Dismissals of Glory and Free State of Jones, as well as DuVernay’s explanation for the historical falsifications at play in Selma, may give the impression that the detractors of white saviorship are voicing a populist sensibility, complaining that black people are represented as incapable of effective social action without a white person (usually a man) leading them. And there is ample precedent in the history of popular culture for suspicion in that regard. The Tarzan films are perhaps the crassest and best-known examples; my father often remarked sarcastically that Africans should be grateful for Tarzan’s presence, since otherwise they apparently would all have been eaten by lions and crocodiles. The 1988 film Mississippi Burning incongruously makes FBI agents (white, though does that really matter?) the heroes of the civil rights campaign. Richard Attenborough’s 1987 Cry Freedom describes the struggle against apartheid and the murder of Stephen Biko through the travails of his white friend, the journalist Donald Woods. And there are many more examples; it is in fact the long history of such narratives that makes what might otherwise be simple feel-good stories, presented with an interracial twist—Conrack (1974), Dangerous Minds (1995), and The Blind Side (2009), among many others—something more distasteful and pernicious than just a set of interchangeable thematic variations on the maudlin human-interest narrative of uplift and overcoming.
But “white savior” objections to Glory and Free State are a different matter. Those films hinge largely on the prominence of black agency, which race-first critics apparently deem irrelevant. Their objection is not that blacks’ agency is absent; it is rather about who is represented as leading their efforts. Decisions by blacks to support nonblack candidates or social policies not expressed in race-first terms are interpreted as evidence of flawed, limited, misguided, or otherwise co-opted black agency. The idea that blacks, like everyone else, make their history under conditions not of their own choosing becomes irrelevant, just another instance of insufficient symbolic representation.
The notion that black Americans are political agents just like other Americans, and can forge their own tactical alliances and coalitions to advance their interests in a pluralist political order is ruled out here on principle. Instead, blacks are imagined as so abject that only extraordinary intervention by committed black leaders has a prayer of producing real change. This pernicious assumption continually subordinates actually existing history to imaginary cultural narratives of individual black heroism and helps drive the intense—and myopic—opposition that many antiracist activists and commentators express to Bernie Sanders, social democracy, and a politics centered on economic inequality and working-class concerns.
