Why Movies on Racism Don’t Really Change Anything

They give a glimpse into the past where you get to see how bad it used to be for black people, which may enable you to put some of the lingering issues into context. Less frequently, you get movies about gay icons and their struggles. The idea behind all of this is to educate us, to make a positive change, bring us together.  Hollywood is trying to be positive by showing us how bad white people have been, and how much black people have suffered. In theory it looks like the right thing to do. When people forget you want to remind them so that they don’t make their old mistakes again. The problem is that the people who need to watch these movies never do, and if they did, if Pride, or Glory Road, or Milk, or The Express were to be rented by accident, by a true bigot, it would not really change them. 

Let’s look at how change works. For you to become a different person, to change the flaws in your personality, in your outlook, you have to recognize that there is a problem, that you have a fault. Then you have to hate that fault enough to be motivated to correct it, meaning you have to be able to see the bad in you. Once you are motivated you have to do the actual work of removing it. if you manage to remove the flaw you have to do everything in your power to not fall back into your old ways. That’s all just basic problem-solving and behavior-correction. It’s what you have to do to get yourself out of any rut in life, any bad habit. If you want to quit smoking or lose weight, or stop cheating on your wife, you have to handle all of it in the same way, with the same skills. Most people never even get to step one in their lives, with anything, they never recognize that there are problems.

If you never recognize that you too are a bigot then you can watch all the civil-rights era movies you want. You can see black people being moved to the back of the bus or have the crap beaten out of them by Alabama hicks, it will not matter, you will not identify with the bad guys even if you are exactly like them. The lens through which people view their own behavior is altered by ego and its favorite tool: denial. People will see what they want to see in the mirror and ignore the truth if that is necessary to avoid feeling bad about who they are. 

Another problem aspect of these movies is their preachy nature. Nobody likes being preached at so it almost never works. Apart from the fact that the minute you subject yourself to it you are pretty much admitting that the self-righteous preacher may have a point, there is the fact that preaching is the easiest thing in the world to tune out. With the right mindset you can selectively omit all the things you don’t want to hear from memory. 

At the end of these movies everybody learns to work together and they all get to see that other are just like them and form bonds across black-white or gay-straight boundaries. Note that all of these movies are set pretty far back in the past. It’s as if none of this overcoming happens, or is necessary in the contemporary world. The reason they choose to set these in that time is that nobody wants to admit that there is still work to do. They want to point at the 60s and say this is when we got our issues settled. Note that nothing works like that in real life. People rarely introspect enough to solve something as deep and potent as racism, what they do is learn to fake like they have, or they just get tired of the sheer effort it takes to be angry all the time, but that doesn’t make for a good movie. On the rare occasion that they do, seriously, try to change, it is imperfect and the old person still shows through from time to time.