Personal Reflections on Lee Daniels' The Butler

Personal Reflections on Lee Daniels’ The Butler

My wife and I saw Lee Daniels’ greatly anticipated movie, The Butler, during its opening weekend.  Starring Best Actor Oscar winning actor, Forest Whitaker, and Oprah Winfrey, The Butler chronicles simultaneously the individual experience of Cecil Gaines and the collective African American struggle for civil rights and justice from legally sanctioned segregation in the American South through the years of the Reagan Administration.  Specifically, the movie centers upon Gaines experience as a butler to the President of the United States from Eisenhower through Reagan.  As he told in his interview for the job, “The White House has no tolerance for politics,” Gaines directly observes how Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Reagan handle America’s enduring race problem.  Gaines’ initial training in service began after “The Missus” of the Mississippi cotton where he grew up decides to make him a “house nigger” as compensation for her son’s cold blooded murder of Gaines’ father for confronting the her son for raping Gaines’ mother in broad daylight.  Gaines is told to serve and wait on the White family “as if the room is empty to you.”  Upon his arrival at the White House, the chief butler reinforces this instruction. Gaines listens to primary decision-making conversations directly affecting his life and the lives of his fellow thirty million African Americans but it is as he is invisible.  The Butler offers viewers an eerie experience of witnessing the triumphs and tragedies of the interplay between Presidential power, Congressional action, Southern resistance, Civil Rights leaders and protesters and the Black Power Movement through the lenses of an essentially invisible man. 

Personally, I am very leery of Hollywood’s newfound interest in the profitability of telling the story of the African American struggle for freedom, justice and equality with excessive cinematic poetic license designed to make unrequited historical horrors palatable to an uninformed audience.  Consistent with this burgeoning genre of marketable “Black” movies that are acceptable to wider audiences, The Butler glosses over the unparalleled revulsion of lynching and the daily incredulous reality that an African American could lose his life at the hands of any White person for any “reason” and without adjudication and due process of law.  As a child growing up in Sumter, South Carolina in the 1970s and 1980s, I recall passing a house of mourning in “the Black neighborhood” one Sunday morning on the way to church.  There, I would learn that a Black father and future grandfather had been killed by a White man on the previous evening as a result of a questionable gambling game.  They drew pistols and the White man allegedly fired first in self-defense; quite possibly, he did.  However, his words solely sufficed to eliminate any further investigation by law enforcement.  Less than twelve hours after the incident and the death of the Black man, the White man walked the streets freely.  He was observed buying sodas for a few Black children at an ABC store with his winnings from the previous night.  To this day, he has not been arraigned yet alone indicted, tried, convicted or acquitted for firing a fatal gunshot that took the life of a husband, father and provider of a working class family whose children struggle financially for the balance of their childhood. 

The recent acquittal of George Zimmerman in the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, a seventeen year-old African American male who simply went to a convenience store to purchase a pack of Skittles and an Arizona iced tea, raised the ghost of that memory from my childhood.  However, during Cecil Gaines’ formative years such incidences of the reckless, wanton and indifferent taking of Black life were commonplace.  Both above and below the Mason-Dixon Line, countless African Americans lost their lives due to the entrenched, maniacal racial hatred of individuals and the institutional racism of a judicial system that relegated those lives as not economically worth the cost of investigations and trials.  Hollywood perpetuates these historical crimes when the movie industry adds dramatic excesses to telling these stories to enable everyone to leave a viewing with a good feeling.

Notwithstanding its limitations and deficiencies, The Butler challenges me to expand my view of the heroes of the Civil Rights Movement and Black Power Movement.  Myopically, I heretofore considered the protesters in the street as the primary agents of change as they coerced the legal and social establishment to enact the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts broaden access of African Americans to all segments of society whether housing, public facilities or educational institutions.  Cecil Gaines’ life embodies the subversive protests of countless nameless persons who resisted segregation in their individual means and methods.  At first glance, Gaines appears to accommodate segregation.  His silence seems to equate with cowardice.  He seems concerned only with his provision for his family.  As the movies progresses, Gaines’ steadfast, gradual and forceful protest against devaluing the worth of African American butlers and employees at the White House unfolds as a personal civil rights movement.  Unrelentingly, he maintains his resistance to this inequity until he succeeds during the Reagan Administration.  Gaines’ efforts eventuate in raises for all White House employees.  His life and example demonstrates the importance of establishing mutually respectful relationships with people and the invaluable role that such relationships play in changing laws and social mores.  Dramatic, nonviolent and public resistance is not the only effective means of transforming society and eradicating historical mistakes.  Cecil Gaines teaches the importance subversive means of protesting injustice.

