Hollywood has a very dubious history when it comes to telling the stories from Black history.
For years America’s guilt at the way it has treated it’s Black population saw Hollywood airbrush Black people out of many of the stories it told.
If Native Americans were vilified in many Westerns, Black people were pretty much ignored. The almost all-white Wild West presented in these films bore little resemblance to the reality in which almost a quarter of cowboys were Black and even more were Hispanic.
Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) was widely credited with giving a more realistic view of the Wild West, and while it was a hugely entertaining and successful film, Django’s tale still had the familiar ring of the poor Black man being liberated by the kindly white man.
The ‘white saviour’ narrative has been repeated over and over again and has allowed stories that America finds difficult to tell seem more palatable.
For a film to work for mainstream audiences the perceived wisdom seemed to be that the stories of ethnic minorities need to be told through the lens of a character white audiences can relate to. Using the white saviour ploy allows a white audience to watch a film about oppression, even with white oppressors, and align themselves with the good white person and Black ‘victims’.
Read the rest of this feature on the TV Collective.
Mouth of the Marmoset 