Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America

by Michael Eric Dyson

Another way you dilute black history is to make yourselves the heroes of our struggles. You argue that there have always been good white folk helping us out. Let’s just call it dilution through distortion. It is the sting of noblesse oblige. Just look at the movies. Films about slavery must feature a sympathetic white character who wants black folk to be free. John Quincy Adams must be the real hero of Amistad, since Cinque couldn’t rebel effectively without help from his great white defenders. Ghosts of Mississippi, about the murder of Medgar Evers, highlights the heroic white prosecutor, Bobby DeLaughter, who fought to open the case, and much less the brave black widow, Myrlie Evers, who fought white supremacy to make sure he paid attention. Mississippi Burning, supposedly about the killing of three civil rights workers in the sixties, celebrates two white FBI agents, heroes in a state where white terror rarely had better allies than silent white law enforcement or brutal local police. If such portrayals might be laid at the feet of last century’s retrograde racial politics, the present is also flush with white savior movies.