I was particularly struck by Gaines’ relationship with his two very different sons.  Gaines and his older son, Louis, misunderstood each other.  The son fails to see his father’s stalwart and progressive protest as a butler in the corridors of power.  In fact, Louis loses respect for his father as Louis assumes his father accommodates the injustice of segregation because of a good paying job.  In contrast, Gaines does not fully appreciate the necessity of direct action as power rarely if ever concedes anything to anyone because the person asks politely and correctly.  Louis’ protests inclusive of sit-ins at the lunch counters, freedom bus rides, marches, church rallies and boycotts were very valid as these means forced the legal and political establishment to take affirmative action to transform American laws and society.  Yet, Gaines’ more silent and meek personal protests were equally legitimate.  The movie depicts their breakdown in miscommunication, respect and trust.  The harm to their relationship prevents them from recognizing that they both seek the same goal despite their differing approaches. 

The death of Gaines’ younger son as a soldier fighting in the U. S. Army during the Vietnam War dismantles his myopic view about Louis’ participation in the Civil Rights Movement.  Gaines acknowledges that he did not understand the reasons for the United States entry into that internal conflict of a sovereign South Asian country.  Gaines embodies the invisible African American sacrifices through perpetual generations throughout American history from the American Revolutionary War through Operation Iraq Freedom.  Louis’ myopic estimation of direct protests crumbles as he refuses to accept the Black Panther Party’s approval of revengeful violence.  Louis alters his approach by running for Congress and attempting change via the political establishment.  Simultaneously, Gaines forges forward with his personal campaign to obtain equal pay and promotion for African American staff at the White House.  The Butler concludes with reconciliation between father and son as they both appreciate their arrogance, myopia and judgment in undervaluing each other’s approach to seeking justice and equality for African Americans.

Embedded within this movie about personal and collective African American protest is an impressive, raw and maturing love story.  Through the peaks and valleys of alcoholism, loneliness, relational conflict with children, infidelity and breakdown in communication, Gaines and his wife “stagger forward, rejoicing” in love.  Viewers observe these daily realities and difficulties which anyone who seeks genuine love experiences in Gaines’ marriage.  How he processes this pain, betrayal and disrespect into an authentic and enduring love for his wife viewers are left to imagine.  The longevity of their relationship seems incredible given the cumulative effects and affects of their personal and collective challenges.  Yet, many African Americans faced the existential challenge of cultivating love despite daily adversities of a rabidly racist society and internal self-hatred within and relational conflicts of the Black community.  I applaud Lee Daniels for including this respectful and worthy dimension of Gaines’ life.  I further appreciate Daniels’ esteem of Gaines by leaving private the interior pain and disappointment of his heart.  Yet, I am grateful for Gaines’ example of the expense and rewards of finding and maturing in love which the basis for genuine and redemptive forgiveness.

“It is as if the room is empty to you.”  That line in the movie reverberates through my consciousness!  I doubt I will ever forget it as long as I live.  Lest I lapse into melodrama and sentimentality, I recite that line as it reminds me of the major motif of Ralph Ellison’s brilliant,  compelling and enduringly relevant novel about the invisibility of African Americans as it relates to the history, culture, institutions and ascent to global greatness of the United States.  Stories of the seminal contributions of non WASP, Eastern European, Latino and Asian immigrants abound within American folklore and contemporary discourse.  Many African Americans ignore the harsh historical reality of unparalleled chattel slavery practiced in the American South.  However, a scholarly consensus amongst historians values the property appraisal of slaves at two billion dollars ($2,000,000,000) in gold in 1860.  Prorated for inflation, the contemporary equivalent of that figure would be simply astounding.  Essentially, slavery significantly financed America’s ascent into an industrial and imperial power in the second half of the nineteenth century and her subsequent assumption of superpower status in the global village.  Accordingly, I reiterate the extreme danger of movies like The Butler meagerly addressing the lynching of nearly four thousand (4000) persons in the South.  It is a further fault of the movie to crop the camera and focus the lenses so that story of African American pain is told through a White person’s prism of experience. 

