The Blind Side

You what white people really love, more than anything else ever? White saviors. From Michael Lewis to Nic Kristof, writer after writer has made bank telling stories of white saviors of the world’s darker people. It truly has no expiration date. And you know who loves the white savior narrative more than anyone else? Yep, Oscar voters, which helps explain why we see racially embarrassing movies win Oscars over and over again. (And yes, Crash definitely counts here because it does the same work that white savior narratives–tells white people that they really are OK and at the very worst, no worse than anyone else). Of course nothing better personifies this in the last couple of decades than Lewis’ The Blind Side, about the white people who “adopted” the offensive tackle Michael Oher. That of course led to Sandra Bullock somehow winning an Oscar and if you need hard evidence of the power of white savior entertainment, that’s as good as you can get. Now Oher is suing said people, saying they made millions off him under false pretenses. Dave Zirin on the disgusting nature of the whole Blind Side enterprise:

For the film, the Tuohys’ two children each got a $225,000 payment and 2.5 percent of net proceeds for having their likeness portrayed. That would work out to almost $5 million per kid. Oher allegedly got nothing. With that film deal, Sean and Leigh Anne tipped their hands as to whom they really considered family. Yet this alleged swindle is only an extension of what is so grotesque about The Blind Side. It’s a “feel-good story” that, even without this lawsuit, is hyper-exploitative trash. The smash hit stars Sandra Bullock as the white woman with a heart of gold. Hollywood rarely fails with this trope, which tells white America that it is—despite historic evidence to the contrary—morally righteous to accept Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden” and civilize the poor and downtrodden. This has been used by “liberal” Hollywood since at least 1939, when Scarlett O’Hara let Mammy sass her out of the goodness of her heart in Gone With the Wind. The list of white-savior prestige films is long—Mississippi Burning, Dangerous Minds, and the fulsomely praised documentary about school reform Waiting for Superman come to mind. All of these movies sell the same tired fiction.

When The Blind Side film was released in 2009, the allegedly “slow” Oher spoke out against his “Baby Huey” depiction and refused to do publicity. Few noticed or wrote about it at the time. Oher may not have known about the fake adoption then, but he knew the one thing about the movie that the Academy did not: It was a terrible and racist film.

The emerging truth about The Blind Side fits neatly within our cultural moment. We are living in an era where people are realizing that waiting for a Superman is a fool’s pursuit and that people who present themselves as white saviors are more often than not white beneficiaries of Black pain. If the charges are true—and the court documents are damning—then maybe this will be a turning point. Maybe even white audiences will stop believing in this trope.

There already is a growing understanding among young white activists about the difference between allyship and paternalism, the importance of creating space for others to speak and lead, and the understanding that the white-savior concept is a dangerous myth that has hurt far more than it has ever helped. Lewis was wrong to valorize this narrative. The Tuohys were wrong to exploit it, which they did whether these charges are proven or not. And Oher is right to take his name back. He’s a hell of a lot smarter than Lewis or the Tuohys have presented, and that may prove to be their undoing. The flip side of white saviorship is white underestimation. The Tuohys underestimated Michael Oher. And now the world knows it.