A Mild Defence of White Man's Burden (the 1995 film, not the cultural concept)

White Man's Burden was made in 1995, the plot is in a nutshell; John Travolta (Louis Pinnock) is a working class man raising a family in a bad neighbourhood, gets falsely accused as a peeping tom by his employer Harry Belafonte (Thaddeus Thomas) and is soon dismissed, losing his job and the callous way he loses it kicks off a chain reaction of bad news for Louis, who faces unemployment and eviction, after trying and failing to find a new job a desperate Louis kidnaps Thaddeus and tries to ransom him. The rest of the film is a sort of odd couple morality tale where a hostage Thaddeus is dragged through the slums and learns how the other half live while an increasingly desperate Louis tries to improvise ways to make his ransom plan work.

The unique selling point of this movie is that it takes place in an alternate reality USA where the racial dynamics are flipped upside down. Here the wealthy and politically dominant are Black Americans, and the White Americans are a marginalised underclass. Its not a great movie, but I feel its heart was in the right place, the reason it exists its to try and expose the features of societal racism to the group that gets the most out of the way society works. To paraphrase `Think racism is no big deal huh, well what if you were on the receiving end of it?` sort of moral lesson. I'm not American so I can't say how well its aged but its an interesting attempt at least. And Harry Belafonte does excellent work with what he's given, he's really convincing as an aloof casually bigoted wealthy patriarch who thoughtlessly uses the vast powers his position gives him to practically make or ruin many total strangers lives and doesn't even notice. And when he's being dragged through the films ghetto neighbourhoods he's believable as the scared and clueless fish out of water. As impractical and ill thought out as Louis's kidnapping plan is, Thaddeus has never had to be confronted in this way before and is equally hapless as he tries to placate the unstable Louis and use opportunities for escape and rescue. And his final transformation as man riddled with guilt over his own role in a horrible system, combined with his continued uselessness and unfamiliarity with his surroundings gives the film its emotional weight.

Its not a science fiction dystopia, its a pretty realistic depiction of a 1990s USA, just with the roles mirrored. The businessmen are all highly educated Black men, there are Black workers in the factories and services alongside white Americans, but the senior positions, the managers, foreman etc are mostly held by black workers. The unemployment office is bureaucratic and unhelpful, and they filmed the scenes depicting overwhelmingly white slums in the actually existing impoverished neighbourhoods that have overwhelming black and latinx populations, and the largely black police force behaves just like the largely white police force does. However there is a downside to this striving for a sense of realism, John Travolta does an accent, loaded with a slang dialect, he's doing this so the film can comment on how society penalises and judges minorities for behaving in ways that are perfectly normal for them, but different from that of the more powerful group that establishes normality. Problem is its very distracting, and it weakens his performance because so much of his energy is spent on keeping the accent going. 

Its not a perfect film, but it is watchable and while the message may seem a bit obvious to some, but when I saw it one night in the early 2000s, -I couldn't have been older than 13- certain parts of it did teach me things I honestly had never encountered or considered before. I grew up in a small town with very little ethnic diversity, so while I was aware that racism exists and is bad, it was always a bit abstract. This film helped me understand that it wasn't just individual ideology and beliefs that created racism and kept it going, but that a society founded for and on the benefit of some would perpetuate those views and relationships everywhere. I still remember the scene where they're channel surfing, and the cast of every single program be it adverts, soap operas, action movies, documentaries etc was starring black actors, and were usually depicting "typical American lifestyles and values" that were far removed from the lives lived by the white urban poor of the film. Which got me thinking, that's probably not because the heads of the tv channels are all individually actively racist, its because they're run by people who grew up in those life styles, and are marketing shows and products to that audience. But the effect of this is that the people who don't have any connections to those lifestyles, and cannot take part in the markets being targeted are essentially stuck watching another world that's foreign and alienating.

Another strength of the film is that it doesn't take easy ways out. Thaddeus is not like Scrooge, who totally changed his ways after being visited by three ghosts in the night. Thaddeus has been changed by what he's witnessed, but his one attempt at change is not accepted, is motivated largely by personal guilt and its made clear that even if his gestured had been accepted it wouldn't have changed anything truly important. At the start of the film he's part of a societal power structure that perpetuates cruelty, and he's powerful enough to inflict some of that on his own, but when it comes to making meaningful change he's powerless and buckles under the pressure. 

White Man's Burden isn't very popular, its critical reception is mixed and it doesn't come up in conversations often, but its not totally obscure either, dvds are still being sold at standard prices and clips aren't hard to find. But given the content and how our existing societies have developed since the 1990s, I would be very curious to see if this film could still get broadcast today and what its modern reception to a new audience was.