The Price of Sugar: What These Guys Need is a Honkey

[bcholmes]

Tonight, THAC hosted a showing of a documentary film, The Price of Sugar at the Brunswick Theatre. Turns out, it's the last night for the Theatre, which is closing its doors tonight.

There was a good turnout, and it was an entertaining film. It's a film about Father Christopher Hartley, a priest working in the Dominican Republic, trying to help secure rights for Haitian workers who are brought in to the country to work in the sugar cane fields. It seems to be getting some attention (I've heard that it's been long-listed for an Oscar).

But.

It's yet another one of these "white guy makes it his mission to help poor, underprivileged people in a foreign country, who would never think of organizing on their own" films. Mostly, the Haitian workers don't get to speak in their own voice: in the few instances where they are interviewed, they're talking about Father Hartley and what he's done for them.

Comments

[indefatigable42.livejournal.com]

So what explains the popularity of WTPNIAH stories? Is it that white people like stories about white people who do good instead of playing oppressors? Or is there a fear among filmmakers that white audiences will feel threatened by the idea that non-white people can rise up against what oppresses them?

[bcholmes.livejournal.com]

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine during a trip to Haiti a while ago. She's an English doctoral candidate, and she was talking about the great resistance her students expressed when asked to read stuff where the point-of-view character had a very different life experience from them.

The common complaint she heard was "I just can't identify with this character."

Apparently, stories are only helpful if you can imagine yourself in the centre of them.

[aquaeri.livejournal.com]

<rolls eyes at film>

We have a similar issue here in Australia at the moment - the previous government (long may they remain in opposition) organised an "intervention" for aborigines in the Northern Territory which assumes they are children who can't be trusted to wipe their own noses. I agree that they were previously shockingly neglected, but I'm really hoping our new government will change the intervention to something less patronising.

(In a discussion about the extent to which the recent election was really a "landslide" or not, someone pointed out that in some NT polling booths, the vote was 90% for the new government - the only real "landslide" in the country.)