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This is a candid and unedited rant against the most popular and misguided trope in modern cinema: the White Savior. It's such a tired cliche, an unimaginative trope that reduces colonial violence to two-dimensional white heroes saving brown victims from their own complexity. I want to talk about this trope which is not only deeply disturbing but also deeply embedded in our thinking as well as a part of our social history. I want to talk about how this myth is playing out in children's movies, how it has been further exacerbated by political leaders like Donald Trump, and I want to talk about what we can do to dismantle it. Because as a brown person who has experienced the effects of colonialism and as a Muslim who has seen the effects of Islamophobia, I can tell you first hand that this myth is deeply violent to the victims it claims to be helping. It is deeply racist and dehumanizing to those it claims to be saving. The real problem with this trope is not only the way it appropriates and exotifies non-white cultures but also how it rewrites history. Survivor tropes like these erase the complexities of history, they create a false binary of victim or oppressor where there are really many actors with many layers and many stories. The real problem with this trope is that it is the same logic that has justified the military invasion of Iraq in 2003, claiming to liberate the people from oppression. The same logic that caused over a million civilian deaths and created the foundations of ISIS. The real problem with this trope is not just how it continues to hurt millions of people across the planet by justifying violence but how it hurts millions through simple storytelling. By reducing history, culture, and humanity into a black and white binary we think we have made ourselves seem superior while at the same time allowing ourselves to succumb to other racist tropes like Yellow Peril. We need to talk about this trope because it is not just racist but also Islamophobic, by depicting Muslims as the only villains in the story, it dehumanizes millions of people, making them seem like nothing more than savage animals. So what can we do about this? Well first off, we need to stop glamorizing these tropes. Stop giving them awards and box office records. We need to stop lauding white savior movies by telling each other that they are important or necessary or even good storytelling. We need to admit that these tropes are harmful and not come up with excuses for why they're okay. We need to stop making up the story of a lead character being a "good Muslim" and instead tell them that they are Muslim just like any other people on this planet. We need to replace the idea that there is only one way to be Muslim, that there is only one right way to look at history, and that there is no room to even think about other interpretations. And we really should stop giving white heroes points for saving brown people. It's not their job. They don't get points for saving brown people so why should they get points for saving white people? By letting this White Savior trope dictate our movies we are validating colonial violence by awarding it with awards and telling ourselves it's okay. cfa1e77820
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