Hiram College professor Jason Johnson was quoted in Forbes by Rebecca Theodore in her review of Kevin Costner’s new movie Dear Hollywood: Let’s Stop Making Movies Like “Black or White.”
You would think in 2015 Hollywood would have evolved from such reductive narratives about race, but according to Dr. Jason Johnson, a political analyst and a professor of political science at Hiram College, it’s business as usual. “It is part of a genre movie we have always had, that’s making a comeback which I like to call the “Reasonable White Man” movie,” Johnson explains. “They are films that are ostensibly about race but are extended polemics where so-called progressive Whites are saying ‘I’m the only one who has a reasonable perspective on this and Blacks are irrational and unreasonable.”
Johnson, who attended a screening of “Black or White at the National Association of Black Journalists convention last year recalls, “There was not one person I spoke to who thought the movie was good. When they screened The Butler last year, there was lots of discussion. I do think it’s very telling that the social media silence afterwards spoke volumes.” Johnson goes on to mention movies like “Monster’s Ball” and “ Losing Isaiah” which promote a one-sided examination of race, “What they don’t want to hear is “No, we hated Losing Isaiah because it was a paternalistic and racist film or that Monster’s Ball wasn’t the least bit progressive – it was a White Supremacist fantasy of ‘I get to screw a Black girl and get away with it.”