White Liberal Guilt Alarm Goes Off

While taking a break from the collection development assignment, I trolled over to the YALSA blog. I saw Linda’s post about Freedom Writers. I’m just as excited as ever to see the film, to wallow in the glory of a big-budget bio-pic about someone beating the system. Yeah!

But then a commenter posted this. Huh. I was a little chagrined that I didn’t pick up on this myself. Back in my UCSC days (in the late 1980s) I would have been all over the White Rescuer meme. I recall seeing Mississippi Burning back then and walking out of the theater thinking: only Hollywood could make a movie about Klan terrorism and tell it from the perspective of two white men. And like the blog post title, sometimes I think these movies attempt to assuage what me and my friend’s back at UCSC called white liberal guilt. “See, the underserved are really not so very underserved, right? Someone’s helping them, right? Can I go back to reading my Baudrillard now? Okay, great.” I'll probably never lose my ability to identify that.

But Linda’s point was valid for our class—that adults can make a difference to teens. I plan to watch this movie and be inspired on that level. I’m also grateful for having read the Deldado essay before seeing Freedom Writers. I worry constantly about losing all kinds of perspective, and that this in turn will make me a lousy librarian. I’ll just be some overly idealistic (c’mon, you know with me it’s a definite threat!), unconnected librarian who is not able to analyze the content of all kinds of media and make good choices for my patrons.

I realize this is a blog post comment in the guise of an actual blog post, but I know most of us seemed excited to see the movie, so I thought I would blog here in case anyone missed Linda’s post.