My wife worked for several years at a high school for at-risk youth, mostly African American. So she has some strong opinions about race relations. A lot of our early fights were about the subject, until time and firsthand experience with her school gradually changed the way I think (although we still don't agree about everything). My wife's eyes light up if you mention Paulo Freire, and she has a deadly accurate radar for racism. I suppose five years of marriage have given me the same.We both enjoyed Avatar, but honed in on lasers on the "white man savior" theme. After seeing the film we had dinner with a friend who majored in postcolonial literature, so we had a pretty vibrant discussion about the movie. I was planning to write a post, and then I discovered this article that says it all better than I can: When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar" (link has SPOILERS). It rounds up all the same films I was thinking of: Dances With Wolves, The Last Samurai, and Dune. Living in Jordan, I would definitely add the classic Lawrence of Arabia to the list. In these films, "a white guy manages to get himself accepted into a closed society of people of color and eventually becomes its most awesome member." According to the author, these films give us the opportunity to ask, "What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?" The answer is atoning for white colonial guilt by becoming colored and saving the oppressed people.
I don't usually mention the novel I'm writing, because I don't want to come across as the dreaded "novelist wannabe" (which I suppose I am), but the book has given me a lot of firsthand experience with these themes. The novel is a science fiction story loosely based on the events of the Rwandan genocide. In the story, an interstellar peacekeeping mission is ordered not to intervene in a genocide in a colony settled by African immigrants. The story follows the efforts of the Force Commander, his NGO activist daughter, and a Special Forces soldier (all white) to draw the attention of an apathetic universe and stop the genocide. The daughter, in particular, was originally a messianic character. Something terrible happens to her during the genocide and she becomes a news sensation. She leverages her fame to force an intervention, while serving as a leader and salvific symbol to the people.Somewhere in the course of writing the novel, I realized how racist it was. The heroes were all white. The locals were cut from cardboard. It was terrible. I had to reconceive the story almost from the beginning and dig deeper into Christian theology. To be a true messiah, Claire had to be despised, rejected, and resented for her intrusion into the local culture. She would have to come to grips with her own "white race fantasy", and discover that the real leaders of these oppressed people would necessarily come from among them. The best thing she could do was give their own leaders every chance to succeed. I have no idea if the story will be any good. I'm sure that people who study postcolonial literature will find myriad ways it's still racist, but it's a better story and it really tries to turn the cliche on its head.
P.S. I just showed my wife the linked article. Her radar was on; her first question was, "What's the author's ethnicity? Newitz? I'll bet she's white." I checked. She looks white to me, but she considers herself biethnic because her father is Jewish and her mother is a white southerner. Postcolonial literature majors, I'm sure you can have fun digging into the implications my wife's question has for the author's premise about white guilt and leading minorities to salvation. I suppose you can also psychoanalyze why I am writing this post!
6 comments:
Why do white guys write scripts like this so often? Because it's so damn easy, that's why :)
While I agree with your concepts and comments about Avatar it is very interesting to view it through the lens I saw of a news broadcast of the Hatian earthquake tragedy. A reporter was talking to a large group of uninjured people who were wondering what was taking the Americans so long to get here to help. They were uninterested in even trying to band together as a group to do anything at all and seemend resigned to sit around and wait until help arrived. While I realize the Avatar/Pocahontas concept of saving a people by becoming a part of the group is different than helping people who have been struck by a tragedy, the concept of the "whites" as the savior of helpless people nontheless remains and even reinforcess the overall woldview that we think we are the only ones who can save the people.
As a point Avatar is a movie designed to really do one thing in the end and that is to make a LOT of money. The fact that it helps to highlight some of the issues you have mentioned (as well as others) and encourages people to openly discuss them is just an added benefit.
Beware the monolenticular life.
Sounds like you've been brainwashed . . . your novel-in-development isn't racist because the main characters are white. What would be racist is if you propagated the belief that the color of their skin made them superior and others inferior. That’s the definition of racism. Having characters that happen to be white and which happen to help a non-white people doesn’t do that.
What was a racist response though was your wife’s immediately checking to find out the color of that author . . . then remarking that she must be a white person based on her piece, as if the color of her skin, and not the ideas the Newitz was trying to get across, was what mattered.
Let’s say I read a piece advocating more welfare and drug treatment programs and then said oh, that author obviously has to be black. Would you or your wife think that is racist? I would.
When people make false claims or engage in poor thinking about racism to feel less guilty about themselves they end up harming the cause of civil rights, not helping them. In your piece of fiction, I suspect the would-be victims of genocide could care less about the fact that it is a white man saving them than the fact that they would actually be saved.
RJS: Your definition covers only the most overt expression of racism. Racism has many more subtle and insidious manifestations.
What made my original draft racist wasn't the fact that white people were saving non-white people. That happens all the time in the real world. As Jacobsenra points out, Americans are leading the disaster response in Haiti (as they have with many other natural disasters). What made my original draft racist is that I was incapable of conceiving local characters who could play a meaningful role in their own lives. I created a world where the Westerners were flesh-and-blood characters with hopes, dreams, feelings, and abilities, and where almost all the locals were cardboard cutouts. The process was entirely subconscious.
What scares me is that this subconscious process isn't limited to my fiction... I see it all the time in the real world. When many Americans think about our role in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, Yemen, or any of the other places we get involved, they think of Americans as the primary actors and the locals as a part of the landscape. We get it exactly backwards. These aren't our wars to win or our problems to solve; we can only succeed if we help empower these governments to solve their own problems. We can't do that if we see through this subconscious lens.
As for my wife, she isn't racist; she just has an eye for irony. She noted that a white author was coming to the defense of minorities by writing an article critical of white people who come to the defense of minorities. You're right, her ethnicity doesn't affect the validity of her argument, but it certainly creates an interesting juxtaposition with her thesis.
And what's fascinating about many of these comments is the assumption that Americans are white. Just consider Reach 364's comment: "What made my original draft racist wasn't the fact that white people were saving non-white people. That happens all the time in the real world. As Jacobsenra points out, Americans are leading the disaster response in Haiti." Hello, people, not all Americans are white! Until you can check your own racism, stop trying to lecture others about theirs.
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