It is reprehensible that Hollywood insists that Black pain requires White validation.  In 1988 when Mississippi Burning was released, its director, Alan Parker, vociferously and vehemently defended his decision to tell the story of the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner and the residual murders of countless and nameless other Black Mississippians through the roles of two FBI agents played by Gene Hackman and William Defoe.  In a feature article in The New York Times, Parker insisted, “Quite frankly, it had to be done that way.  That was the only way it could be done.”  A quarter of a century later, with the interim release of Unconquered, a 1989 film depicting the socially progressive sacrifices of former Alabama Attorney General Richmond Flowers, Sr. in 1962; Glory, a 1989 film recounting the sacrifices of Robert Gould Shaw as he led the Massachusetts 54^th Regiment, all Black division, in a Civil War battle; The Ghosts of Mississippi, a 1996 film the concentrates upon the role of Bobby DeLaughter in the eventual conviction of Bryon De La Beckwith for the cold blooded and cowardly of murder of Medgar Evers whom Beckwith shot in the back with a shotgun as Evers wife and children watched; and The Help, last year’s blockbuster success which details the indignities of Black domestic workers through the perspective of an aspiring White female writer; Parker’s insistence that Black pain must be told through the experience of White people continually justifies Hollywood’s marketing approach to releasing “Black films.”  Parker’s defensive and inadequate explanation for slighting the collective, indescribable and incalculable pain of African Americans persists. 

Albeit a profitable means of addressing race and racial injustice on the wide screen, hopefully this genre of movies will mature to future iterations in which the primary expression of Black pain will suffice to encourage and empower all American citizens to create a more just and equitable society.  Who knows, perhaps, Hollywood rather than furthering prevalent racial stereotypes and creating more Black jokes may utilize its unquantifiable influence upon social media and popular culture to fulfill the grand American ideals of the Declaration of Independence.  Will Hollywood join the rising tide of racial, ethnic, religious, cultural and ideological pluralism to establish the inherent value democratic and egalitarian principle that all persons are indeed equal and share certain inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?  In its simplest and most unvarnished form, will Hollywood assist all Americans in seeing the worth of African American life as of equal value to their own?  Then, it will no longer be necessary for Cecil Gaines or any other African American to live within a social, economic and political context that remains utterly indifferent to his life and pain.  Then, no longer will the room be empty to Gaines and other African Americans; they will sit alongside the increasing diversity of this great democratic republic where in King’s grandiloquent declaration they are judged by the content of their character instead of the color of their skin.

I did have a few heartwarming moments as I watch The Butler.  I rejoiced during the scenes in which an elderly Gaines and his wife wore “Obama-Biden” tee shirts during the 2008 presidential campaign.  Immediately, I recalled the many senior persons who marched during the Civil Rights Movement and protested in their personal ways who cried on the night of then candidate Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention which occurred forty-five years to the date of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech delivered on the National Mall as the culmination of the March on Washington.  How momentous an occasion it must have been for them to have heard King in the midst of the volatility of the sixties and then to listen to Obama declare “Change has come to America” at the dawn of the twenty-first century!  Additionally, I remembered staying up on election night in 2008 to witness the historical moment of the election of the first African American President.  I cried as I knew how much my beloved paternal grandfather, who voted in every single election and never missed watching any election returns and watched every single “State of Union” address, would have desired to share firsthand in that jubilant occasion. 

Following the President Obama’s inauguration on 20 January 2009, I went to a fly shop and purchased two of the biggest American flags on sale.  One flag flies on the top of a flag pole installed by the previous owners and the other adorns the front door of the house.  I raised the first flag on Presidents Day.  The second flag honors my late brother who died at the tender age of nineteen in a car accident while on active duty in the United States Air Force.  As I watched the official notification scene in The Butler, I very briefly relived the depth of loss of my brother who died serving this country.  To the extent the movie invoked any good and sentimental feelings within me, I imagined how satisfying many African Americans found President Obama’s election as the fulfillment of centuries of dreams and hope that the United States would one day recognize and respect their invaluable contributions to making this country great. 

I have one final favorable reaction to The Butler.  The concluding scene in which Cecil Gaines waits to be ushered into the Oval Office to meet with President Obama metaphorically opens the door to unlimited future possibilities for African Americans and all other persons who become American citizens.  Pluralism, globalization, technology, science, secularism, all, combine to offer boundless opportunities for individual and national progress.  One imagines how gratifying it must have been for Gaines to have visited with President Obama.  In his wildest dreams, did he ever allow himself to consider the day that he would wait upon an African American President?  On inauguration day in 2009, I paused to consider mystically what the White House staff must have felt when the Obamas moved in following the ceremonies.  Could they have ever imagined they would serve an African American family?  Was I one of them, with tears of deep healing and smiles of great joy, I would have welcomed them with genuine gratitude for their sacrifices.

