In film, the white savior is a cinematic trope portraying a white character rescuing people of color from their plight. Certain critics have observed this narrative in an array of genres of movies in American cinema, wherein a white protagonist is portrayed as a messianic figure who often learns something about him- or herself in the course of rescuing characters of color.
Contents
- Trope
- Literary antecedents
- Inspirational teacher
- Man of principle
- Historical period drama
- Example films
- References
The narrative trope of the white savior is how the mass communications medium of cinema represents the sociology of race and ethnic relations, by presenting abstract concepts—such as morality—as innate characteristics (racial and cultural) of white people, rather than as characteristics innate to people of color. In the praxis of cinematic narrative, the white-savior character usually is a man who is out of place within his own society, until he assumes the burden of racial leadership in order to rescue non-white foreigners and minorities (racial and ethnic) from their plights; as such, white-savior stories "are essentially grandiose, exhibitionistic, and narcissistic" fantasies of psychological compensation.
Trope
In "The Whiteness of Oscar Night" (2015), Matthew Hughey describes the narrative structure of the subgenre:
A White Savior film is often based on some supposedly true story. Second, it features a nonwhite group or person who experiences conflict and struggle with others that is particularly dangerous or threatening to their life and livelihood. Third, a White person (the savior) enters the milieu and through their sacrifices, as a teacher, mentor, lawyer, military hero, aspiring writer, or wannabe Native American warrior, is able to physically save—or at least morally redeem—the person or community of folks of color, by the film's end. Examples of this genre include films like Glory (1989), Dangerous Minds (1996), Amistad (1997), Finding Forrester (2000), The Last Samurai (2003), Half Nelson (2006), Freedom Writers (2007), Gran Torino (2008), Avatar (2009), The Blind Side (2009), The Help (2011), and the list goes on.
The white savior film arose from the occurrence of "racial schizophrenia" in the culture of the U.S. in the latter half of the 20th century. Following the release of cinematic adaptations of the play A Raisin in the Sun (1959), by Lorraine Hansberry, and the novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee, in the 1960s, the films of the blaxploitation genre of the 1970s reflected continued discontent over the social and racial inequality of non-white people in the United States, and functioned as counterbalance to the trope of the white savior. That from the 1980s, continued cultural hypersegregation led to the common misbelief, by many American white people, that the nation had reached a post-racial state of social relations, which resulted in a backlash against the racial and ethnic diversity of the cinema of the previous decades, on screen during the 1960s and the 1970s; thus, the popular cinema of the 1990s and the early 2000s featured the white savior narrative. That reappearance of the white-savior narrative occurred because the majority of white people in the United States had little substantive social interaction with non-white people of different races and ethnic groups. Therefore, the initial rise, and continued popularity, of the white-savior film trope likely offered interracial experiences to the mostly white viewers at the cinema, who usually do not encounter nonwhites in real life.
At the cinema, the white savior narrative occupies a psychological niche for most white people, as an expression of their latent desire for interracial goodwill and reconciliation. By presenting stories of racial redemption, involving black people and white people professing to reach across racial barriers, Hollywood is catering to a mostly white audience who believe themselves unfairly victimized by non-white ethnic groups, because they are culturally exhausted with the unfinished national discourse about race and ethnicity in the society of the United States. Hence, films featuring the narrative trope of the white savior have notably similar storylines, which present an ostensibly nobler approach to race relations, but offer psychological refuge and escapism for white Americans seeking to avoid substantive conversations about race, racism, and racial identity. In this way, the narrative trope of the white savior is an important cultural artifact, a device to realize the desire to repair the social and cultural damage wrought by the myths of white supremacy and paternalism, regardless of the inherently racist overtones of the white-savior narrative trope.
