Legitimation crisis and containment: The “anti‐racist‐white‐hero” film

Abstract

This essay examines the way in which collective memories of struggles for African peoples’ equality are constructed in mainstream film. From the late eighties to the late nineties, the film industry produced a series of thematically similar films dealing with struggles against white supremacy in the U.S. and in South Africa. In this essay I argue that movements for equality created a legitimation crisis for white supremacist patriarchal capitalism in general and white identity in particular. A textual analysis is presented in which it is argued that mainstream film helped “contain”; this legitimation crisis by circulating paternalistic white supremacist discourses through which to remember key historical moments in the struggles against white supremacy. These “anti racist‐white‐hero films”; are placed in the larger cultural context of backlash through which white supremacist patriarchal capitalism has sought to regain legitimacy in the U.S. over the past three decades.