The Help: "You've Come a Long Way Baby" Or How a Slightly Liberal White Woman Discovers the Noblity of Black Maids.

I haven't seen the movie. I really don't want to see the movie.

I have read about the movie.

Don't get me wrong. It was terrific to see a black actress take home an Oscar last night. How can you not think that is a good thing?

Do you know who the first African American person male or female to get an Academy Award as star or supporting star was?

It was Hattie McDaniel and the movie was that total white wash of the Civil War, "Gone With the Wind".

The year was 1940 and Hattie McDaniel got that award for playing "Mammy", a maid.

Seventy-two years.

Seventy-two years. As a child I grew up with a combination of images of Black people that I saw in the movies. The horribly racist images from Tarzan movies and the nobility of actors like Sidney Poitier and the beautiful Dorothy Dandridge.

Mostly though Black people in films were in the back ground. Musicians playing in Jazz bands or the help.

I grew up during the Civil Rights Era. I remember the images I saw on television and in the magazines like "Life" and "Look". I remember the Movement, hell the Civil Rights Movement was part of the reason I became a left wing activist.

The reason I am left wing is because the white supporters of the Civil Rights movement were left wing, hell in the period between the 1930s and 1960 many were full fledged Communist Party members, something that has been whitewashed out of history.

Indeed "Nigger-Loving Commie" was a standard slur thrown at the white people who actually put their bodies on the line and marched with African American people during that turbulent era.

But showing the level of hatred and bigotry, the terrorist campaigns waged by the same sort of right wing assholes who make racist slurs about President Obama, his beautiful wife Michelle and his lovely children get erased from history.

Along with the bigotry that gave us Jim Crow Laws. The same bigotry that is behind the war the conservatives are presently waging against public education.

Seventy-two years between Hattie McDaniel getting an Oscar for playing the wise Black maid and Octavia Spencer getting an Oscar for playing a wise Black maid.

Come on people... We can do better than this, but first we have to be honest about racism just like we have to be honest about how misogyny handicaps women and how the Class War the rich have been waging on working people and the poor has destroyed our hopes for a just society with equality and dignity for all.