Literary antecedents
As a literary trope, the white-savior narrative antedates the audio-visual narrative of the cinema. In the late 19th century, with the poem "The White Man’s Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands" (1899) Rudyard Kipling appeals to the white people of U.S. society to assume racial stewardship in civilizing a non-white people of Asia, and in the novella The Man Who Would Be King (1888), the explicit objective of the protagonists—ex-soldiers Daniel Dravot and Peachy Carnehan, formerly of the British Indian Army—is to become kings to the tribes of Kafiristan, a part of Afghanistan then unexplored by white men from Europe.
In each medium of mass communication (literature, cinema), the plot and themes undermine the racial superiority of the white-savior narrative, despite the narratives of the novella and of the screenplay representing the tribes of Kafiristan as stereotypes of people of color, as benighted natives who must be led to civilization (i.e. be Westernized), as Kipling recommended in the poem "The White Man’s Burden". Hence, the film version, The Man Who Would Be King (1975) retains Kipling’s racist representation of the Kafiristani peoples as "uncivilized natives", a literary trope usual to the colonial literature of the 19th century. Likewise, the novel King Solomon's Mines (1885), by H. Rider Haggard, features Europeans exploring Africa who encounter the rightful (native) king of a kingdom—as yet "undiscovered" by white Europe—whom they restore to power by actively intervening to the internal politics of an "undiscovered" nation.
Inspirational teacher
The white-savior teacher story, such as Up the Down Staircase (1967), Dangerous Minds (1995), and Freedom Writers (2007), "features a group of lower-class, urban, non-whites (generally black and Latino/a) who struggle through the social order in general, or the educational system specifically. Yet, through the sacrifices of a white teacher they are transformed, saved, and redeemed by the film's end." As an inspirational tale of the human spirit, the storyline of the white-savior-teacher is not racist, in itself, but is culturally problematic for being racialist, because it is a variant of the white-savior narrative that factually misrepresents the cultural and societal reality that there exist minority-group teachers who have been successfully educating (racial, ethnic, cultural) minority-group students in their communities, without the saving stewardship of white people.
Man of principle
The white savior's principled opposition to chattel slavery and to Jim Crow laws makes him advocate for the humanity of slaves and defender of the rights of black people unable to independently stand within an institutionally racist society, in films such as To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), Conrack (1974), and Amistad (1997). Despite ostensibly being stories (fictional and true) about the racist oppression of black people, usually in the Southern United States (American South), the white-savior narrative relegates characters of color to the story's background, as the passive object(s) of the dramatic action, and in the foreground places the white man who militates to save him, and them, from the depredations of racist white folk, respectively: a false accusation of inter-racial rape, truncated schooling, and chattel slavery.
Historical period drama
In "12 Years a Slave: Yet Another Oscar-nominated ‘White Savior' Story" (2014), Noah Berlatsky identifies the white-savior narrative in film as essentially racist, because the films in that genre are thematic variations of a single narrative about the lives of black people being oppressed by "bad white people". The black people thus cannot achieve their physical freedom, social independence, and economic self-sufficiency without "the offices of good white people". In Recognizing Race and Ethnicity: Power, Privilege, and Inequality (2014), Kathleen Fitzgerald, said that, although the white-savior narrative is "a successful film genre, this image is problematic, because it frames the person of color as unable to solve their own problems, as incompetent."
About the Free State of Jones (2016), reviewer Ann Hornaday said that it is just "another white savior movie", whilst the reviewer A. O. Scott said the opposite, "This is not yet another film about a white savior sacrificing himself on behalf of the darker-skinned oppressed. Nor, for that matter, is it the story of a white sinner redeemed by the superhuman selflessness of black people. Free State of Jones is a rarer thing: a film that tries to strike sparks of political insight from a well-worn genre template"; and in "The Historical Imagination and Free State of Jones" (2016), the reviewer Richard Brody said that "it's tempting to shunt Free State of Jones into the familiar genre of the white-savior tale, but [the] Newton Knight [character] appears as something else—not so much as a savior, but as an avatar of a new South."
Example films
The table shows films that are discussed by at least one source as examples of the white-savior cinematic narrative.