Racism In The Film White Man's Burden

While many claim racism is a thing of the past, a deeper look into one’s surroundings would quickly dismiss this idea. Institutional racism is everywhere and is not something that died with the civil rights movement of the 1960’s. In the film White Man’s Burden, directed by Desmond Nakano, institutional racism towards people of color (or P.O.C for short) is directly acknowledged. Nakano switches the typical roles and lifestyles of African Americans and whites in society; and in doing so, paints a clear picture of what privilege and racism looks like in present day America. The book Uprooting Racism: How White People Can Work for Racial Justice by Paul Kivel explains exactly where and why white privilege and institutional racism occurs. With this …show more content…
Nakano, forces viewers to see society through an alternate reality where blacks and whites are switched and racism suddenly becomes a much more obvious picture: Positive role models for those in the minority are missing, segregation in both housing and work, and unjust police force. In combination with Kivel’s Uprooting Racism, institutionalized racism is out for society to see and realize racism is not dead. In the movie, Thaddeus Thomas and Louis Pinnock are together for bad and immoral reasons, however at the end of the film, as Thaddeus lays dying from a heart attack, Louis stays with him, a gun in hand. When the police come, Louis is shot and in some ways, he dies the moral hero. While in the alternate reality Louis represents the black in the community, on screen, the white man is the hero. The white man is not the bad guy, but morally on the higher ground. Even though the movie points out society’s racism through its plot and characters, the fact that the white man dies a hero and, to some extent, a positive role model, speaks volumes about what institutionalized racism looks like in the real