Actress Viola Davis, who received an Oscar nomination for her role as a black maid who worked for a white family in the 1960s in the 2011 film "The Help" criticized the movie in Vanity Fair.
"There's a part of me that feels like I betrayed myself, and my people, because I was in a movie that wasn't ready to [tell the whole truth]," Davis said, adding the film was "created in the filter and the cesspool of systemic racism."
She said the narrative of the movie was focused on the white characters and not the black ones, explaining "Not a lot of narratives are also invested in our humanity. They're invested in the idea of what it means to be black, but . . . it's catering to the white audience. The white audience at the most can sit and get an academic lesson into how we are. Then they leave the movie theater and they talk about what it meant. They're not moved by who we were."
Davis first talked about her problems with the film two years ago, telling The New York Times:
"I just felt that at the end of the day that it wasn't the voices of the maids that were heard. I know Aibileen. I know Minny. They're my grandma. They're my mom. And I know that 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."
Brian Freeman ✉
Brian Freeman, a Newsmax writer based in Israel, has more than three decades writing and editing about culture and politics for newspapers, online and television.
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