Benjamin DeMott Source for Seminar Paper

DeMott, Benjamin. “Put on a Happy Face: Masking Differences between Blacks and Whites,” in Harper’s Magazine ed. (September) 1995.

In his article “Put on a Happy Face,” Benjamin DeMott explains the irrational logic by which America has ignored the modern racial inequalities:

Yesterday white people didn’t like black people, and accordingly suffered guilt, knowing that the dislike was racist and knowing also that as moral persons they would have to atone for their guilt. They would have to ante up for welfare and Head Start and halfway houses and free vaccine and summer jobs for school kids and graduate fellowships for promising scholars and craft apprenticeships and so on, endlessly. A considerable wasteful expense. But at length came the realization that by ending dislike or hatred it would be impossible to end guilt, which in turn meant an end to redress: no more wasteful ransom money.(DeMott 33)

The majority of the American public seems to be under the false impression that a simple change in the racial attitude toward black Americans will make up for centuries of civil repression and bondage, as well as a lack of modern economic, political and social opportunity and reform. In his article DeMott accusesHolywood of encouraging America’s assumptions and complacency about the status of blacks in America, through what he calls “black friend” movies such as White Men Can’t Jump and Die Hard in which the black and white protagonists are able to set aside any differences in racial equality for the greater good (or the plot of the movie) (DeMott 32). DeMott says, “I cannot tell the reader how much I would like to believe in this sunshine world”; yet this “sunshine world” cannot exist due to the historical and racial silences imposed on the American mind.

It is this problem that is at the forefront of the many issues with Taylor's "The Help" the recently acclaimed film concerning the social and emotional burdens faced by the maids of Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s. Based on the Katherine Stockett's novel, the film promotes a sense of the "sunshine world" that DeMott condemns. For instance, the majority of the plot is motivated by a young white woman's desire to "change things" or "set things right" as is stated in the script. Yet this storyline promotes the concept that only through the beneficiary actions of the young white woman can positive social change occur for the African American women in the film.