one of these days, I’ll get back to having my own thoughts on these issues . . .

Seriously, though . . . I haven’t seen Avatar, though I’ve heard much about it. I did see The Blind Side, and went into it quite reluctantly, knowing that I wouldn’t be able to turn off my “anti-racism radar”. I was actually pleasantly surprised by a few things:

1) The mom took him shopping in HIS neighborhood for clothes. a) she wasn’t all, “EEK!!! THE INNER CITY!!!” b) even though his fashion style didn’t match the “norm” at their school (which crazily reminded me of NorthPointe), she let him be who he was in that sense.

(in contrast, when 20/20 covered the story, they included a story about a young man who “could be the next Michael Oher“. I about punched a hole through my tv screen when they said that this kid moved in with a white family because “they couldn’t bring him home to his neighborhood after football practice”. If you can’t go where he lives, then you have no business being in his life!)

2) There was definitely evidence in the movie (and this was confirmed in a 20/20 interview with the parents) that Michael Oher gave them as much as, or more than, they gave him. Although I wished that the 20/20 episode would have delved deeper into that*, and into the whole issue of the white folks being the “saviors” (another friend of mine pointed out that none of the black people in the film were shown in a positive light), I was glad to see at least that much acknowledged.

*they had the black journalist interviewing the family, but there didn’t seem a willingness to really go deeper into these issues. It was kind of, “don’t you think people will say, ‘why are you rescuing the black kid?’ and the mom saying, “It’s about love” and that was it. Okay, that might be a paraphrase.

but ANYWAY . . . Soong Chan Rah has expressed this much more eloquently than I have, so check out his thoughts on the two films.