We Are What We Were

This chapter explores a spate of civil rights and slavery dramas produced in the late 1980s and 1990s—most notably Glory (1989), The Long Walk Home (1990), Forrest Gump (1994), and Amistad (1997)—against the evolution of the Reagan administration’s position on the federal Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. It aims to deepen our understanding of movies commonly labeled “white savior” films. White savior critiques often miss the deep historical context and intricate role Hollywood has played in anti–civil rights maneuverings. Beginning in the latter half of the 1980s, both Reagan and the movies frequently represented civil rights and abolition as driven by a colorblind white ethos. For Reagan, the efficacy of this position was clear; for Hollywood, perhaps less so. Yet together, the reimagination of colorblind black freedom struggles by both factions proved integral to the growing influence of colorblindness, which had become and would continue to be the driving force behind the dismantling of key civil rights programs in the post–civil rights era. As colorblindness became increasingly influential, Hollywood performed the vital task of reimagining an American past in which colorblind white heroes were at the center and colorblindness was responsible for the abolition of slavery and the victories of the civil rights movement. Together, Reagan and Hollywood’s dramatizations of black freedom struggles in the late 1980s and 1990s positioned colorblindness as an enduring quality of American whiteness and insisted that colorblind logic should inform the country’s legislative future.