There could be differences between the book and the movie. I have to say that the experience of not watching the movie was a remarkably similar to the experience of not reading the book.
After seeing five seconds of an ad for this movie, having known nothing about the movie or the book before, I didn't know anything about the plot but I knew it would be the target of a million liberal rants about how the movie portrays white people as the saviors of black people.
But the narrator is such a modest, humble savior of black people! Who her? She couldn't have done it without being inspired by their beautiful truthiness. Just no one else noticed how beautiful and noble all the black people are, so I guess that makes her special if you really force her to admit it.
and would love to believe that she'd have known better if she'd lived back in the 1960s.
I believe Micheal Berube has christened this particular tendency the Schindler Effect, which I always thought was kind of perfect.
I believe Micheal Berube has christened this particular tendency the Schindler Effect, which I always thought was kind of perfect.
That is spot on.
I think it should be called the Sam Beckett effect after the character in Quantum Leap.
(calling it th Schindler effect seems unfair, since Schinder was a real person that actually saved people)
Ack, I could have used the term Schindler effect in my class on Huck Finn and Divine command theory today if I had known about it.
I want to push back a little bit, although I also have neither read the book, or seen the movie. The existence of large scale historical injustices weren't uncontested, some people really were opposed to these things in the 1960s, some people did have really strong feelings on gay equality etc. I'm perfectly willing to believe that people with very marginalized left-wing beliefs now, would of had very marginalized left-wing beliefs then, ones that are now much more popular.
I didn't know anything about the plot but I knew it would be the target of a million liberal rants about how the movie portrays white people as the saviors of black people.
Maybe because the trope of white savior comes up so fucking often? I had several conversations about this movie with people who should know better. The arguments in favor of it all, to a one, boiled down to "But this is just one story! It's just one instance, it's not saying that's how it was in every case!"
The technical term for the wish-fulfillment character of hte beautiful author alter ego who does everything bravely, correclty, and beautifully in an exotic setting is the Mary Sue.
I disagree with 1. Not reading the book barely qualified as an experience. The experience of not watching the movie is that I can't entirely make sense of what all the bloggers and critics are arguing about for the last few weeks.
I don't think this makes much difference to Heebie's argument, but the author is forty something, not twenty something. So the book is set shortly before she was born.
Bob Somerby wrote about this the other day. It turns out that lots of actual black people really like this movie. What's a liberal to do?
I'm perfectly willing to believe that people with very marginalized left-wing beliefs now, would of had very marginalized left-wing beliefs then, ones that are now much more popular.
Fair enough, but this tendency goes well beyond the marginalized far left and is quite common among "moderate" center-left types.
Depends when you're talking about. By the early 1960s being generally pro-civil rights was a very mainstream position and respectable everywhere, except in the Deep South, where it wasn't respectable in roughly the same way that being in favor of gun control is today there (that is, you'd run into very strong opposition, even ostracism, but it wasn't unthinkable).* I think if you were strongly anti-civil rights in 1963 anywhere in the USA you deserve the harsh judgment of history.
Haven't read the book or seen the movie so I have no idea how relevant the above point is.
*A lot of debate over timing, of course, and about what it meant to be pro-civil rights in general in connection with actual black people moving into your actual neighborhood.
Maybe because the trope of white savior comes up so fucking often? I had several conversations about this movie with people who should know better. The arguments in favor of it all, to a one, boiled down to "But this is just one story! It's just one instance, it's not saying that's how it was in every case!"
And yet it may be that the trope of "the trope of white savior comes up so fucking often" comes up even more often. At this point the makers of this movie obviously knew exactly what backlash would happen and just decided to ignore the political-obsessive audience and make a movie that a lot of people would like.
17: I don't disagree. People radically underestimate the extent to which the common culture influences their moral beliefs.
I disagree with 1. Not reading the book barely qualified as an experience. The experience of not watching the movie is that I can't entirely make sense of what all the bloggers and critics are arguing about for the last few weeks.
Whereas I agree with 1, because I didn't even know there was a movie until just now.
Well, it's one thing to have the "correct" views, and quite another to behave courageously standing up for these views, when the hegemonic forces of society are lined up against you.
