The film tells the story of the main character Cecil, a black man, who was hired as a food manager in 1952 and entered the White House to work. During his 34 years of service, the U.S. presidents have rotated eight times, and Cecil has witnessed the ups and downs of the status and politics of black Americans over the decades.
When Cecil first started working in the White House, a time when racism was most prevalent, he was taught to dress like a white officer in the White House, not to anger them, but to respect and admire them. The rise and fall of black power was Cecil’s main concern in the White House, and with every change of president, Cecil would judge in his mind whether the president was a good one for blacks. The identity of the white man’s waiter became more and more solid, and he did not even understand his son’s struggle for racial issues or the ideas of racial radicals.
In this film we can see very much the concept of class. Blacks are in the position of the Other in the film, while the white man in power is THE ONE, and thus the discrimination against blacks has been happening for decades. The president used the black movement to gain political support and hypocritically abandoned the rights of blacks. Cecil gradually lost his identity and the ability to speak out. At some point blacks were just subaltern and did not have the right to speak out while the whites of the time profited from them.
At the end of the film, the United States welcomed its first black president. Cecil witnessed this moment, while the experience of his son and so many incidents of discrimination allowed Cecil to find his identity and recognize the existence of racial injustice.
the butler, Wil Haygood