Professor Melissa Harris-Perry calls ‘The Help’ movie “ahistorical and deeply troubling”

The Help a new movie starring Viola Davis and Emma Stone hits theatres this week and it’s already creating a bit of controversy. Set in Mississippi in 1963, The Help is story of domestic workers but the revision of American history in the movie has caused a deep sense of frustration among historians, feminists, and anyone who knows that Mississippi in the 1960s wasn’t all gossip and giggles.

Yesterday, Tulane University Professor Melissa Harris-Perry went to see the movie The Help. She live-tweeted her impressions of the movie and last night on The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell she gave her review of the movie.

In the clip below Harris-Perry is able to eloquently break down why The Help is damaging in that it completely distorts American history and at worst rewrites it to whitewash just how horrible it really was for black women in the south at that time. Harris-Perry argues the movie makes it seem like “Real Housewives of Jackson, Mississippi” when in reality for black women, “it was rape, it was lynching, it was the burning of communities” that were the unspeakable realities they survived.

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