But I haven't read the book or seen the movie or even read an entire review of the movie, so this may not apply.
I just read the synopsis of the book on Wikipedia, which makes it seem even more amazingly Mary Sue-ish than I had heard. A white woman writes a book about how a white woman saved black people by writing a book about them!
18: My parents moved from the Brooklyn shtetl to a small town in East Texas for my father's first academic job in 1961. Typical anecdote:
At a faculty social event, some parents of young kids are chatting about school desegregation, which hadn't reached this county but was in the news. The "liberal" position among the college faculty was that school integration was a damn shame, because they would shut down the Negro school and all of the Negro teachers would lose their jobs. Being a teacher was the most prestigious and well-paid job available for Negroes, so it would hurt the community.
Allegedly my mother suggested that there would still be the same number of kids so they would need the same number of teachers, so the Negro teachers could move over to the other school, and that one of her favorite teachers in elementary school had been Negro. That was so far beyond the Overton Window that everyone recoiled in horror at the thought of a Negro techer for their own children. So someone changed the subject quickly and my parents resolved never to talk politics again in East Texas. They did not find five dollars, but did escape back North not long afterwards.
.
Yeah; wasn't the mainstream liberal position then to be concerned that MLK was moving too fast?
Sort of, but things changed fast, and the question was timing and tactics, not the propriety of segregation per se. See JFK introducing the civil rights bill of 1963. Again, it's clear that being pro-civil rights would have been deeply unpopular in Mississippi, but I don't think by that time you can really give a pass to pro-segregationists, unless you're willing to grant the same charity to e.g., Tea Partiers in Kentucky today. That is, it was a common and majority position, but not one to which a person opposed couldn't find support.
4, 10: I believe Micheal Berube has christened this particular tendency the Schindler Effect, which I always thought was kind of perfect.
He may have referred to it as that at some point, but in What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? he has it as the following:
>...most of my white students could not detach themselves from what I've come to call the Huckleberry Finn Fantasy; the seductive notion that if we were alive back then ... we would somehow, all by our lonesomes, come to the conclusion that we should save Jim and go to Hell.He then mentions Schindler as another example.
27> Hmm, Amanda Marcotte has him calling it the "Schindler Effect" in her review--which did come out before it was released, so maybe he used it in an earlier draft.
Plus, he totally gets into great digressions about literature, which I love. He also advances his theory on why it sucks to teach things like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, because of what he calls the Schindler Effect
24 -- We were also Yankees in Texas at the time. A shouting match broke out at my mother's 30th birthday party in 1964 -- maybe more of a growling match, really, but the growling was pretty menacing -- over whether decent folk could use particular terms for MLK.
We escaped too, some years later, but unfortunately to the Bay Area where my parents were (and remain) traumatized by the goddamn hippies . . .
Don't know how applicable it is to this book/movie, but the effect is certainly real. I'm sure if we were Arlo Guthrie or Phil Ochs we never would have allowed "faggot" and "dykes" to be recorded coming out of our mouths
30 -- sure, not trying to argue otherwise. But if you're trying to make the argument that something's excused by history you've got to be careful about the exact dates you're talking about. That line in Alice's Restaurant would have read pretty differently if it had been released in 1978, more so in 1988, and even more so in 1998.
Again, haven't read or seen The Help.
At this point the makers of this movie obviously knew exactly what backlash would happen and just decided to ignore the political-obsessive audience and make a movie that a lot of people would like that would make a lot of money.
If they didn't realize what they were doing, it's a shameful lack of awareness. And if they did, it's a cynical money grab.
The Schindler Effect isn't bad in that it cements progress that has been made in the past. People pick up from these narratives what they are supposed to believe then they believe it.
Auden is good on the Schindler Effect:
Fresh addenda are published every day
To the encyclopedia of the Way,
Linguistic notes and scientific explanations,
And texts for schools with modernised spelling and illustrations.
Now everyone knows the hero must choose the old horse,
Abstain from liquor and sexual intercourse,
And look out for a stranded fish to be kind to:
Now everyone thinks he could find, had he a mind to,
The way through the waste to the chapel in the rock
For a vision of the Triple Rainbow or the Astral Clock,
Forgetting his information comes mostly from married men
Who liked fishing and a flutter on the horses now and then.
