White saviors, the progressive preference for fantasy over reality, and the reality that they secretly want black people to suffer

An almost 15-year old controversy over the Academy Award winning film, The Blind Side, is thrust back into the spotlight, proving once and for all that no good deed goes unpunished for progressives, and helping others through good works only counts if you are of the right race.

We should all agree that modern storytellers should be careful to avoid some of the more patronizing tropes of the past and the idea of a “white savior,” that is a colored people of some kind waiting on a Caucasian to lift them up, is one of those ideas.  Even setting aside any potentially racist overtones, these tropes are problematic from a purely story telling point of view because the characters lack agency.  Generally speaking, a good story requires characters who act on their own behalf based on their own unique lives and their interactions with others.  Characters that seem real, have their own motivations, goals, and objectives.  While it’s possible some people really do wait around in real life for someone to save them, doing nothing on their own behalf until a new arrival shows them the light, real life is no excuse for bad drama, as an old screenwriting professor of mine put it rather succinctly.  At the same time, we should be careful to evaluate each narrative on its own merits. Sometimes, a narrative that appears to use the white savior trope, such as Frank Herbert’s Dune, can actually be subverting it, and at other times, people really do play a critical role as a mentor or guardian, changing the lives of those around them for the better independent of race, color, or ethnicity.  A teacher, a coach, a foster parent, social worker, and others, all have the potential to positively influence people’s lives, sometimes dramatically.  Those who do such things should be celebrated; their compassion and caring elevated; their desire to help applauded, especially as this world has so many in need and seemingly so few who are willing to give of themselves to help.

Under normal circumstances, the real life story that served as the basis for the hit movie, The Blind Side, which earned Sandra Bullock an Academy Award, is one of these cases.  Michael Oher was a homeless 17-year old high school student living in foster care for a decade after his drug addicted mother lost custody of him and her eleven other children.  By a lucky quirk of fate that undoubtedly changed his life for the better, he attended high school in Memphis, TN with the son of a wealthy couple, Sean and Leigh Ann Tuohy.  The couple took an interest in the young Mr. Oher, bringing him into their home along with their own son and daughter, and ultimately signing a conservatorship that gave them legal authority to help guide his future.  Mr. Oher went on to play football for the University of Mississippi, where both Mr. and Mrs. Tuohy graduated.  Indeed, he might have not gotten into the school at all without their connections given his grade point average was below the threshold for an academic scholarship.  After a successful college career, he played professionally for the Baltimore Ravens, earning some $34 million in total.  These facts are not in dispute. In all likelihood, Mr. Oher would have become merely another statistic without the Tuohy’s, like so many others from broken homes, confined to crushing poverty.  Instead, a couple with the means and the desire, whatever their race, stepped in and opened up doorways that would almost certainly have remained closed, transforming an orphan living in foster care into a football star worth tens of millions of dollars.  I do not believe anyone disagrees with this in principle, but in practice, many attacked it as a white savior narrative even upon the film’s release in 2009, as though these events didn’t actually happen and we couldn’t see the results with our own eyes.  As the progressive website Vox.com recently described it, “Critics argued that the portrayal of Oher played into Uncle Tom stereotypes about Black people as submissive to white authority. Many also took issue with the film’s portrayal of the Tuohys as white saviors whose personal charity helped an impoverished Black youth overcome challenges and find his footing and potential.”  Jeffrey Montez de Oca of the University of Colorado-Colorado Springs had issue with the portrayal of adoption, claiming “charity operates as a signifying act of whiteness that obscures the social relations of domination that not only make charity possible but also creates an urban underclass in need of charity,” whatever that means.  Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, insisted the film perpetuated “negative racial stereotypes,” calling it “fundamentally and insidiously anti-black.”

