Culture Corner:
The Six Triple Eight and Milkman

Jan 6, 2025

Film: The Six Triple Eight, directed by Tyler Perry, 2024 on Netflix

Tyler Perry takes on the true story of the 6888th Battalion. The film reveals a buried history of the only battalion of black enlisted women who served in Europe. They were given a seemingly impossible task: to sort through and deliver in six months 17 million pieces of mail, that had been literally rotting for years in warehouses, to and from soldiers serving in WWII. They had to work in horrifyingly miserable conditions, with no support from their racist military superiors. Yet they managed to do it in three months.

The film celebrates the essential and important role these women played, in spite of all the odds. What this film also shows is that the working class, when organized and faced with worthy goals, can accomplish anything it needs to do.

Book: Milkman by Anna Burns

This book, winner of the 2018 Man Booker prize, is a courageous telling of life in 1970s Northern Ireland in the time of the Troubles in a neighborhood occupied by the British army. People, cities, factions and even countries are unnamed, but the narrator (who is called third sister) depicts a life that is stifling, scary, and pressure-filled. You see glimpses of the oppression imposed by the British forces. The occupied community’s fight-back is organized by people who end up adopting the same terroristic habits of the occupiers, imposing taxes and violent forced compliance and tolerating sexual assault by their leaders.

Third sister, however, resists all the pressures and the demands. Her rebellion is dramatic yet quite simple: she enjoys walking while reading. She goes for runs. She is not in a hurry to get married. She enjoys sunsets. This is the 1970s, so this is huge. Can she persevere in the face of the political pressures, her family, the church and her community? It’s a question we continue to face even today.