What do I mean? Let me illustrate using three films (and I'm sure others can think of even more!)
Come See the Paradise is a film about the Japanese American internment, but the Hollywood Studio that produced and distributed it was clear that there needed to be a white male hero in the lead; that a film about Japanese Americans during WWII could not be about the infringement of their constitutional rights based on racial discrimination (isn't that a dramatic story??!!) but needed to be an inter-racial romance, with a historical backdrop of discrimination.
Amistad is another film in which white male figures take the leading roles in a historical drama about non-white people--this time it's the transatlantic slave trade. The director Stephen Spielberg, or "Mr. Happy Ending," has made a film about slavery that ends on a positive note--the Amistad slaves get to return to Africa. (For more on Spielberg's record of happy endings to otherwise tragic and traumatic events see the endings to Saving Private Ryan and Schindler's List to see what I mean.) Don't get me wrong--it's not that I don't think there should be a happy ending to slavery, but the truth is, the Amistad case was exceptional; the reality of slavery and a film about slavery would actually not end quite so happily and we should not feel quite so good, as an audience, about the historical record of the transatlantic slave trade. And this film may blur that reality by ending on such a happy note--when the reality for the majority of African slaves and African Americans in bondage during the antebellum period was one of brutal indenture.
Last but not least, there's my all-time favorite, The Last Samurai. Although, ostensibly, the film's title is supposed to refer to the actual "last samurai" in the film (played by the wonderful Ken Watanabe) the movie poster and the film's narrative concentration make Tom Cruise's character "the last samurai." This film really takes the cake in terms of Hollywood whitewashing--Cruise goes from being a boozed-up, washed-out Civil War veteran to the heroic central figure, out-Japanese-ing and out-Samurai-ing the actual Japanese and Samurais he comes into contact with.
And really--why can't we have stories of slavery, of internment, of other historic events featuring non-white people in which there is not a white lead who steals the central role as savior, as hero, as rescuer? Why, Hollywood, why???!!!