The almost 15 year old controversy was thrust back into the public consciousness after Mr. Oher filed a petition in Shelby County Tennessee recently, alleging that the Touhy’s never actually adopted him and that he was tricked into a conservatorship instead, a legal arrangement that gave them the authority to use his name and likeness in business deals.  How they would even adopt an 18-year old adult is left unsaid, but “Michael Oher discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023, when he learned that the Conservatorship to which he consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of the Tuohy family, in fact provided him no familial relationship with the Tuohys,” the petition reads.  Mr. Oher believes he has been used by the family that protected him at a critical period to make millions of dollars from the original book and the subsequent film.  By calling him their “adopted son” in public, rather than the technical legal term, they have used “the alleged lie to boost their foundation and other promotional work” to quote Vox.com.  Mr. Oher is asking for an immediate end of the conservatorship, the revocation of the family’s use of his name and likeness, and an accounting of how much money they made from the book and the film, plus damages.   The Tuohy’s themselves have refused to criticize Mr. Oher in public, other than claiming he has been aware of the conservatorship for some time.  Instead, they insist, as the son put it, “You will never hear me say anything bad about Michael Oher in any capacity other than I’m upset that he feels the way that he does.”

The family has, however, engaged a lawyer, a Hollywood heavyweight, in fact, who issued a statement claiming Mr. Oher is seeking $15 million and has threatened to “plant a negative story about them in the press.”  Further, the Tuohys have always been “upfront about how a conservatorship (from which not one penny was received) was established to assist with Mr. Oher’s needs,” such as getting health insurance, and this is not the first that Mr. Oher has “attempted to run this play.”  Mr. Tuohy also insists the conservatorship was necessary for him to play football at the University of Mississippi, a not unreasonable proposition, and he’s willing to end it voluntarily anyway. While I’m not qualified to comment on the legal merits of the petition, the underlying accusation strikes me as absurd.  The Tuohy’s couldn’t possibly have known that a film would be made of their experience when they signed the conservatorship shortly after Mr. Oher turned 18, nor could they have known that he would go on to be a football star.  Unless they could see into the future somehow, we can only assume they were acting out of charity and compassion, taking Mr. Oher into their home to the shock of even their close friends, providing him with much needed necessities and support, and assisting him through his football journey.  This is true even if charitable giving helped their self esteem or otherwise scratched some other itch.  Ask yourself:  How many people do you know that would do this for a person who was effectively a stranger and potentially a troubled one given his background?  I know precisely one.  The Tuohy’s were wealthy, that is true, but having the means to positively impact someone’s life and actually doing so are two different things.  The Tuohy’s stepped up and did precisely that, and for their pains, they are being maligned once more in many parts of the media.

CNN’s Jill Filopivic falls short of accusing the Tuohy’s of malice, but still insists the situation was ripe for “exploitation,” “his background and age made him far less sophisticated than the Tuohys, who were much older, much wealthier and much more experienced. Whether the agreement was actually manipulative or not, the circumstances were prime ones for exploitation.”  What exploitation could possibly have occurred at that point is oddly unexplained, but we can glean some of her meaning when Ms. Filopovic broadens the perspective to white Christians who adopt minority children in general.  “It’s also difficult to take Oher’s story out of the context of the abuses rife within Christian adoptive communities. In the last two decades, it has become trendy for White Evangelical families to adopt children, often children of color and often children from poor countries, as part of a broader mission to spread God’s word…This has resulted in profound and widespread exploitation.”  She has no evidence this was the case, except the Tuohy’s use similar language when they tell their story.  She quotes the couples’ autobiography, apparently shocked that they claim they “decided early on that her mission was to raise children who would become ‘cheerful givers.’ Sean, who grew up poor, believed that one day he could provide a home that would be ‘a place of miracles.’ Together, they raised two remarkable children ― Collins and Sean Jr. ― who shared their deep Christian faith and their commitment to making a difference. And then one day Leigh Anne met a homeless African-American boy named Michael and decided that her family could be his. She and her husband taught Michael what this book teaches all of us: Everyone has a blind side, but a loving heart always sees a path toward true charity.”  Also of interest to Ms. Filipovic, the Tuohy’s claim that  “Michael Oher’s improbable transformation could never have happened if Leigh Anne and Sean Tuohy had not opened their hearts to him.” Thus, she concluded, “Oher’s success in life, in other words, was made possible by the Tuohys, and they have used his story to promote themselves through the language of Christianity.”

