It’s one of the most pivotal scenes in the classic 1985  film, The Color Purple: set in 1930s rural Georgia, Ms. Sofia (Oprah Winfrey) is in town running errands with her family, when she’s approached out of nowhere by Ms. Millie, a white woman who happens to be a mayor’s wife. “Would you like to come to work for me?” Millie asks. “Be my maid?” 

After a stunned Sofia declines with “Hell no,” Millie’s husband asks her to repeat herself, then assaults her. An angry Sofia strikes him back, and by the time the dust is settled, she’s the victim of two worst case scenarios: she receives a lengthy jail sentence and, after being released, still ends up as the mayor’s maid.

I was a teenager when the film debuted, but even then I was struck at the arrogance and entitlement of Millie and the townsfolk: they didn’t see a woman minding her own business and entitled to disagree, or even to defend herself when attacked. Millie didn’t even look at Sofia as a mother or a person, much less as a peer—-she saw two-legged chattel, a useful tool she could exploit to her advantage no matter what Ms. Sofia’s autonomous needs or desires happened to be.  That’s what came to mind when a tweet from writer, TV producer and series creator, Julie Plec (“The Originals,” “Legacies,” “The Vampire Diaries”) recently went viral for appearing to do just that: direct Black women see themselves as the solution to what ails the world and “save us all.”

In her tweet, Plec appeared to openly address the coverage of a recent domestic violence assault of rapper Megan Thee Stallion by her also-rapper boyfriend, Tory Lanez. Instead of offering words of support to Megan, Plec’s response came across as the exact opposite: “I believe Black women will save us all and I am so sorry to put that pressure on you, but white women are continually failing all of us. I hope you understand that me seeing you [Black women] as a hero is not meant to add to your anxiety—rather it’s to lift you up and celebrate you.”

Say. What?

The blowback was immediate, across the racial spectrum: “You need to hold yourself and your fellow white women accountable for your role in systemic racism,” wrote Rebecca Abernathy. “That is our work.” Another user, Mo Comments, replied that Plec’s words reeked of entitlement and white privilege: “‘Black woman please take care of white women and lead the way because we can’t do it.’ Who’s going to help the BLACK WOMAN When we constantly get and take care of US. When we get constantly disrespected by everyone. White women need to step up and be allies to us.”

While I was aghast at Julie’s lack of awareness, viewers of her long-running series The Vampire Diaries were not, saying that the series’ lone African-American character, Bonnie Bennett (Kat Graham), was frequently a “sacrificial lamb” in relation to her vampire friends. Even my teenage daughter, Nia, characterized Bonnie as “never getting her happy ending.” “I felt like every time other characters needed something, they went to Bonnie,” she told me even before learning of Plec’s comments.’ “Every time Bonnie had the thing she needed, someone else needed it more and got it.”

After the outcry over her tweet, Julie was quick to tweet a mea culpa: “I was completely embarrassed by my carelessness and lack of knowledge…..I am mortified and I will absolutely do better and do more work.”

But will she?

According to viewers, Plec’s hit shows seem to portray Blacks as ‘magical negroes’ who exist to make to make whites feel more—to borrow the infamous words from Viola Davis’s character in The Help—- “smart, kind and important.” Maybe Julie’s learned that we have our own mountains to climb without shouldering the additional weight of other groups, who haven’t always returned the favor. Like Grey’s Anatomy actor Jesse Williams said in his much-lauded 2016 BET Awards speech: “Just because we’re magic, doesn’t mean we’re not real.”