1/11/2024 0 Comments Racial progress u.s. mintMaterial standards have in many ways improved. It is obviously true that many of the conditions of life for Black Americans have gotten better over time. Progress is seen as natural and inevitable-inescapable, like the laws of physics. The mythology of racial progress distorts our perceptions of reality perhaps more significantly, it absolves us of responsibility for changing that reality. Thinking this way won’t make the future better. This redemptive narrative not only smooths over the past but smooths over what is yet to come: It holds out the promise of an almost predestined, naturally occurring future that will be even more just and egalitarian. Many people asserted at the time that America had become a “postracial” society, or was at least getting close-maybe one more short escalator ride away. As if we’re riding a Whiggish escalator, the narrative of racial progress starts with slavery, ascends to the Civil War and the Emancipation Proclamation, speeds past segregation and Jim Crow to the victories of the civil-rights movement, and then drops us off in 2008 for Barack Obama’s election. When we think about the nation’s racial history, we often envision a linear path, one that, admittedly, begins in a shameful period but moves unerringly in a single direction-toward equality. It also influences the way racism is treated in popular culture. Broad acceptance of this trajectory underlies the way our leaders talk. Despite our tragic racial history, Americans generally believe that the country has made and continues to make steady progress toward racial equality. Since the nation’s founding, its prevailing cultural sensibility has been optimistic, future-oriented, sure of itself, and convinced of America’s inherent goodness. All of these strains, and others, are woven into a larger and enduring narrative-the mythology of racial progress. Sometimes it involves a willful ignorance. Sometimes it involves a desperate grasping for affirmation. One reality that the Help phenomenon makes us recognize is the enduring power of mythology when it comes to American racism. That the movie was newly available on Netflix does not explain everything. To ask what was going on here-why people started watching The Help at a moment of deep racial trauma-is to risk tumbling down a rabbit hole. But it has also been criticized as a sentimental and simplistic portrayal of racism-and redemption-amid the cruelties of Jim Crow. The 2011 film-which depicts Black servants working in affluent white households in 1960s Mississippi, and centers on a white female journalist-won acclaim in some quarters. Courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth photograph by James Wang.)į or two days in early June, as America was erupting in sustained protests over the killing of a Black man, George Floyd, by police in Minneapolis, the most watched movie on Netflix was The Help. Part 1 Part 2 (2016) by Lorna Simpson (© Lorna Simpson.
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