February 20, 1998

REVIEW: White Man’s Burden

We know, or we should know, that being black is more than an accent-whether John Travolta himself, or the writer, or the director who blocked the scenes defined this white-man-in-a-black-man’s-world’s character as black because of either the accent or socioeconomic condition alone is besides the point: the movie wants us to believe that that is all there is; granted, we have white-black skinhead gangs visiting violence upon the head of our black-white nonprotagonist, Harry Belafonte’s character, but it seems as if there is no correspondingly white-black cause for this gang violence; the movie gives us no clue as to the specifically white origins of this gang violence over against the black gang violence we have come to know and market; these skinheads might as well be the ones we have now. Why the movie’s white-blackness is comprised of nothing but accent: it must preserve the blackness in whiteness, and cannot make it a specific kind of white poverty or injustice in order to deliver its arguably problack message: the nobility and socioeconomically induced savagery of John Travolta’s character is supposed to strike us as a hearttugging tension and contradiction in the souls of white-black folk, and we are supposed next to remember that “this is a diagnosis of blacks as we already know them,” and “Lo!” If this movie succeeds at all in this cheap trick, it is only because we are unable to look injustice-sans-whiteface in the unaverted eye: if seeing Travolta as a white-black man moves one, that one is racist, guilty of at least wilful blindness—which is what the movie exploits, in order to trick one into seeing and discovering its message—in the face of real black folk.

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