The Secret Life of Bees

I may have caused a bit of trouble at work. One of my colleagues, a woman of color, told me that she saw The Secret Life of Bees last weekend and that an older white woman spent the entire movie crying on her shoulder. I told her that the woman just wanted to know if she made honey with her sisters too. We all had a good laugh, but my co-worker went back and wrote a blog about it.

After a good start to the blog, describing the strong, prominent black actresses in the film, my co-worker started talking about how awful it was to have this woman single her out because she kind of (not really) looks like the women in the movie.

And let's get one thing straight: she's absolutely right. But now it's my job to make some racial theory palatable to the wealthy, older white women who are the members of my organization. (Our staff is very diverse, but I think it will still be hard to get this by them.) Samhita on Feministing talks about it in a post today, reminding me why this blog is important and that it should go up, and not necessarily in white-washed (pun intended) language.

I personally can't wait to tell these women that, despite their best intentions, some of their sentiments and "diversity" programs are, well, racist. (Though one member did tell me that, and I quote, "diversity means different things to different people." But she was using that to justify leaving authors of color off a reading list in favor of rich white women, so it looks like we have our work cut out for us.)

Of course the safe blog is likening the difficulty the Jennifer Hudson character has with voting to what's going on today, but this is definitely the more interesting of the two. We'll see what we can do. Might be time to break out the Patricia Hill Collins...

Wait, I DIDN'T KNOW PHC LIVED HERE!!!!! I kind of love her. Wait, did I know that? It's on the back of her books. Nevermind.

How would you phrase the blog?