And how reliable can any truth be that is got
By observing oneself and then just inserting a Not?
And, yet, in 1997 Bob Dylan still used "gay" to mean happy. Some folks are just timeless.
I think it's really weird to be frustrated that people identify more strongly with historical figures (fictional or not) that have similar moral beliefs to them, rather than ones that don't. That's just human nature.
Let's not slight cyncal money grabs too much. Some of us have mortgages.
I feel like the discussion in this thread has been conflating several different issues.
I think it's really weird to be frustrated that people identify more strongly with historical figures (fictional or not) that have similar moral beliefs to them, rather than ones that don't.
The Schindler Effect isn't bad in that it cements progress that has been made in the past. People pick up from these narratives what they are supposed to believe then they believe it.
Of course watching Schindler's List and identifying with Schindler is on balance a good thing (certainly better than the opposite).
The complaint is the touch of easy self-congratulation that tends to creep in. "Of course I would have been one of the 1 in 1,000,000 people that actually risked something to stop ".
Schindler is noteworthy because most people in similar circumstances just went along.
I don't think that the sort of moral education under discussion necessarily needs to consist of nothing but endless guilt mongering and self-flagellation either. But there should be some happy medium.
"risked something to stop (injustice X)".
I read the book and liked it a lot, perhaps because I didn't see skeeter as a saviour at all(I am a sucker for any work that features a lot of domestic detail about cleaning) The viola Davis character is far more of a saviour to the other maids by really helping them with their stories. Skeeter leaves town at the end, while ablene loses her job but is clearly set up as going to write real fiction--kind of a zora neale Hurston character. She seems more like the mary sue than anyone( i am but a maid, but have super deep inner thoughts and am about to become a great writer) I think the book and the movie are coming in for so much criticism a little bit because of who likes them and how thEy express it.
That said, the ultimate Schindler effect book is the beloved to kill a mockingbird.
You're laboring under a false consciousness, Miranda! They cynically grabbed your money.
I think the problem with the Huckleberry Finn Fantasy is that it is a denial of the existence of moral luck, specifically circumstantial moral luck.
People want to believe that they are good people because of Who They Are, but it is really just as likely a product of when and where they happened to be born, if it is true at all.
I have to say that the experience of not watching the movie was a remarkably similar to the experience of not reading the book.
In my case it's been strikingly different. I'd never heard of the book until the movie came out.
They cynically grabbed your money.
Oh right, I forgot option #3! "It's just a heartwarming story."
People want to believe that they are good people because of Who They Are, but it is really just as likely a product of when and where they happened to be born, if it is true at all.
I don't think this is a helpful way of making the intended distinction.
It's not as if the Who They Are can be held constant across the changes in time and space.
Personally I think the whole concept of "good people" and "bad people" is problematic.
I guess I wasn't paying attention in high school. When did Huck Finn become the great emancipator?
I suppose you could teach students that the lesson of Schindlers list and Huck Finn is that art can be effective at convincing you, that you too, would oppose the government and risk yourself to save innocents. But you shouldn't be fooled, it's not true. See all those guards at Abu Gharib, they probably saw Schindler's list in school, how much did it help them.
Thinking that "of course I would have stood against [bad thing in history]" seems almost appropriate for an adolescent. The trick as a teacher would be to use that sentiment to lead into the question of what they should be standing against today.
It's not as if the Who They Are can be held constant across the changes in time and space.
Right. The deepest thing one can say about the belief "If I were alive back then, I would have totally been one of the few poeple standing up for justice" is that it is so vague that it is impossible to evaluate.
But the underlying belief behind it is "I am incredibly specially special and not subject to the kinds of mistakes that bring down everyone else." That's a sentiment we can evaluate. It is very probably false.
50: I am incredibly special and I make the same kinds of mistakes as everyone else. It is really the little touches that count.
Should we be suspicious of people who feel morally superior to people who underestimate how hard it is to be truly morally superior to the herd?
If I were a white guy born 100 years ago in rural Georgia, I would have been a relatively friendly racist.
