, which is something I never considered or was taught in school, as well as shows where many of the modern social divisions between blacks and whites stemmed from.