The Butler leaves me with one final question.  What is the Civil Rights Movement of today?  Assuredly, contemporary Americans cannot rest on the laurels of past generations and erroneously assume the successes of yesteryear eliminate the need to expand upon past achievements.  We are approaching the wholesale incarceration of one percent, three million people, of the American population.  Many of these citizens have been wrongly arrested, arraigned, indicted, tried, convicted and imprisoned because of their race, ethnicities, culture and lack of economic resources.  The Innocence Project essentially is a twenty-first century civil rights movement as it relates to crime, capital punishment and classism.  Already, one hundred and fifty men have been exonerated utilizing DNA thereby proving they did not and could not have committed the crimes for which they were incarcerated.  Minimally, they have lost fifteen hundred years of human existence due to prosecutorial misconduct, false eyewitness testimony, racial and class assumptions by jurors, trial errors and other causes of the miscarriage of justice.  Startlingly, some of these exonerated men were on death row with imminent execution dates.  Second, the preservation of good, effective public education is critical to preserving a solid middle class in the United States.  Segregated residential patterns throughout the country have resulted in the practical and pragmatic reversal of the grand aims of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.  Nearly sixty years after that landmark U. S. Supreme Court decision, many students of color attend schools more segregated than the pre-Brown days.  Continual erosion of the quality of public education and its ability to prepare American students to be productive, profitable and contributing participants in the global village significantly threatens the country’s international standing and competitiveness. 

Third, predatory lending injustices persists as Americans of color face sophisticated institutional racism as they strive to attain the American dream of private home and business ownership.  Morally and ethically questionable lenders of the housing crisis in the first decade of this century targeted certain demographical segments as they were deemed ripe for default and foreclosure; realizing huge profits as these people’s expense and dignity.  Fourth, the twenty-first century civil and human rights movement is not strictly an American one.  The epidemic spread of HIV/AIDS in South Africa perpetually ravages this nation where Americans fought to end apartheid.  Current activists must return to encourage and empower our brothers and sisters in South Africa and throughout the continent as they combat an assault on their society and posterity equal in proportion to the Black Death in Europe in 1348, the Middle Passage of the Atlantic slave trade, the casualties of the First and Second World Wars and the wholesale genocide of Eastern Europe and Asia throughout the twentieth century.  This disease is one of several others including varying types of cancer, heart disease, obesity, alcoholism and drug addiction which potentially will rob “Millennials” and their children and grandchildren of the centenarian longevity they should easily enjoy if they live healthy, happy and holistic lives.  Distributing healthcare resources in an equitable and just means is a contemporary civil and human rights issue that affects all Americans and global citizens. 

Fifth, dear to my heart, adoption particularly in the African American community is another type of civil and human rights movement as many of the entrenched personal and systemic pathologies could be reversed within one generation if the children in foster care and state custody were adopted into loving and compassionate families.  These family units could train these children with morals, ethics, principles and work ethic enabling them to actualize their talents and abilities.  This familial and relational empowerment undoubtedly will eradicate lingering educational and economic disparities.  Easily, I could list countless other important issues such as the environment, sexuality, ecology, international relations, debt in Africa, trade and economic empowerment within developing countries, and diplomacy in the Middle East that comprise a national and global civil and human rights movement.  Today’s movement requires specialization within one or two issues as the breadth and width of their interrelation with other social, economic and political challenges prevent anyone from acquiring expertise in numerous causes.  Still, each citizen in the global village can choose an issue or two and focus intently upon creating a more just world in which to live celebrating the invaluable wealth of humankind’s diversity.

Whether advocating for legislative, judicial and governmental changes to redress systemic causes perpetuation of racism and other societal inequalities or delivering direct services to individuals as they assume greater personal responsibility, contemporary citizens have an obligation to expand upon the legal, social and political achievements of the Civil Rights Movement in twentieth century America.  Lee Daniels cinematic depiction of Cecil Gaines’ life shows the power of each person to change the world whether through direct action or confronting societal inequality through integrity of personal character and myriad silent subversive ways.