Needless to say, she never explains what precisely she believes would have happened to Mr. Oher if he were left in the foster system.  Does she think it’s a coincidence that Mr. Oher attended the same university as the Tuohy’s or that his drug addicted mother would have been able to do the same for him?  Nor is Ms. Filipovic alone in finding potential malice if not evil when white Christians help others, selflessly giving of themselves and expecting nothing in return.  NY Mag’s The Cut argues that “Michael Oher Doesn’t Have to be Grateful to the Tuohys,” in a rather shocking redefinition of the term.  What rational person wouldn’t be grateful to someone who gave of themselves to help them out at a critical juncture in their lives and what sane person would right an article proclaiming they don’t need to be grateful?  I’m reminded of my own family after my parents got divorced.  My grandmother, without question, put her retirement savings towards a down payment on a house for my mother and my three siblings.  It was the last thing she expected at that point in her life, from living alone in her pleasant little co-op to being thrust into the bottom level of a home with four children aged ten through eighteen, and finding herself once again needing to be a breadwinner.  We certainly had our differences given the generations and the normal chaos that ensues in such a situation, but not once was I ever anything but grateful.  I can barely imagine where we would have been without her, stuck in a tiny rental for that number of people, my mother eking out a meager existence simply to make ends meet. My entire life would have been different.  In Mr. Oher’s case, The Cut’s author, Andrea Gonzalez-Ramirez, who covers “systems of power,” quoted Angela Tucker, who is black and was herself adopted by white family, the author of You Should Be Grateful: Stories of Race, Identity, and Transracial Adoption.  “What do Black and brown people have to do in order to be seen as fully human and deserving of being believed?  As Black adoptees, we don’t get that benefit of the doubt.  There can never be an accusation that we make without people defending white people first, looking at us sideways, thinking, There’s gotta be more to the story.  Maybe they’re exaggerating.”  She continued to impugn the film as playing a huge “role in people viewing adoption as a purely charitable act that benefits all involved.” Obviously, there are situations where an adoption does not benefit everyone involved and conservatorships that are used for nefarious purposes, but that is not this story, or the vast majority of them, nor should we accept her position that basic gratitude for a helping hand is not to be expected.  That’s what gratitude is.  The entire point is to feel something for those who helped you when they needn’t have done so.  Reading statements like these make it no wonder that the younger generations appear to be the most ungrateful in human history.

Overall, one also gets the distinct impression that Mr. Oher and others in his situation would be better off left for dead in the minds of these progressives.  The fact that there is any debate over whether or not Mr. Oher’s success is due entirely – or at least in an incredibly large part – to the Tuohy’s welcoming him into their home and their family is a testament to the insanity of our times.  His mother was a drug addict who had twelve children and left them to their own devices, literally struggling on the street, taking precisely no care at all for her offspring.  The odds of any of them achieving the kind of success Mr. Oher has from that background are essentially zero.  Everyone knows what happens to these kids when they are not adopted and cared for.  Mr. Oher himself said in his own book that, when the Tuohy’s took him in, he was starving and needed a home.  This is not a situation that leads to football stardom, fame, and fortune, and everyone knows it, but underneath the surface of statements from Ms. Filipovic, Ms. Gonzalez-Ramirez, and others, that seems to be exactly what these progressives would prefer.  Deep down inside, they’d rather Mr. Oher starve and no one ever knew his name than accept that a white Christian couple saved his life, or at least turned it completely around.  I have no idea what happened specifically between the family and Mr. Oher, but I do know that by any rational standard the Tuohy’s deserve praise for doing what few in their situation would have done and that we should be encouraging more people to act charitably and do the same.  The perversion that leads one to attack them – and others in a similar situation – can only be described as a mental illness, a plague upon us all. Previously, I’ve noted that when it comes to the woke, you are damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Apparently, the situation is even worse than I thought, if helping others is a bad thing when you are of the wrong race.