narratives

Like many who care about racial justice – especially those of us who write about pop culture – one of my inclinations is to recommend movies and television shows as educational tools or emotional salves for a given moment. But while many of the lists I saw from Black folks feature the work of Spike Lee and Ava DuVernay, the 2011 white savior film The Help also started trending on Twitter. Based on a novel by Kathryn Stockett, The Help lives in a category of film alongside Green Book, Crash, and Driving Miss Daisy. These movies exist to comfort white…