White Saviors of the World Stay United
White Saviors of the World Stay United
No Matter How Much White Folk Mess Up, White People Still Must Rule
The enormous success of the Barbie movie and its eight Oscar nominations, along with 11 for Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, confirms above all else that representation, or feeling seen, is important. A movie that is partly about second-wave white women’s feminism and a celebration of white femininity has grossed $1.45 billion worldwide as of last month. This success confirms what so many Gen-Xers in particular have known since they were kids. Barbie, and dolls, action figures, and stuffed animals, are always about representation and imagination, allowing every child — and every adult responsible for a child — to play in the world as it is and as it ought to be, and to express the hurt and joy of it all while at play.
Oppenheimer, despite the realities of a Western-dominated world teetering toward nuclear implosion, presents the story of the man who led the effort to build what for humanity is the ultimate weapon of mass destruction during World War II. Nolan himself spoke of the importance of people like J. Robert Oppenheimer. “Whether we like it or not, we live in Oppenheimer's world, and we always will,” Nolan said in an interview after his movie’s release.
With the dominance of the neoliberal vision of diversity since the 1980s — what I have called “the Benetton” effect since I was in middle school — has risen a now not-so-new idea in popular culture, especially in movies and tv series. The idea that began with Star Trek TOS in the 1960s morphed with the Benetton effect to allow creatives to envision and implement future worlds that remain whiteness-dominated, but with women and folk of color (including women of color) mixed in so as to promote diversity within a West-centered framework. For the most part, Hollywood has fully perfected the idea that no matter how much white folk running the world mess up, the world needs white folk to save it, with a few helpful non-white sidekicks helping them out.
Despite the triumph of the 65-year-old Mattel franchise, for example, Barbie’s history is not just one of representation or of imagined worlds. Despite attempts to be more inclusive (like with the Black Barbie line or the casting of Issa Rae and Alexandra Shipp and others in the film), Barbie has mostly been a reflection of the white affluent thinking of the post-World War II years, the so-called golden age of the 1950s. Barbie’s is a world that is very white while being a place of patriarchy and a space that can and often does reproduce the very racial, gendered, and classist world the movie itself pokes fun at. Even as the Barbie movie cast other, non-white versions of its white feminism. That Greta Gerwig was not nominated for best director is as much a reflection of the world that birthed Barbie in 1959 as the movie itself.
As for Oppenheimer, it’s not just the fact that the 1940s world of massive R&D science was a white-male-dominated world where any person of color’s work within it would have been marginalized or erased as a contributor entirely (as is often the case in the 2020s, too). It’s also true the crack team of scientists and mathematicians and engineers who made the atomic bomb a real weapon were at least partly responsible for putting the world and humanity in peril. There is no Hiroshima or Nagasaki, there is no Cold War, there is no Cuban Missile Crisis, there is no American Century of bullying foreign policies, not without nuclear weapons. Yet Nolan wants viewers to pay for movie tickets and pay homage to folks — antiheroes, really — who are the progenitors of a weapon that very well could murder billions and destroy life on this planet. Those who may be responsible for destroying the world cannot also be its saviors.
This theme has been art imitating life imitating art for as long as I have been alive. Going back to the sci-fi and fantasy genres, certainly anyone can look at Star Trek franchise series like The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine and notice the creeping toward diversity in actors and in themes between 1987 and 1999, culminating in Avery Brooks’ character Captain Benjamin Sisko/The Emissary and a demigod among the Prophets. Every Star Trek series and every Star Trek movie, though, is based on a simple premise. After decades of global decline, civil wars, and the Third World War, humans discovered faster-than-light transport and benevolent aliens came to help a Western-dominated humanity clean up its mess. The social order somehow shed systemic racism, and yet left (mostly) white people in charge. Once I figured this all out, it was like Wow, what hubris! They fucked up, left billions dead, destroyed the world, and the Vulcans still left them in charge? Really? Really. Really!
But it’s only really in the past two decades that this thread of limited diversity within a futuristic framework of whiteness and West-centered ideals really took off. The movie franchise The Matrix is a perfect example of diversity as good yet grafted onto a Western-frame. Over the course of four movies in 1999, 2003, and 2021, the Wachowski sisters gradually expanded The Matrix’s world to be one of gender-queer fluidity, with a pantheon of actors of color mixed in, including a small handful of biracial actors. This level of diversity in anything Hollywood tends to impress most.
But despite this and the not-so-hidden parallels between the monstrosity of an AI-machine world that has enslaved humanity for hundreds of years and how the Western world had done the same to African and Indigenous people, the franchise disappoints. The main event is an evolving love story between Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) across more than one lifetime. All with an AI-machine world leadership that looks very much like the world humans have been born into for a quarter-millennium: very white, very male, and very much out of touch with the entities around them. The Matrix franchise lets fans and critics down because it remains fundamentally what it has always been. It is a white-dominated future, with the endless algorithms of its world drawing ultimately from the seeds of white supremacy.
Other tries at racial, gender, queer, nonbinary diversity since the turn of the century have attempted to craft a future world by implanting the present with what most Westerners and Americans would call the exotic. Take the short-lived but much-beloved tv series Firefly. A fourteen-episode, one-season arc where the concept of the space western is truly fulfilled (sorry, Gene Roddenberry). Actor Nathan Fillion as Malcolm Reynolds, along with Gina Torres, Alan Tudyk, Summer Glau, Jewel Staite, Morena Baccarin, and the late Ron Glass, brought this show about humanity living beyond Earth a half-millennium into the future to life.
The mix of English, Mandarin Chinese, and even the occasional Cantonese added some lingual diversity that allowed viewers to envision the future. But there are no Chinese actors of any significance in the series, and outside the occasional bit role, nary an Asian actor to be found. Besides Glass and Torres, the other actresses provided the relative diversity within their whiteness for the series, as in Scotch-Irish and German, (white) Brazilian and Italian, white and part First Nation. None of Joss Whedon’s futuristic stab at diversity really mattered, as the powers that could’ve been 500 years in the future remained very white and very Western, and not just in an Old West cowboy-way either.
Even the 2005 spin-off movie Serenity (the name of the lead character Reynolds’ ship, by the way), with its addition of minor Asian characters floating in the background as mere props, didn’t vary from this theme one bit. British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, who played The Operative in the movie, was the operative for a Western-civilization-style plutocratic government, who repressed information about its deadly autocratic deeds, and experimented on anyone deemed different, often weaponizing people in order to protect their rule. Whedon’s future of whiteness gained a metric ton of fans 20 years ago, even as that future represented a white and Western civilization spread across a galaxy, with limited diversity outside of barely proficient forms of Mandarin and Cantonese.
There are more recent series that encompass the penchant of Hollywood execs and showrunners and writers to create a world in which the West and Western-dominant thinking continues to reign supreme. That includes everything from Supernatural to Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek; Strange New Worlds. It’s like the powers that be can’t help themselves. No matter their imagination and understanding of the present, the future for them requires white saviors, no matter how responsible these same white villains are for putting the world in peril in the first place.
The Expanse is a nice exception to this trend.