After watching three episodes of Maid, a few things became abundantly clear: 1) the film would showcase how navigating poverty in America as a person of any background is nearly impossible, 2) the unfair ways in which the location and context of someone’s birth can shackle them, 3) the show would poignantly depict the many faces of DV, coercion, and control, 4) the show would avoid discussing the obvious intersection of race and class, and 5) the show would make sure to placate white middle class audiences that couldn’t stomach feeling too much culpability.
By the end of episode three, I had noticed a disturbing pattern, most of the story’s villains were Black and brown, from the officer who awakens her and her sleeping daughter in an empty lot to the boss who begrudgingly gives her a job and the mean Karen-caricature whose house she cleans, Regina. (They throw in a sympathetic shelter mother but the exception only proves the rule.)
Now, this is where people normally remind me that Alex and Regina’s characters eventually become friends after learning about the life the other leads. For a second, let’s set aside their “grass is greener on the other side” adage of a friendship that attempts to make poverty comparable to a chosen life of wealth and greed. My true refrain is that the only time a viewer has to wait nearly four episodes for an accurate representation of herself or her community is when that viewer is Black. White viewers do not have to suffer the agony of seeing themselves as the power-abusing girl boss or officer even when they are the ones who most often wield that kind of power.
Sadly, I think that’s what this and many other shows have to do in order to bait an unwilling, well-off and white audience into listening to stories about American poverty which would undoubtedly tug at their consciences, politics, and heart strings… if only a little. Shows sympathetic to black women in poverty don’t make it to top 10 on Netflix but right now there are two, Maid and Unforgivable, starring white women. Americans have an aversion to conversations about race AND class, because that would force us to address their historical relationship in this country and… you saw what happened when we tried to do that in schools. So, if we want to change American attitudes about poverty and homelessness — so embarrassingly misguided that conversations on the topic often include the argument, “They’ll just spend the money on drugs” — then we have to play to a very fragile audience.
I considered this when watching a scene in which Alex chews off Regina’s head after she refuses to pay for her cleaning services. But I couldn’t suspend belief long enough to feel Alex’s vindication, not because rich Black women don’t abuse power or White poor women aren’t exploited but because it didn’t and couldn’t reveal the truth of American poverty. It didn’t shine a light on racial class systems that have for years been upheld by white housing associations keeping out low-income housing. And I don’t think it illuminated white viewers, rich and poor, to the ways in which they have been complicit in systems of inequality. If anything, it made white people seem like the victims in a world full of powerful and mean, Black overlords.
In the wake of January 6th, Charlotte, and Trump, I would hope I didn’t need to explain to most informed and empathetic individuals how having a show in which white heroes, mostly blameless victims, are bullied by black overlords could be dangerous. I don’t know why the casting directors decided to take the route they did. I do know Regina’s character was as fictional as it was unnecessary, never appearing in the original novel. The optimist in me said the producers warped reality to lure unsuspecting white women viewers, those coming to see a feel-good movie about a white woman overcoming the broad and faceless patriarchy, into a narrative about the cruelties of the American welfare system. And that by doing so, the show will change hearts and minds and maybe those heart and minds will vote and act in ways that change lives and circumstances for everyone. The pessimist in me remembers how the War on Drugs became the Opioid Epidemic and the face of each headline.
I don’t think it is too much to ask that Maid better depict how Alex’s white privilege would intersect with the challenges she faced as a homeless, single mother or the disadvantages she faced as a child of a parent suffering from mental illness. I sympathized with Alex, but when are show writers going to make decisions that sympathize with viewers like me. When will we stop allowing the Welfare Queen to reign over America’s conception of the urban poor while saving the more sympathetic portraits for poor, white women. Or if we must have a fantasy land, let us have one in which rich white women forsake their privilege and make a sacrifice for the benefit of people who don’t look like them (could help in the next election). My point is that conversations about intersectionality are crucial for the moment we’re in and the kind of feminism we need — one that can foster true solidarity. I can only imagine what would have happened if the show had used Alex to illustrate the ways in which, historically, white working class people have been pitted against black ones for rich peoples’ political and financial gain.Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure the outcome would have been lower ratings.
