Word: whiteness
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John Lee Hancock's movie, based on the Michael Lewis nonfiction best seller, is about Michael Oher, a homeless black teenager who was adopted by a white couple and, after many a challenge, became a star tackle at the University of Mississippi. (Today, Oher is an acclaimed rookie for the Baltimore Ravens.) A true story that sounds like it's the most improbable type of uplifting fiction, The Blind Side could have been one of the dozens of sports inspirationals that reach their core audiences, moisten many eyes and retire quickly to the DVD shelves. Yet it's obviously connecting...
...Michael's enablers are white folks. Here are the film's main black characters: his crack-addicted mother (Adriane Lenox, who's very good, considering what she's got to work with); a drug lord and his posse who try to derail Michael from his destiny; and a buppie lawyer from the NCAA who investigates a charge that the Tuohys have unfairly steered Michael, who's finally a much-recruited high school star, into the Ole Miss football program. These characters are either lost, evil or suspicious. It's as if blackness were a plague and adoption by whites...
Reviewing the movie for Slant, Aaron Cutler goes further: "The ultimate NFL destination renders the whole thing benevolently sadistic: A white community first removes Michael from other black people, then trains him to beat them up on the field." Well, The Blind Side isn't exactly Gladiator. Oher is being paid well to do what hundreds of thousands of young men dream of. And if he had been left on the streets of Memphis, he might be dead now. But for all the closeups of black-white handshakes, the movie does have a Manichean view of the racial divide...
...pregnant, illiterate teenage girl whose teacher goads her toward self-worth. Both Michael and Precious begin as scholastic failures with awful moms and no hope who are reclaimed and saved by a caring adult woman. Except that, here, we see the awkward teen through the eyes of his white benefactor. Leigh Anne's first visit to Michael's old neighborhood is treated like Margaret Mead landing on Samoa. She delivers tough love to Michael's mother and tough lip to the local drug lords. At times, she can be caustic to her beloved charge. At the end, as Michael goes...
During the panel discussion that followed, Gordon-Reed explained the significance of acknowledging different accounts of Jefferson from the slave children that he fathered with Hemings, rather than relying on the accounts of white men who had no respect for the slaves...