55: Fucking Apple really over reached with that one.
A person with completely different beliefs, family, and culture wouldn't be me in any important sense.
What if someone gradually replaced your beliefs, family, and culture one at a time with new ones as the old ones decayed?
I'm not pointing out an infinite loop, just the possibility of an inconsistency of standards. You see this all the time: someone claims that all human behavior is driven by status seeking while posing as an objective truth seeker, someone claims that cost benefit analysis is the best way for organizations to address problems without doing a cost benefit analysis to support this conclusion, someone decries useless moral posturing while engaging in something that looks suspiciously like useless moral posturing.
48 -- Yeah, but maybe the guy that turned them in saw/read Mockingbird. I'm more than willing to have 100 kids entertain the delusion if it ends up sticking to one.
49 ++
So, since we're musing on this, let me throw up something: seems interesting to me that the whole "I would have stood up against the holocaust/slavery/southern racism" moral genre is kinda a post WWII thing.
Before that you had historical heroes and villains, but not framed in quite those moralistic terms; the equivalent story was religiosity and ahistorical and was basically "I would have been one of the disciples, but not Judas and not Pilate."
not sure where I'm going with that, or even if it's right, but hey it's a blog.
I think it's important to keep in mind that Berube was talking about college students.
At a younger age I think that unreflectively identifying with Schindler or the abolitionists or whoever is a good thing and big part of one's moral development. Even if it is basically a hero fantasy, since hero fantasies are part of how we construct an image of who we would like to be.
But 20 is old enough to examine the fact that these are hero fantasies, and that there is actually no risk taken and no courage required to hold what are, here and now, totally respectable main stream beliefs.
It's also old enough to examine the possibility that maybe you wouldn't have been Schindler. Not in order to cynically conclude that we all suck, but to consider how hard swimming against the current really is.
Even if there's no other case to be made for it, being a German major in college certainly gets you to these questions pretty fast.
62: I thought there was a long history of teaching history as a series of moral examples.* I don't actually know the history of history teaching, but it seems to be something that modern (19th century and post-) history writing was reacting against.
*They may have been more complex moral examples than what we're discussing here.
Also, Huck Finn was not post-World War II, of course. But I'm also still not clear on how it fits in. I can see the argument, but there are much more moralistic ways you could write that story. For one thing, Huck could have been an actual abolitionist.
62 - What about "I would have been a Christian and not one of the Roman oppressors?" See Ben Hur, The Robe, etc.
The Help is definitely a Mary Sue story. There's even an afterward in which the author defensively claims it's not a Mary Sue story.
the problem with "Huck Finn" is not with the book itself; it's a historical novel, written well after the Civil War and set before, that's become the school text used to teach How We Grew Beyond Racism, and so that "how" turns out to be all about individual right feeling: if everybody had a good heart like Huck, no racism!
and when you suggest that maybe Huck himself was a racist? hoo boy, do they not like that.....
62: So, since we're musing on this, let me throw up something: seems interesting to me that the whole "I would have stood up against the holocaust/slavery/southern racism" moral genre is kinda a post WWII thing.
That's because prior to the 20th century the United States was ruled by an absolutely white supremacist political culture, North and South. That particular ideology then started a slow fade until Hitler really put the ideology in very bad smell indeed. (And then it still took awhile for segregation to go away. Of course, now that enough time has passed the usual suspects (Ann Coulter, etc.) are trying to buff up white supremacy (and mass murder) and make it look all shiny and new again. That they compulsively squawk out 'Hitler' while doing so is one of God's little jokes.)
13: The arguments in favor of it all, to a one, boiled down to "But this is just one story! It's just one instance, it's not saying that's how it was in every case!"
'Then where are the stories about the nice black kid romancing (consensually) the pretty white girl on the QT, followed up by the nice black kid getting lynched for his trouble?'
24: The "liberal" position among the college faculty was that school integration was a damn shame, because they would shut down the Negro school and all of the Negro teachers would lose their jobs. Being a teacher was the most prestigious and well-paid job available for Negroes, so it would hurt the community.
Hilariously, this turned out to be true! Because...
That was so far beyond the Overton Window that everyone recoiled in horror at the thought of a Negro techer for their own children.
