Understanding whiteness Part 10: Victim narratives, saviour complexes, and unhidden figures
The saviour complex
(edit) In the previous entry to this Understanding Whiteness series, we examined the way in which white liberalism struggles to see beyond itself, embodied, in my reading, by the character of Baby in Dirty Dancing. Since then, comment section conversations with Substack subscribers have got me thinking anew about what the fate of white liberalism, as a character, could (or should) be. For Baby, the end of Dirty Dancing is an ascension in some ways, but a regression in others. In one sense, she grows out of her liberal naivety, able to see more of the world for what it truly is, and then, depressingly, gets put in the corner, powerless to change it. You could argue that white liberalism could do with this level of reality check – being forced to accept its limitations.
On the other hand, Baby is rewarded with a dream sequence of unimaginable perfection. Does white liberalism deserve this? And what could possibly be a reward big enough to satisfy the white liberal ego? Enter White saviourism – an iteration of dominant whiteness that seeks the ultimate reward and accolade; i.e.: being the hero of the whole story…
Falling at the first hurdle
I’ll cut to the chase. White saviourism falls apart because it serves its own ego, rather than a greater good. White saviourism is distracted from its mission to actually do good by the prospect of being seen to do good. Hidden Figures, a 2016 film about three black NASA mathematicians in Civil Rights era USA, holds a particularly notorious example of this phenomenon.
The story is simple, charting the life and times of Katharine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughn and Mary Jenkins as they strive to become key members of the US space race, facing systemic sexism and racism along the way. In the film, there’s a heavily laboured sequence in which Katharine, disallowed from using the ‘Whites Only’ toilets, spends a whole montage scurrying back and forth to the nearest toilets permitted for use by black people. It’s overt Jim Crow era segregation, presented to the audience as a shocking reminder of the fundamental racism our hero is struggling against.
All is not lost. Katharine’s manager is a plain talking, no-nonsense, white man called Al Harrison played by the actor Kevin Costner. Upon discovering that his best mathematician is having to suffer the indignity of racist toilet trips, he takes the matter into his own hands, finds a sledgehammer and batters the ‘Whites Only’ sign to the ground before uttering the immortal line:
‘Here at NASA, we all pee the same colour’.
Pause for effect.
And…
…It’s entirely made up.
Not only did the sledgehammer incident not happen, at all, but the entire character of Al Harrison was fabricated for dramatic purposes. In the real life story of Katharine Johnson there was no white man fighting the good fight. Katharine Johnson didn’t need saving by a square jawed, sledgehammer wielding knight in shining armour, and, rather anti-climactically, her solution to being barred from using the ‘Whites Only’ toilet was to simply use it anyway.
White saviourism is less concerned with helping black people than it is about massaging its own ego. In the case of Hidden Figures, the insertion of a fictional white saviour actually does damage along the way, insofar as disempowering the black hero – who is shown to be reliant upon white heroics in order to complete her journey.
Released in 2016, depicting events that took place decades earlier, Hidden Figures clearly serves some purpose for modern white audiences. It seeks to sooth them, telling a story in which dominant whiteness (embodied by a Kevin Costner-shaped leading male) was on the right side of history. This is an ideal, a fairy tale designed to make reality more palatable than it really is. And for white liberalism, the reality is almost unbearable, namely that dominant whiteness simply cannot be the hero of this story. Not on its own anyway. It can help, it can assist, it can be an ally, perhaps, and it can be an advocate for the truth, but it absolutely cannot solve the problem of racism on its own – sledgehammer or not. When dominant whiteness casts itself as the hero without first looking at itself and its link to white supremacy, you get tone deaf philanthropy. You get white celebrities cradling poverty stricken children, happily reinforcing ‘third world’ stereotypes. You get black squares posted on Instagram. You get white supremacy in a new jacket. When dominant whiteness slips into blind saviour mode, it actually feeds off of black degradation. I mean, how many white funded black trauma movies does Hollywood need to make in order to show a majority white audience that racism is bad? And who do these stories serve?
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