(Fox News) Liberal columnists attacked the 2009 film “The Blind Side,” as a “White savior” tale that looks “even more fake than before,” after former NFL player Michael Oher came out with bombshell claims against the Tuohy family.
Oher’s allegations dominated headlines this week, after he claimed the Tuohys, who took him in as a youth, never legally adopted him and tricked him into a conservatorship from which they solely benefited.
The Tuohy family has denied these allegations. An attorney representing the Tuohys claimed Oher threatened to “plant” a negative story in the press about the Tennessee family unless they paid him $15 million.
However, liberal columnists were quick to seize on the controversy and attack the uplfiting tale behind “The Blind Side” for making the Tuohy family look like “White saviors.”
Michael Oher stands with Tuohys during senior ceremonies prior to a game against the Mississippi State Bulldogs at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium on November 28, 2008, in Oxford, Mississippi. (Photo by Matthew Sharpe/Getty Images)
Robyn Autry, a professor of Sociology at Wesleyan University, wrote off the film in a MSNBC column as “typical Hollywood White savior nonsense, that unsurprisingly made hundreds of millions of dollars.”
The sociologist complained the film gave a “dishonest, condescending and emotionally manipulative” portrayal of race relations but was successful due to the White public craving “feel-good stories that portray them as heroes.”
Autry also bashed the depiction of the mother-son relationship between Leigh Anne Tuohy’s character and Michael Oher’s character was like a”twisted version of ‘Beauty and the Beast.'”
“It excites a White imagination that longs for contact with the Black other and simultaneously fears that contact,” the sociology professor wrote.