Or a black doctor, nurse, lawyer, etc. And certainly white people were not going to patronize black businesses. So all the middle class black people more or less went out of business. (No, not an argument for keeping segregation; an argument that white people were amazingly dickish about the whole thing... and come to think of it, still are.)
max
['It's one thing to say 'systemic racism' and another to say, 'Ya know, there sure are a lot of old white people who still hate black people whether they'll admit it or not.']
Hopefully at some point white people will stop congratulating themselves for the civil rights movement and move on to dealing with some of the bad shit that's happened in the last 40 years.
Speaking of this sort of books/films, what I can't understand is people who have the arrogance to think that what the world needs is their unique take on the Holocaust.
After you've spotted that you probably wouldn't have had the courage (or the chutzpah) to be a Schindler, the next question to ask yourself is, what is it that you should be doing right now that you don't have the insight to realise would be the right thing to do, or which you know is right but don't have the courage to do.
The other thing that needs to be said is that, unlike in books and movies, people who go against convention for moral reasons don't get any thanks. They get beaten up or ostracised or thrown in jail. After all, it wouldn't be brave to do the right thing if there were no consequences.
I was on the London Underground a couple of years ago and a very big man in the carriage was harassing a woman, telling her how he was going to "stick her" and so on. I thought, maybe I could distract his attention from her, or at least make it clear I disapproved. So I stared into his face. And it worked! "What are you looking at," he said. And then he kicked my head in. Bootprints all over my face, and out £200 for a new pair of glasses, but mission accomplished, right?
Be the change you want to see in the world.
52: Should we be suspicious of people who feel morally superior to people who underestimate how hard it is to be truly morally superior to the herd?
Only in retrospect.
So what are the relatively unnoticed current attitudes that will be cringe-worthy in 2050?
79 to the thread in general, not 78.
62 - Also lives of the saints.
I totally Schindlered out on the lives of the saints in second grade. You wouldn't get me to renounce Jesus just by poking me in sensitive places with hot irons, or...would you?
79: I don't know, but if the vegans have their way, I'm in a shitload of trouble.
After you've spotted that you probably wouldn't have had the courage (or the chutzpah) to be a Schindler, the next question to ask yourself is, what is it that you should be doing right now that you don't have the insight to realise would be the right thing to do, or which you know is right but don't have the courage to do.
Exactly this.
One of the pretty immediate "tells" for me is if someone raving about a movie like The Help is is immediately resistant to the idea that there is anything that ought now to be done.
I've had versions of this conversation enough hundreds of times, in a low-key, nonjudgmental way with people I know somewhat to fairly well, to be confident that for many people, being considered "different" by their social circle is much more terrifying than being on the wrong side of history. Since I'm hardly immune from this myself, I've deliberately chosen to include a lot of activists in my social group.
I'm headed to work and can't find the link right now, but there is a terrific essay floating around online by a self-described "red-diaper baby" who was one of the few to resist the Milgram experiment. IIRC, his argument was that having had extensive practice questioning and resisting authority and mainstream opinion helped him tremendously in the Milgram situation.
81: "I, too, would have been as beloved of the birds of the air and the beasts of the forest as St. Francis, and would have gone around taming wolves and preaching to birds" is a pretty good template for a Mary Sue story, YA division. Stigmata/eating disorder metaphor for extra points.
N.B.: I think St. Francis was awesome. It's a shame he wasn't a Protestant. (A joke.)
a self-described "red-diaper baby"
You should really take the baby to the doctor before the rash gets that bad.
73
Or a black doctor, nurse, lawyer, etc. And certainly white people were not going to patronize black businesses. So all the middle class black people more or less went out of business. (No, not an argument for keeping segregation; an argument that white people were amazingly dickish about the whole thing... and come to think of it, still are.)
Why exactly is it white people's fault that given a choice many black people chose not to patronize black businesses?
79: By 2050, liberals will be crying out for laws to let illegal immigrants leave California and Bank of America will want to force them to stay in order to keep from going broke in another housing price collapse.
