DOESN'T GET MUCH WHITER THAN LINCOLN, DE KLERK & LBJ:

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 (Joe Queenan, January 5, 2007, The Guardian)

If there is anything black people the world over have learned from Hollywood - and there isn't a whole lot - it's that no matter how bleak the situation seems, they can always rely on some resourceful, charismatic and, in some instances, shapely white person to bail them out.

The Zwick film in question is the exciting but characteristically idiotic Blood Diamond, in which Leonardo DiCaprio plays a ruthless Rhodesian smuggler who specialises in spiriting precious stones out of war-torn nations whose diamonds the G8 nations have promised not to purchase, as the profits are invariably used to do very bad things. They are called "conflict diamonds". [...]

Despite Connolly's beatific stature as the White Journalist Who Cares - and Cares Deeply - she gradually finds her role as the anointed one filched from right under her by the morally recrudescent DiCaprio. For, as the film proceeds, and as more and more horrible black rebels kill off horrible black soldiers representing the horrible black regime - every black person in the film is either a victim or a monster - DiCaprio gradually comes to realise that there are more important things in life than money, that ebony needs ivory, that diamonds are not forever.

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.

In fairness to Hollywood, it was white folks who unilaterally ended slavery and apartheid and bilaterally Jim Crow.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 4, 2007 9:09 PM