Book Review: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

I cannot tell you how long I waited to read this book. It was just sitting on my shelf collecting dust, and finally I just decided I was going to read it. I sat on the floor and thought, Oh maybe I’ll read a couple pages since I’m reading some other books right now. But more than a few minutes passed by, and I still hadn’t let go of the book. I found myself reading the book as I stood up, reading the book as I walked down the hall without trying to bump into anything, reading the book while sitting in bed. I took a break during one of my cello practice sessions, and I devoured this book the rest of the evening.

In this collection of essays Roxane Gay covers a myriad of topics related to feminism, race and media: the misogyny of “Blurred Lines” by Robin Thicke, the lack of racial diversity in Girls, how The Help reinforces stereotypes, and many other topics. Her essay on The Help stuck with me especially since I both read the book and saw the film adaptation and honestly wasn’t sure what to think about either. The essay, whose full title is “The Solace of Preparing Fried Foods and Other Quaint Remembrances from 1960s Mississippi: Thoughts on The Help” talks about Gay’s experience of seeing the movie in a theater where she was the only Black person watching the film while everyone else was an older white women. While everyone else loved the movie and cried because they thought it was touching, Gay cried because the film reinforced so many problematic long-held racist tropes. According to Gay, “every transgression, injustice and tragedy was exploited so that by the end of the movie it was like the director had ripped into my chest, torn my heart out, and jumped up and down on it until it became a flattened piece of worn-out muscle, cardiac jerky, if you will.” (Gay 214) Gay points out several problems with the film, particularly one scene where Minnie teaches a white character named Celia Foote to make fried chicken, and tells Celia that “frying chicken tend to make me feel better about life.” Gay explains that this is a problem especially because this movie was produced in this decade, so it’s easy to think that these racist tropes were so Gone with the Wind, Hattie McDaniels-era and that we’re long past that, but that scene showed that Hollywood is still perpetuating these racist tropes in movies.

Gay concludes her essay by explaining the deeper reason behind her frustration with The Help, that Kathryn Stockett, who is white, didn’t truly make a genuine effort when writing about her Black characters and instead just reinforced stereotypes and caricatures them. Honestly, I would need to read the book again to gain a deeper insight into Gay’s analysis of the book, but there’s definitely a lot of truth to be said about her essay. When watching the movie and reading the book, I wasn’t moved to tears or even really angry, partly because before reading the book and watching the movie I had read up on and talked with people about the controversy surrounding The Help, so I knew coming in reading it that it wasn’t going to be a super progressive book.

I actually wanted to know more about the controversy surrounding the film, so I looked up on Google “the help racist” and it came up with a really interesting article from June 2020 in Entertainment Weekly. In the article, Maureen Lee Lenker reports that Bryce Dallas Howard, who plays a racist white character in The Help named Hilly Holbrook, recommended anti-racist TV and film to watch besides The Help in response to the news that The Help was the most viewed movie on Netflix in the U.S. She said on social media that although she is appreciative to have worked with her cast members on this film, the film, at the end of the day, was written by a white woman and told from the perspective of white storytellers, and that there are much more accurate sources out there to educate ourselves about America’s history of racism. At the time of anti-racism protests last year, I didn’t know this, but apparently many people looked to The Help as a resource for educating themselves about racism and anti-Blackness. Many Black writers and activists spoke out against this on social media, alerting people to the fact that The Help is about a white woman who essentially speaks for the experiences of Black women who are perfectly capable of telling their own stories without relying on the aid of a white person to tell their stories for them. Yes, The Help takes place during a time of Jim Crow and anti-Blackness but at the end of the day, no matter how many accounts Skeeter writes down about the Black women’s experiences, she will never know what it’s like to deal with racism because she benefits from white privilege and moves around the world and sees the world from the perspective of a white woman. Howard recommended movies like I Am Not Your Negro, Selma and Malcolm X, and Just Mercy (all of which are really excellent films I highly recommend you watch.) The article also points out that Howard wasn’t the only cast member to make people aware of the drawbacks of The Help. In 2018, Viola Davis told The New York Times that she regretted acting in The Help, not because of the cast and crew, who she loved working with, but the storyline gave more voice to the white characters than it did to the Black characters. According to Davis:

“I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn’t the voices of maids that were heard. I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They’re my grandma. They’re my mom. And I know if you do a movie where the whole premise is, I want to know what it feels like to work for white people and to bring up children in 1963, I want to hear how you really feel about it. I never heard that in the course of the movie.”

“Viola Davis on What ‘The Help’ Got Wrong and How She Proves Herself”, Mekado Murphy, The New York Times, Sept. 11 2018

Overall, I really loved Gay’s book and the essays in it. I can’t wait to read more of her writing!

Bad Feminist: Essays. 2014. Roxane Gay. 320 pp.