Examining Racial Relations: A Review of 'The Help'

The movie I chose is The Help, I have the DVD and watched it over the weekend. The reason I chose to review this movie is because It was an eye opener to the amount of abuse black people faced while working for white families. This movie discusses the relationship between whites and blacks during the Civil Rights era in 1962. I watched the movie in my room with the television my mother purchased in honor of my birthday. I feel very comfortable in my room, it’s a safe haven for me to escape from the outside world. Every time I watch a movie, I watch it in my room just for the fact that It’s is the only place in my house that is quiet and peaceful. My siblings did come in a few times however for the majority of the movie I was left alone. I lit

Minny Jackson, her best friend is the firecracker in the movie. Skeeter is a 23-year-old white woman with a college degree but from the get-go, you can tell she is different than other women during this time. Hilly Holbrook is the villain in the movie, who treats pretty much everyone she encounters badly. The other character’s bond over how harsh she treats colored people and she ends up being the central character in Skeeter’s book. Skeeter develops a project in which she documents the lives of maids in Mississippi, she recruits Aibileen who then suggests Minny. Minny Jackson has five children and a violent husband because she Is financially unstable you see her daughter leaving school at a young age to work as a maid alongside her. We are also introduced to additional characters, such as Celia Foote, a friendly but mysterious woman Minny later works for. She is rejected from southern society because she is married to Hilly’s ex-boyfriend, Johnny. She was raised poor, and learns a lot from Minny and treats her better than most other white

The setting could be called in the “deep South” at the time segregation was enforced. Although there are flashbacks relating to the Civil Rights Movement, most scenes take place in the white ladies’ homes who have hired black maids to clean and take care of their children. The white families lived in the nicest houses however the colored women lived on the other side of town in the harshest conditions with high crime