The butler

In the film ‘’the butler’’, we can identify the powerful recognition of the truth and reality of the black experience within the human condition. We also become fully aware of how much black people fought for their rights without ever giving-up.

First of all, the film shows us that black people contributed a lot in America’s history. Not only did they build the White House, but they also worked there ever since as butlers, cooks and maids. They first worked through slavery and, later, through the indignities of racial segregation.  

Moreover, the painful beginnings of the main character, Cecil Gaines, who is working on a Georgia cotton farm in the 1920's where his father is killed in front of him and his mother is the target of the plantation owner's rage, shows us that the movie is going to deal with difficult subjects such  as racial equality. The young boy then becomes educated on how to be a "house nigger" by the plantation matriarch and a benevolent pastry shop servant. From the beginning of the movie, we become aware that Cecil’s life is going to be a struggle fight for rights and recognition. Even though his life was not easy, he keeps doing is job and never complains about his situation.

Furthermore, Cecil's oldest son, Lewis, is also a character that shows us how much African-American achieved recognition in this movie. He becomes the rebellious child and while he is away at college in Tennessee, he becomes endlessly inspired and entrenched in the civil rights movement over those same 30 years his father works at the White House.

We can make a connection between some movements which play a large part in the black people condition and the Gaines family, such as the "freedom riders", the peaceful protests of Martin Luther King, Jr. and finally the Black Panthers movements in which Lewis is part of.

Besides, the film pushes us to an emotional investigation in the Gaines family and the larger portrait of the civil right movement happening around them. From an entertainment standpoint, we can handle the fiction mixed with the fact.

At the end of the movie, Cecil finally gets the recognition he deserves when he successfully advocates for equal compensation and promotion opportunities for black White House employees during the Reagan Administration. The Reagan’s family invites him and Gloria to the state dinner as guests, but something isn’t sitting right with Cecil and he finds himself increasingly dissatisfied with his job. He decides to patch things up with Lewis and joins him in protesting the imprisonment of Mandela. As an old man, Cecil retrospectively feels a great sense of pride for Lewis’ contributions to the civil rights and black power movement. 

African-American recognition is completely achieved when Cecil and Gloria eagerly campaign for the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Gloria passes away, leaving Lewis and Cecil as last survivors of the family. Father and son watch the election results with tears in their eyes. Cecil is invited to meet the new president and is warmly greeted by the butler, who is also an African-American man.

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