(Is Avatar Racist?) When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?

io9 ^ | Dec 18, 2009 | By Annalee Newitz

[DogByte6RER]

When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?

Critics have called alien epic Avatar a version of Dances With Wolves because it's about a white guy going native and becoming a great leader. But Avatar is just the latest scifi rehash of an old white guilt fantasy.

Spoilers...

Whether Avatar is racist is a matter for debate.

Regardless of where you come down on that question, it's undeniable that the film - like alien apartheid flick District 9, released earlier this year - is emphatically a fantasy about race. Specifically, it's a fantasy about race told from the point of view of white people. Avatar and scifi films like it give us the opportunity to answer the question: What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent. In the film, a group of soldiers and scientists have set up shop on the verdant moon Pandora, whose landscapes look like a cross between Northern California's redwood cathedrals and Brazil's tropical rainforest. The moon's inhabitants, the Na'vi, are blue, catlike versions of native people: They wear feathers in their hair, worship nature gods, paint their faces for war, use bows and arrows, and live in tribes. Watching the movie, there is really no mistake that these are alien versions of stereotypical native peoples that we've seen in Hollywood movies for decades.

[DogByte6RER]

James Cameron makes another blockbuster, this time one centered on liberal white guilt.

I'll save my ten bucks for something else more worthwhile...

[Mamzelle]

There is a great open thread at Bighollywood.com of reviews of the movie...Breit must really hate this movie!

[theBuckwheat]

Because liberalism is the based on the rejection of external moral values and the supremacy of internal, ever-changing subjective morality, the lib lives in a world where he can do no wrong. This is because he is morphing his own rules as he goes. He never violates them, at the very least because he is always giving himself a pass.

No matter how often and to what extent the lib excuses his own shortcomings, he really cannot escape cause-and-effect nature of the violation of timeless moral principles. Since he rejects God, there is no sin, and the lib has no way in his own internal thinking to face his sins and to have them forgiven.

In short what we see with themes like this is a form of self-loathing. Such people make me sick. Not only for the damage they do to the rest of us, but because they will tolarate anything in their personal lives and in the lives of those they approve of, but let it be known you are a Christian, and they will shower sneering scorn on what you beliefs, and laugh at your shortcomings.

[blam]

"I'll save my ten bucks for something else more worthwhile... "

Yup...you're going to need more ammo.

[blam]

"In short what we see with themes like this is a form of self-loathing. Such people make me sick. Not only for the damage they do to the rest of us, but because they will tolarate anything in their personal lives and in the lives of those they approve of, but let it be known you are a Christian, and they will shower sneering scorn on what you beliefs, and laugh at your shortcomings."

There was a time when people fought and died for their beliefs...we may be there again.

[crescen7]

Yeah, it’s even more than “racist”. It’s also “enviromentist” to coin a phrase. It’s that tired old saw about “civilized” people raping and pillaging the land for mineral wealth.

The bizarre thing is that it’s 180 degrees out of phase. Right now humans are being devastated in favor of a “smelt” in California’s central Valley, all over the country land use is determined by epa “wetlands” and endangered species rules.

It’s about time for somebody to do a movie about the totalitarian environmentalists.

[purplelobster]

Sounds like “A Man Called Horse” from the ‘70’s starring Richard Harris. Cameron could have saved 300 million and shot the remake with a few horses, teepees, vintage military costumes and a drunken irishman.

[AndrewB]

Gimme some good old fashioned blacksploitation ...

[aruanan]

(Is Avatar Racist?) When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"?

No. Avatar is not racist. One could say it was specie-ist, but comments on this movie are just examples of people wanting to hang their political junk from any convenient hook. It was an extremely well done movie with a good story and a satisfactory ending. It was a story about powerful people moving in to take from powerless people their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness and ending up getting their asses thoroughly kicked. It was a movie about the triumph of good over evil and choices people have to make to fight with the good, even if it meant possibly giving up something they're really yearned for--like the Marine being promised new legs if he did this one little thing.

[DogByte6RER]

Yes...

