‘White Savior: The Movie’ Champions Hollywood’s True Underdogs

The white saviour narrative is almost as old as modern cinema itself.

For decades, Hollywood has been making movies that place white characters at the foreground of the narrative, at the expense of people of colour — movies about brave, heroic Caucasian people who sweep in, save the day, and sort out the problems of disenfranchised communities for them.

To Kill A Mockingbird is probably the most significant example of such a narrative, but to be totally honest, there are thousands of them — from civil rights drama Mississippi Burning to Civil War epic Glory to weepy drama The Help to engineer porn Hidden Figures. In all of these films, African-American characters are relegated to the position of props, while white people do the hard work of change for them.

How "white savior" movies hurt Hollywood pic.twitter.com/LJw9N4gy1Z

— INSIDER (@thisisinsider) March 6, 2019

Now, the white saviour narrative is receiving renewed attention and pushback. Though African-American critics like Bell Hooks have been tackling the issue for decades, the trope is hitting the public eye once more — presumably in no small part thanks to the Best Picture win of widely derided Green Book, a film that was heaped with criticism for thoroughly committing to the trope.

Now, talk show host Seth Meyers has aired his own takedown of the trope, in the form of a fake trailer for a film called White Savior: The Movie.

In it, Meyers plays the role of an overenthusiastic Caucasian man, who seeks to take credit for everything from adjusting a woman’s mic stand, to solving complex equations that he hasn’t actually solved.

It’s an all too real — and genuinely funny — dismantling of a very unwelcome trope. Although of course, there is a degree of irony in the fact that we’re giving Seth Meyers, a white man, the credit for poking fun at something that African-American critics have been discussing for some time. Looks like the white saviour narrative really is everywhere.