I watched the 2007 movie Freedom Writers the other day. It put into my mind the thought that the U.S.A. is, among many other things, a missionary nation.
If you don’t know the movie, here’s the synopsis from IMDb:
Hilary Swank stars in this gripping story of inner city kids raised on drive-by shootings and hard-core attitude — and the teacher who gives them the one thing they need most: a voice of there own. Dropped into the free-fire zone of a school torn by violence and racial tension, teacher Erin Gruwell battles an uncaring system in a fight to make the classroom matter in her students lives. Now, telling their own stories, and hearing the stories of others, a group of supposedly “unteachable” teens will discover the power of tolerence, reclaim their shattered lives, and change their world.
In other words it’s a Nice White Lady movie: poor benighted underclass folk lifted up and made whole by a middle-class white gal who is willing to sacrifice everything — including, in this case, her marriage — on their behalf.
I loathed the movie, of course. It was quite explicitly anti-white, the dire circumstances of the kids’ lives all the result of “oppression,” “racism,” and the rest, practiced by heartless Ice People who run everything and stomp on minorities who get out of place. I’d imagine minorities would loathe it, too. The message is: “You’re so messed up, you’ll go on living in your hell of drugs and violence and oppression unless some Nice White Lady comes along to show you the way.” The movie seems to be targeted quite directly as some commonplace female-white-American fantasy.
I loathed it on Darwinian grounds, too. Hilary Swank will apparently be happy to remain a spinster all her life if it will serve these kids from minorities with TFR two point something (African Americans) and three point something (West Coast Hispanics). Hmmm, how will that work out?
Mrs. Bradlaugh quite liked it, though. “She’s just trying to help people …” Arguing the case with her afterwards, I got her attention with an analogy to the American missionaries in pre-Red China. (Mrs. B. is Chinese.) Same deal: bringing light and hope to the wayward heathen, at some sacrifice to oneself. (How’d that work out? And what would be the equivalent, in this analogy, of a “rice Christian” — a Chinese who signed up with the missionaries for the sake of a meal ticket?)
There’s some sort of national character trait in there somewhere. Can anyone shed light?
I agree with P. Gottfried that this form of messianic leftism is an extremely decadent (and heretical) form of American Protestantism.
These fantasies portray redemption from white guilt and a messianic age of perfect equality as attainable entirely through human effort.
In this narcissistic gospel God can be replaced by–YOU! If you only “want to help people” and believe the right things, you too can save the benighted blacks, racist whites, or oppressed blue aliens.
It sounds like a hideous movie; thanks for the heads up (it’s the kind of film my friends would tell me I MUST watch).
Particularly offensive is the idea that is right, necessary, laudable, or obligatory for someone to sacrifice his life for a group of strangers.
I wonder, was there not the usual scene near the end where the White Savior reveals that she has learned as much from them as they have learned from her? I mean, she taught them how to empower themselves through self-expression, but they taught her how to FEEL others’ pain.
Swank has already won two Oscars. Could this be a third?
We’ve always been an unusually religious people, yet the theological integrity of most forms of Christianity has virtually collapsed over the past half century or more.
When the ancient Israelites turned away from the laws of their religion, they did not become atheists–rather they began worshipping every strange kind of idol they could find. I think the same phenomenon is at work now. We have crusades to “spread freedom,” public penance and sacrifice for racial sins, a superstitious belief in the power of the state to heal societal rot, the raising of M.L.King as a secular Christ, and a constant strain of debased Christian mythology as in the movie you describe.
“Swank has already won two Oscars. Could this be a third?”
It’s from 2007.
Didn’t Sandra Bullock just star in similar movie? Black boy can’t make it without white sponsor? Why do blacks allow Hollywood to portray them as so helpless? Tired old ‘To Sir With Love’ plot. Get some new material.
I think it satisfies a lot of needs:
1. The need to think poverty is a solvable problem. If we just get the right people, we can work miracles.
2. Some missionary zeal to help the underprivileged (and some of those schools really are awful if you are a good student).
3. A denial of HBD
4. No math required! Note that these movies almost always involve English teachers who allow students to tell their stories. Rarely do the students actually have to learn anything hard (Stand and Deliver is a notable exception, and that movie was actually good)
The three best movies in this category are To Sir, With Love, Lean on Me, and Stand and Deliver. Here, the hero genuinely cares about the students, but also expects them to behave and learn.
For a moderately funny parody of these sorts of movies, see High School High with Jon Lovitz.
Would “Gran Torino” be an example of a nice white man movie? Maybe it is the daddy version of the “nice white people” movie genre. It does not have the same condescending feel though and Clint Eastwood’s character is definitely not out to save the world.
Dear Bradlaugh !
Thank you for important post.
Meanwhile I do advise you (and everybody) to watch the movie “Precious”. It is quite an artistic illustration of 1984 Charles Murray’s book “Losing ground”.
The main thesis of the book:
It is not so much the problem of what we, the taxpayers, have to pay for welfare system.
It is the problem what is the value of the product we purchase for the money.
And Murray shows, very convincingly, that we purchase the product of extremely _negative_ value: destruction of poor (mostly minority) families.
Good movie, contrary to my (and my wife’s) original expectations.
Your truly, F.r.
See Walter Russell Mead’s chapter on Wilsonianism in Special Providence.
Freedom Writers is the sort of movie whose plot you can not only glean from the trailer, from the movie poster.