Is ‘the help’ comfortable with you?
I was over at a friend’s new house, and we were in the kitchen. So I asked if I could get a glass of water. She said, “Oh, let the nanny get it.” And she then called for the nanny.
The words struck me hard. She said “the nanny;” she didn’t mention her by name. Plus the nanny was off somewhere else in that gigantic house. And I was already in the kitchen.
Durgamom’s post on white feminism made me think about the unease I feel with ‘the help,’ especially when ‘the help’ is doing something that you could easily do yourself. The white woman pictured in the photograph seems disengaged from her child. She’s talking on a cell phone while the nanny pushes the stroller. So what exactly is the point of going out on an outing with your child?
But the other thing I recognized when I saw that picture is how “normal” it seems for people of color to be doing these jobs for white people. And I have realized this more and more because some of my friends are extremely well-off (even rich) and they have ‘help.’
They have brown gardeners and cooks and maids and nannies. And when I visit them, their brown ‘help’ is supposed to be helping me as well. Which I find distinctly uncomfortable. Because here I am, a brown person, having another (usually) brown person meet my needs.
Yet several of these friends are people of color. One friend has live-in help of the same ethnicity. Another has white help. And I realized that the sight of a white woman with a brown woman holding the white woman’s baby gives me very little pause at all, but the site of a white woman holding a brown woman’s brown baby creates some unease.
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October 28, 2007 at 2:14 am
christine
i’ve thought of this quite a bit. What i find most disturbing about it is how this came about- mammies nursing and raising the white children of a plantation or home, doing all the things a mother does and still be a “mammy”, n-, treated like a beast not only by the mother who was seemingly too delicate to do the hard and deeply intimate work of mothering, but by the children once they were grown enough to utter the words ‘gal’ and ‘n-’.
i see today’s brown and black “nannies” as modern day mammies. It is such a dichotomous and disturbing system of operation. It seems obvious to me.
October 28, 2007 at 8:58 pm
Wendi Muse
wow, i can definitely identify with this post. i went to a private all girls’ school (for middle and high school) and was the only black girl in my grade. whenever there were holiday parties at my wealthy acquaintances’ grand estates, the only other brown faces besides my own would be those of the maids. white parents who did not know me sometimes would ask i was “[insert random maid's name here] daughter”…a w k w a r d.
my mother, though invited, refused to go to any of these affairs because she knew she would be too uncomfortable for words…
it’s sad.
in situations when i am at a home where the homeowner has “help,” i still do things on my own. i can’t handle having another woman of color, who could easily be my aunt, mother, or grandmother, looking after me hand and foot.
October 28, 2007 at 8:59 pm
Wendi Muse
and even with white help, i would feel uncomfortable. i just think it makes it extra uncomfortable when the help and i are the same race.