Lakeview Terrace:
Black Conservatives and White Yuppies

I’ve written on Hollywood pushing their utopia by pretending it already exists.  For example, they may make a movie about a white woman stalking a black man and not mention race.  Or a movie called I’m Through with White Girls that at the end reveals that race wasn’t really the issue at all.  Lakeview Terrace employs this strategy in a more subtle way.

The story centers around the white Chris Mattson (Patrick Wilson), his black wife Lisa (Kerry Washington) and their move into a new neighborhood.  Interfering with their loving relationship is neighbor Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson).  A single father and cop, he seems to take an immediate dislike to the interracial couple.  His disapproval of  miscegenation at first seems to be philosophically grounded.  While on duty, Abel has the following exchange with Clarence, an obese racially ambiguous thug who has just referred to himself as a “brother.”

Abel: Clarence, we ain’t brothers.  We didn’t even crawl out of the same evolutionary gene pool.  What are you anyway?  You know, I’ve always wondered about that.  You’re a Mexo, Japo, Chini, Stymi (?) or what?  You don’t even know, do you?  You’re a weed, that’s what you are.  A junkyard weed.  Spray your ass with some roundup.

Clarence: I’m 1/7th [sic!] Cherokee, bitch!

Abel: And the other 93% [sic!] wigger.

Patrick Wilson with his screen wife Kerry Washington

The point about the racially ambiguous and rootless loser adopting the culture of those isolated from the white majority is never followed up.  Only later do we find out that when Abel’s wife had her fatal automobile crash she was in the car with her white boss, who also died.  So his objection to Chris and Lisa’s marriage wasn’t about race at all.  Nothing ever is, unless it’s discrimination against black people.  Abel lets it be known that his wife died because she was “treated by pigmentation” at the hospital, meaning that her care was delayed because she was black.

Abel slashes the tires of the young couple, shines his security lights into their bedroom at night, and cuts down trees they plant.  There’s no question that Chris and Lisa are supposed to be the ones we sympathize with.  Able at one point has a good laugh with his fellow cops about Berkley alumnus Chris being a Democrat.  The officer even doubts global warming!

But Abel isn’t all bad, despite his conservatism.  The movie even implies that some of his positions have merit.  Abel and his partner get shot at by a maniac whom he eventually subdues.  The officer is then reprimanded by his superiors for verbally abusing and violating the civil rights of the criminal.

Patrick Wilson with his real wife, Dagmara Dominczyk

The director doesn’t take a clear position on climate change, police brutality or anything else that our elites allow debate on.  He has bigger fish to fry.  Cops tend to be conservative and Berkley grads liberals.  But a conservative cop can be black just as easily as he can be white.  People may disagree about how to deal with trouble-making youngsters, but the kids don’t fit any particular profile.  Nor do those who move into high class neighborhoods to get away from the thugs.  Race may be the obsession of old and cranky weirdos (who can at least now be black — maybe that’s progress?), but it means nothing to anybody who is mentally sound.

The world we see in Terrace is the one we would’ve had if the civil rights movement were a success.  There are still rich and poor, law abiding and criminal, conservative and liberal.  But the idea that any of these things would correlate with race?  If that world still existed, then all the marches, laws, half-a-century of totalitarian political correctness, etc. weren’t enough to get rid of it.  A land of hostile tribes is what we’re stuck with.

The message reaches a reductio ad absurdum in a scene where Able is at Chris and Lisa’s housewarming party.  In addition to the three stars, there are two other couples involved in the conversation.  One is a black man with a white woman and the other is a white male paired with an Asian.  There might as well have been a “RACE DOESN’T MATTER” notice flashing across the bottom of the screen.

Another liberal fantasy is that single black women are some kind of scarce commodity that white men need to scoop up. A friend tells Chris that he’s always wanted a black chick but is now on Asians, working his way up.

As we race realists know, black females are along with Asian males one of the two groups most likely to end up single. (This says something good about the taste of males and something ugly about that of females.)  A universe where a white man would “work his way up” to blacks is one that could only exist in the minds of the hopelessly politically correct.

A more interesting movie would be about a white male/Asian female couple moving next door to a virginal Oriental engineer who loses his mind over their presence.  That story might actually be plausible.

Unfortunately, liberals can’t handle too much reality and checked out of it a long time ago.