I remember that dopey movie (and its sequels) during the 1970s-1980s.

I think one of the “Man Called Horse” movies was playing as the B flick at a drive-in when I was with a girlfriend.

[FrankR]

" When Will White People Stop Making Movies Like "Avatar"? "

Also...

When will white people stop having to endure endless, white-bashing, cracker-calling, black cast sitcoms on all the networks;

When will "Roots" and other 200-year-old slavery setting movies stop being aired on PBS as a "booster shot" of white guilt?

When will people stop looking for perceived racism is everything white people say and do, we have a culture too.

How long must white people walk on eggshells and stifle their freedoms of speech and expression lest they "offend" some person of color? Definition: "Offend V. the definite possiblility of a lawsuit or legal action".

and finally,

When will the white people learn that most of this "white guilt" crap is just a control ploy, designed to "put chu in yo place", and possibly extract some of yo money"...right Jesse?

You know what you are...don't let other people define you.

[Hugin]

Avatar imaginatively revisits the crime scene of white America's foundational act of genocide, in which entire native tribes and civilizations were wiped out by European immigrants to the American continent.

The premier big lie about America. There never was any genocide of the Indians.

I don't know if it's racist, but aperently it's anti-Americanm anti-business, and anti-military.

[aruanan]

James Cameron makes another blockbuster, this time one centered on liberal white guilt.

I'll save my ten bucks for something else more worthwhile...

Why don't you actually watch the movie instead of responding in a knee-jerk reaction to some politicoid's use of the movie to promote his own mini culture war? This kind of response is exactly what made possible the global warming crowd's ascendency.

I went into the movie with all that I had read by the detractors and discovered that they were really, REALLY reaching. The movie wasn't anything like that. It was a simple story of good versus evil and the powerful finally getting kicked in the teeth by the downtrodden they were abusing. That some of the powerful evil folks were humans? Big deal. As though we can go through over 4000 years of human history and see only beneficence in the way humans treat other humans.

[Yardstick]

Best of the comments section is by a black woman who says that just as predictable as the movie being a white race fantasy is the inevitable high minded and oh-so-intellectual analysis that identifies the movie as a white race fantasy. I like how she turned the tables.

What’s funny and ultra postmodern about this is that it’s a liberal director who’s made the film and liberal critics who are finding the racial themes. Which expresses in a perfect nutshell the state of race in this country — namely that liberals are obsessed with it.

[donna]

What do white people fantasize about when they fantasize about racial identity?

That the promotion is awarded based on merit, not race.

[GnuHere]

Oh, you mean like the Aleve ad where all the white people are looking at other pain relievers, moaning and counting how many pills they have to take, and the wise black woman walks in and finds she can take many fewer? I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, or maybe the wise Latina was not available that day...

[TomasUSMC]

Hey it wasn’tthat bad. It took a White Marine to save the “Blue Monkeys”.

[eyedigress]

It’s meant to piss off people.

[FrankR]

"Oh, you mean like the Aleve ad where all the white people are looking at other pain relievers, moaning and counting how many pills they have to take, and the wise black woman walks in and finds she can take many fewer? I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, or maybe the wise Latina was not available that day..."

Yep....that would be one example....

[Anti-Utopian]

"Avatar," and all the previous movies it plagiarizes, are indeed racist, but not the way most people think.

In every one of these tired iterations, the "victim" natives are always dipicted as primitive, dirt-eating chumps armed with sharp sticks and rocks, nature-loving hippies who are guaranteed to be wiped-out by the approaching war machine. But wait! What's this?! A WHITE MALE abandons the machine, rejects a life where he is but a cog in that awesome machine, and uses his OBVIOUS SUPERIORITY over the chumps to easily become the Savior of the Dirt Hippies!

People believe this is about the superiority of sharp sticks over technology, of dirt-worship over progress. But the truth is, this is the deranged fantasy of a damaged ego that believes white leftists alone are the redeemers and sovereigns of the stupid, backward troglodytes of the world.

Barf on Avatar, and barf on the next movie to flog this tired, nauseating, racist fantasy of mental defectives.