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Last week, I borrowed the book from a friend, read it, raged more. In the following months, I continued to see the trailer only now it was plastered all over the Internet and on television and the reprinted tie-in book version was heavily hyped, even climbing back to the top of the Amazon bestseller list because this is one of those books nearly everyone seems to love.
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By the end of the trailer, which contained all the familiar, reductive elements of a movie about the segregated South, I had worked myself into a nice, frothy rage. The moment I saw the first maid’s uniform grace the screen, I knew I was going to be upset. When I first saw the trailer for The Help several months ago I was not familiar with the book. History is important but sometimes the past renders me hopeless and helpless. I am troubled by how complacently we are willing to consume these often revisionist stories of this country’s complex, and painful racial history. More than that, though, I am troubled by how little has changed. I watch movies like Rosewood or The Help and realize that if I had been born to different parents, at a different time, I too could have been picking cotton or raising a white woman’s babies for less than minimum wage or enduring any number of intolerable circumstances far beyond my control. Watching historical movies about the black experience (or white interpretations of the black experience) have become nearly impossible for the same reason I hope I never read another slave narrative. If Rosewood demands a three-day window of voluntary segregation, The Help demands three weeks, maybe longer. The first time I saw Rosewood, I turned to my friend, and said, “I don’t want to see a white person for three days.” She said, “That’s not fair.” Fortunately, it was a Friday so I locked myself in my apartment and by Monday, I was mostly ready to reengage with the world. It’s all very distressing and the injustice of what happened in Rosewood is, at times, unbearable because it is based on a true story.
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There are some heartbreaking subplots but mostly the story hinges on a little white lie, so to speak. The angry mob destroys nearly every building, house, and structure in the town. The white men proceed to lose their minds, surrender to a mob mentality and create a lot of havoc, lynching an innocent black man and tormenting the townsfolk of Rosewood.
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With no other way to explain the marks on her body to her husband, she cries rape and when the townsmen ask her who has done this terrible thing, the white woman, predictably, shrieks, “It was a nigger,” her voice pitched in a way that makes your skin crawl. A married white woman in nearby Summer, having an affair, is beaten by her white lover. Rosewood, is a movie set in 1923, and tells the story of Rosewood, a deeply segregated, primarily black town in Florida. When my brothers and I have a particularly frustrating day rife with racial insensitivity, we’ll call and say, “Today is a Rosewood day.” Nothing more needs to be said.