White saviour movies, like their history text counterparts, are designed to reinforce and perpetuate white privilege. White audiences get to walk away from these films feeling good about being white, and they are never prompted to empathize with supporting non-white characters. Furthermore, white audience members are never confronted with their own privilege or internalized racism. They are let completely off the hook for their own roles and responsibilities in the perpetuation of a racist power structure.
Since more whites than non-whites are shown throughout our pop culture as the people effecting change, the lesson inferred is that these individual cases we see in movies and on TV are the rule, when they are really the exception. This leads to a false sense of racial justice in the minds of all audience members. Just as the election of Barack Obama led some white Americans to actually believe that the West was entering a "post-racial state [*insert bellowing gut laugh here*], white saviour films give white audience members the notion that they don't have to do anything about racism themselves because look, there areplenty of examples of white people out there doing good!
Back to the history question, Loewen deftly points out that "the Eurocentric history in our textbooks amounts to psychotherapy for whites. To run with this simile, I would liken these white saviour films to psychotherapy for whites with a bonus happy ending. But like the history behind them, there is much therapy needed to right the normalization of whiteness, which is plainly wrong.
1. Both Lies My Teacher Told Me and Lies Across America as well as Loewen's Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism are required reading, especially for those in the US. Get your hands on them now or turn in your "progressive card.
2. FYI, Columbia and CBS Films are actually in development for a remake My Fair Lady with Keira Knightly being considered for the role of Eliza.
3. Yes, that is Treebeard from JRR Tolken's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The nerd in me couldn't resist.
4. I'm kidding.
Mike Barber is an independent filmmaker with a particular interest in issues surrounding social justice. He is currently directing "A Past, Denied: The Invisible History of Slavery in Canada, a feature documentary exploring how a false sense of history "both taught in the classroom and repeated throughout the national historical narrative "impinges on the present.It examines how 200 years of institutional slavery during Canada's formation has been kept out of Canadian classrooms, textbooks and social consciousness. He is currently based in Montreal, Quebec. You can follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/apastdenied (@apastdenied)
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