In the rush to participate in a national reckoning with racism, culture presents an easy initial target: It’s simple to access and simple to disown. To the understandable horror of some observers, “The Help,” a period piece about black domestic workers and a young white writer set in 1963, shot to the top of the Netflix most-watched list. HBO Max announced that it was pulling “Gone With the Wind” from its digital shelves until it could find a way to contextualize a movie that is both a racist milestone and a masterpiece, and Warner Bros. canceled a planned screening of the movie in Paris.

I understand the impulse to shy away from the treaclier aspects of “The Help” and the offensive Lost Cause mythology of “Gone With the Wind.” Yet if you ever enjoyed either of these movies, or the novels from which they are adapted — or want to understand why people loved these stories — there’s never been a better time to watch and read them again.

Both “Gone With the Wind” and “The Help” use their white heroines to sell readers and viewers a particular kind of self-flattery. It’s possible to for contemporary consumers to identify with Scarlett O’Hara and Skeeter Phelan, because those characters understand themselves to be different from their Southern neighbors. To Scarlett, the cause that obsesses her fellow Georgians “just seemed silly,” while Skeeter’s literary ambition leads her to pitch a book of interviews with black domestic workers to a New York editor eager to capitalize on the Civil Rights movement.

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Within the novel, Scarlett’s moral flexibility helps her survive events that humble her more principled neighbors. It also allows readers’ relationships to her, and “Gone With the Wind” itself, to survive the era in which Margaret Mitchell wrote it. If faithful Confederate Melanie Wilkes were the heroine of “Gone With the Wind,” the novel and movie would be a relic. But because Scarlett doesn’t care for the Lost Cause, she can pass for ahead of her time rather than mired in it, and audiences can think of their affection for her as understandable instead of unforgivable.

Of course, saying fiddle-dee-dee to the Confederacy because the war “killed men senselessly and cost money and made luxuries hard to get” is not the same thing as reckoning with the white supremacy it represented. Early in both Mitchell’s novel and Victor Fleming’s film adaptation, Ashley Wilkes, the love of Scarlett’s youth, muses that he opposes war with the North because “when the wars were over, no one ever knew what they were about.” This is evasion dressed up as profundity: The Civil War was fought to maintain the Southern slavocracy “Gone With the Wind” pretties up so effectively.

By contrast, “The Help” is genuinely, if somewhat preeningly, concerned with the racism “Gone With the Wind” alternately ignores and expresses.

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Where the characters in “Gone With the Wind” are portrayed as paternal toward the slaves who clean their homes and raise their children, many of the white women in “The Help” are vicious and openly bigoted, convinced that black women “carry different diseases.” Where “Gone With the Wind” can’t imagine that Mammy might have wants or desires that don’t relate to the O’Haras, “The Help” is deliberately conceived as a response to that incuriosity, and women like Aibileen Clark and Minny Jackson are active players in their own liberation.

Yet both the novel and the film adaptation of “The Help” flatter Skeeter and their self-satisfied white audiences in a way that “Gone With the Wind” does not. Skeeter is presented as good and moral for wanting to record Aibileen and Minnie’s stories, even in service of her own ambition; by extension, we are good and moral for wanting to hear their testimony.

At an inflection point like this one, it can actually be easier to set aside stories you once loved or even congratulated yourself for consuming than it is to examine them again and consider what your affection for those stories says about you.

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I first saw “The Help” and observed the debates about it in 2011, when I was a single journalist like Skeeter. Watching it again 10 years later as a working mother who pays another woman — a woman of color — to help take care of my child is not an entirely comforting or comfortable experience, nor should it be. I first encountered “Gone With The Wind” even earlier; my paperback copy is ragged and my DVDs of the movie are scratched with use. I know now, as I didn’t know as a girl, that it isn’t enough, like Scarlett O’Hara, to be a little bit ahead of your time, or to be willing to defy senseless norms merely in your own interest.

Yes, there’s a whole black cinematic and novelistic canon that can help explain this moment and chart a better future: Spike Lee’s drama about the legacy of the Vietnam War, “Da 5 Bloods,” arrived on Netflix on Friday if you’re looking for a place to start. But if part of your response to this reckoning is self-examination, it’s worth pausing to take a searching look — at Scarlett and Skeeter and yourself.

Read more:

David Axelrod: I thought I understood issues of race. I was wrong.

Brian S. Lowery: To my white friends, the time for talk has passed. Now is the time for work.

Ruth Marcus: If you don’t believe systemic racism is real, explain these statistics

Eugene Robinson: Trump might go down in history as the last president of the Confederacy

Karen Attiah: George Floyd, Emmett Till for a digital generation

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