Clint Eastwood, Righteous White

Clint Eastwood: No Longer Making Our Day

America is still a majority white nation. Whites still hold most of the nation’s wealth and power. Thus the process of white dispossession cannot continue without the cooperation of white Americans. Because of this, Hollywood cannot portray all white Americans as evil racists. That can wait until after we are extinct. In the meantime, Hollywood must also offer images of decent, moral whites: the kind of white people with whom white audiences would like to identify. It should come as no surprise, however, that the measure of these white characters’ virtue is their willingness to cooperate in their own people’s dispossession. Thus, although the viewer is given an image of the evils of white majority society, he is also allowed to identify with a member of the white majority who steps forward to defend the rights of non-whites. I call this character the “righteous white.”

Righteous whites are a staple in Hollywood race films, whether the non-whites they champion are American Indians in Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves (1990), Japanese Americans in Come See the Paradise (1990) and Snow Falling on Cedars (1999), or blacks in movies from To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) to Mississippi Burning (1988), A Time to Kill (1996), Ghosts of Mississippi (1996), The Hurricane (1999), and The Green Mile (2000).

Late in his career, Clint Eastwood has invested a great deal in presenting himself as a righteous white, both in True Crime (1999), where he comes to the aid of a black, and Gran Torino (2008), where he champions a family of Hmong. Eastwood not only starred in both movies, he produced and directed them.

In True Crime Eastwood plays reporter Steve Everett, an adulterous recovering alcoholic. Sensing a travesty of justice, he looks into the case of Frank Beechum, a black man condemned to death for murdering a white woman and scheduled to die at midnight that very day.

Though Everett is liberal and non-racist, the rest of the whites in the movie are racist to one degree or another. For example, when the white warden tours the execution chamber, two white guards joke around by imitating a condemned man who finally confesses. This is in contrast to Beechum, who maintains his innocence. Later, a smarmy white pastor attempts to use the black convict for his own ends, hoping to draw publicity to himself. The pastor goes so far as to invent a last-minute confession by the condemned. The camera repeatedly intrudes on the guards’ banal conversations and jokes, despite the solemn atmosphere created by an impending execution. True, one guard is black and one Asian, but they appear as props. The focus is on the more numerous white guards and warden.

In addition, the key witness to the murder comes across as a cowardly white who hopes to gain attention by embellishing his story. In any case, he and another white witness are shown to be guilty of racism in that they “naturally” pick the black man they saw at the crime scene out of a police lineup. When Everett visits the home of the black grandmother of a possible witness, she delivers a soliloquy on the pervasiveness of anti-black racism in America.

When it turns out that the woman’s now-deceased grandson killed the white victim, the shooting is shown as unintentional; thus, there are no true black criminals in this movie, only white racists. Everett’s new evidence halts the execution seconds after it has begun, and Beechum survives to enjoy freedom with his doting wife and daughter. Steve Everett may look good at the end of the film, but the same can hardly be said of whites in general.

In Gran Torino, Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a retired auto worker living in a neighborhood that has been taken over by poor Hmong refugees. Walt is an angry, bitter old widower who is alienated from his family. He later learns that he is terminally ill. He also has negative, racist feelings toward the Hmong. Eventually, though, Walt involves himself in the struggle of a young Hmong neighbor, Thao, to resist the pressure to join a gang. He comes to value the family-oriented Hmong culture while remaining alientated from his own family.

When Walt repels a gang assault on Thao, the gang responds by raping Thao’s sister and shooting up his house. Thao wants to retaliate immediately, but Walt first stalls him, then locks him in his basement. Once Thao is safe, Walt confronts the gang members outside their house. With a cigarette in his mouth, he asks them for a light. Then he thrusts his hand in his jacket. The gang members think he is pulling a gun and shoot him dead. In fact, he was only reaching for a cigarette lighter. The gang members are arrested for killing Walt in cold blood. By sacrificing his life, Walt has halted the cycle of violence and saved Thao and his family. But Walt does more than merely sacrifice his life for non-whites. He also sacrifices the interests of his children to them. When Walt’s will is read, it is revealed that he has disinherited his children, leaving his house to the Catholic Church and his prize Ford Gran Torino to Thao.

It is a model of righteousness that can only lead to racial suicide.