via Steve Gilliard

A whiter shade of guile
In Blood Diamond, Leonardo DiCaprio is the latest in a long line of Caucasian crusaders fighting for po' black folks. Joe Queenan is once again staggered at Hollywood's sheer gall
Friday January 5, 2007
The Guardian

Zwick would thus have us believe that in a society ravaged by a murderous civil war, where black children are routinely kidnapped and induced to murder other black children, after being shot up with heroin purchased with conflict diamonds from horrible white people from out of town, the man who will ultimately bring the villains to justice is a formally depraved Rhodesian mercenary who now prefers justice and racial harmony to wealth. Hmmm, say I to Mr Zwick. Hmmm!

Blood Diamond joins a growing body of films set in Africa in which good vanquishes evil because morally upstanding white folks ultimately triumph over truly satanic white folks. Meanwhile, the entire black African population kind of takes a back seat and watches the honkies duke it out. For example, in The Constant Gardener, Rachel Weisz plays an incorruptible white woman who is murdered by a gang of racially mixed thugs in the employ of the thoroughly evil white man Bill Nighy, all because she has stumbled upon damning proof that white-owned pharmaceutical companies - the very worst kind - have been secretly using ordinary black people as guinea pigs in their perfidious experiments. Bad white people! Bad! But, by the end of the film, the very wicked, very white Nighy will be packed off to the calaboose thanks to the efforts of the very saintly and even more pasty-faced Ralph Fiennes, who lays down his own life for the benefit of impoverished black Africans. To which an entire continent of otherwise invisible black people joyously exclaim: "Hear, hear! Hats off to White Folks!"

Hard-done-by Africans also get a surprising helping hand from white folks in The Interpreter, in which Nicole Kidman plays an African-born translator who accidentally discovers that perfidious black men are planning an assassination involving black men who are not nearly as perfidious. She is able to do this because she is the wrong place at the right time and because the men are speaking in an obscure language that only two white people on the entire planet have mastered: Nicole Kidman and David Attenborough. These films derive directly from such motion pictures as A Dry White Season and Cry the Beloved Country, where the evil that white men do gets swept under the rug by the good that other white men do. In all of these movies the same message comes through: Yes, some white people are bad. Oh, so very, very bad! But when white people are good, well, nobody does it better. That's just the way white people are.

The template for the Up With Caucasians! film was established in 1962 with the release of Robert Mulligan's preposterously overrated To Kill a Mockingbird. Based on a beloved, fabulously successful, thoroughly absurd novel by Harper Lee, who never wrote another book, To Kill a Mockingbird tells the story of two white children living in the Deep South in the 1930s who gradually come to realise what a heroic figure their father cuts after he courageously defends a black man accused of raping a white woman.

The self-congratulatory motion picture was released at a time that black men were still being lynched in the South. Bob Dylan even wrote a song about it. The notion that a black farmhand accused of raping a white woman in the 1930s - 30 years before the film was made - would have ever reached the courthouse in Dixie is somewhat fanciful, as is the director's refusal to dress the white trash who come to bust the innocent man out of jail in the customary garb of the era: freshly laundered sheets. Instead, they are portrayed as hapless rustics who have temporarily misplaced their moral compass and merely need to come to their senses. You know: Good Ol' Boys.

Pioneeringly foolish, To Kill a Mockingbird establishes the basic theme of all Three Cheers for Whitey! movies: Yes, there are many bad white people out there who do some terrible, terrible things to black people. But when the chips are down and black people are poised on the very precipice of disaster, they can always rely on some thoroughly decent white folks to step in and make sure that justice prevails.

What does this have to do with Fox TV?

M.A.N.T.I.S.

M.A.N.T.I.S. started as a two hour made for TV movie by Samm Hamm. The hero was a Black guy, a paraplegic genius, who with the assistance of a brilliant brother-sister team of scientists from Africa, created an exoskeleton to fight crime. The pilot did so well, they decided to make it a series.

Fox, however, decided to make some changes so people could "better relate" to the show. The changes?

The primary work in creating, updating and maintaining the suit was done by a white guy. And a white Gen-X bike messenger got into the mix somehow. Discussing it in the media asection of the Wall Street Journal, a Fox executive  said, "I mean, come on...African scientists?"

I almost skipped the Static cartoon too. In the Milestone comics, he was this really smart Black kid that got electromagnetic powers and worked every science lesson he'd ever had with them. On the TV cartoon...Richie, the white kid that invented his support tools. Ultimately turned out to have the super power of hyperintelligence.

So yeah. The pattern is real.