White Man's Burden

The film White Man's Burden, about a world where black and white Americans reverse roles, portrays a world that is not too pleasant from the outside looking in.  In this world, certain people are treated very poorly and unjust, while some are born privileged.  These privileges are based almost completely off skin color.  I think that this movie tries to cover a very serious and important topic, racism, but I think that they fall short of convincing much of the audience.

To begin, this film takes too much of a "hollywood" route on how to portray racism.  I think that they take the situations to the extreme.  For example, when Louis Finnock kidnaps Thaddeus Thomas that seems very "hollywood."  The Finnock character is just so terrible with his choices that I found myself at times rooting against the protagonist.  I think that a more realistic situation could have been Louis Finnock continually looking for a job and being unsuccessful due to his skin color.  However, I understand how that plot line would not have been entertaining enough for the audience.  It just seems to me that the plot is so unrealistic that the topic of racism is not covered fairly.

Additionally, the African-American characters are portrayed as the "bad guys" in the film.  This seems to be an unproductive way of demonstrating the evils of racism.  As I was watching the film, I found myself feeling sorry for the white characters rather than realizing the evils that racism has caused to the black people in our country and other places throughout the world.  This was also partially caused by the unfortunate story line in the movie.

Another issue that I had with this film was the extreme stereotypes.  I will try to tread lightly as I state this due to the fact that I have never encountered extreme racism like others have.   I found it hard to believe that this movie would portray nearly every single white person as poor & uneducated and nearly all of the black people as rich, educated, and attractive.  Is this what hollywood producers thought would get the message across regarding racism?  Either way, I found this to be a bit ridiculous.

Overall, I feel as if the creators of this film had the right intention; they wanted to prove how awful racism is and how it affects people.  However, I do not think that the way this movie's plot was made was productive to this cause.  I would like to see a film with this same goal, but I would like to see one that was more realistic.