Another test for me is whether the author acknowledges any ownership of the moral choices she made. In the interviews I've read (both more than a year ago), the author was pretty resistant to the idea that she had made any kind of editorial choice by rendering the black characters' speech in dialect but not the whites', for example. Not very confidence-inspiring.
Organizers are using the movie as a entry point to talk about Domestic Workers Bill of Rights campaigns, though. A rather forgiving take on it from California , and a more distilled and pungent view from New York.
87: Aaaaaand Shearer tendentiously frames the issue as usual.
Come out to 52nd Street, James. I'll show you what it looks like 40 years after a black professional class is no longer forced by zoning and social control to be concentrated in a neighborhood with poor and working-class black people.
Residential diffusion has both positive and negative economic effects, but it's pretty clear that it's a lot harder to stay in business when only 12% of your potential market is willing to even consider patronizing you.
...it's a lot harder to stay in business when only 12% of your potential market is willing to even consider patronizing you.
I feel even more sorry for Tiffany's and Neiman Marcus and the like. It must be very hard to stay in business when less than 5% of the people can afford to patronize your business.
Somebody should provide a tax break to help luxury retailers stay in business.
it's a lot harder to stay in business when only 12% of your potential market is willing to even consider patronizing you.
The 12% figure understates the economic importance of Black customers to southern businesses. In some areas Blacks would have been at near parity with whites in population (though not in purchasing power). I conjecture that the bigger handicap to Black business was lack of access to capital: banks and vendors extended credit to white businesses on terms that were unavailable to Black-owned businesses--if those businesses could get credit at all. In other words, the Black merchant class was probably smaller than it should have been given the size of the natural market, even accounting for a near total white boycott.
73: Actually, many small Southern towns kept the Negro school open, and sold the White school to a private institution. Unintended consequences . . .
Although some black-owned businesses closed with desegregation, typically as part of the general trend of smaller busiensses being wiped out by larger stores as more people had cars, the black middle class and the black capitalist class have been growing consistently for the past 50 years. There are many, many more black doctors and nurses now than there were back in the day.
How many more Black-owned businesses there are now depends on what you count. It would be very difficult to count in a way that shows any decline. Is American Express a black-owned business? Merrill Lynch when Stan O'Neal was CEO? Did either of these companies lose business when the scary Black guys took over?
90: If the concern is the effects of desegregation, the appropriate quesiton isn't the number of stores on 52d Street, but the number of stores where African-Americans can comfortably shop. Fewer on one street, more in the city as a whole.
By the early 1960s being generally pro-civil rights was a very mainstream position and respectable everywhere, except in the Deep South, where it wasn't respectable in roughly the same way that being in favor of gun control is today there (that is, you'd run into very strong opposition, even ostracism, but it wasn't unthinkable).
I think this significantly understates the moral courage it took to openly favor civil rights in the early 1960's Deep South. To speak openly in favor of gun control in the contemporary South might make you unelectable to political office, but it's unlikely to provoke gratuitous police beatings or attempts on your life.
93: the bigger handicap to Black business was lack of access to capital
And a very analogous set of hurdles for farmers is why the Pigford settlement is not "reparations" as the hate speech spewing from FOXNews talking heads would have it, but rather a recognition of actual material harm.
I feel even more sorry for Tiffany's and Neiman Marcus and the like. It must be very hard to stay in business when less than 5% of the people can afford to patronize your business.
Indeed, this seems to be the driving force behind LL Bean's response to the 80-year black boycott of their products.
76: Duck next time? But, and I mean this sincerely, good on you for intervening.
I'm headed to work and can't find the link right now, but there is a terrific essay floating around online by a self-described "red-diaper baby" who was one of the few to resist the Milgram experiment. IIRC, his argument was that having had extensive practice questioning and resisting authority and mainstream opinion helped him tremendously in the Milgram situation.
If you manage to find a link, I'd be very interested in reading that.
94: Come on, a corporation isn't black-owned just because its CEO or chairman is black. If its stockholders are majority black, sure, I'd call that black-owned. The racial makeup of a company's employee population might be a good metric also (maybe weighted by salary?).
99: http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2004-jan-dimow.htm
Thanks. Is that definitely the same essay? The phrase "red-diaper baby" does not appear.