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You could argue there's a subgenre where the black man or native is in effect an honorary white man because he's adopted White norms and behaviours that White audiences can identify with him as one of them. A good example would be In the Heat of the Night or Hotel Rwanda or Swing Kids (2018 South Korean film, not the Christian Bale movie) and Thunderheart. Perhaps an article that examines deviations, perversions or inversion of the White Saviour narrative would be a start you could expand into separate articles and look at similar narratives in other film cultures. Another popular variation is also the white journalist or observer, but also voyeur and sensationalist who uses the backdrop of horror and suffering of post-colonial and other regional, ethnic conflicts to explore and discover his own humanity or lack of it, before returning to his life in the real world to tell his story to an indifferent society preoccupied with its own problems: Salvador | The Killing Fields | Under Fire | Deadline | The Year of Living Dangerously | Last King of Scotland | A Taxi Driver. Clint Eastwood's Pale Rider also has many narrative devices of the White Saviour genre although he's rescuing a group of white miners from a local landowner. I would also include Witness starring Harrison Ford as well, substituting the Amish for PoC or indigenous community. Dead Man Walking too has elements of the white savior narrative even though the person that Sister Helen Prejean is trying to save is white. Hell, even the great basketball movie Hoosiers feels like a white savior film with Gene Hackman's well-educated, "city slicker" character uplifting a bunch of "small town hicks" (if you replace the hicks with Blacks, it would EASILY fall under the white savior trope).
"the black man or native is in effect an honorary white man because he's adopted White norms and behaviours" I think that is an example of cultural assimilation at work. The members of a minority group have fully adopted the values, behaviors, and beliefs of another group. It reminds me a bit of the finale from the novel Animal Farm (1945) where the ruling class of the farm and the farmers which are their former enemies and current allies turn out to be identical in both thought and behavior: "When the animals outside look at the pigs and men, they find it is "impossible to say which was which"." ... "elements of the white savior narrative even though the person that Sister Helen Prejean is trying to save is white..." There are numerous characters who either act as Messiahs or as Christ figures, from Paul Atreides and Aragorn to Superman and Harry Potter (who explicitly has to die and be resurrected to fulfil his destiny). In many cases, race or ethnicity has little to do with a narrative about people considering self-sacrifice as an acceptable price to achieve their goals. The narrative explicitly promotes the value of martyrdom. Dimadick (talk) 10:11, 28 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
In many Hollywood movies, the white race is symbolically represented by characters who are sick/defective in some way (symbolizing "whiteness" and the supposed sins of the white race) who redeem themselves through their own destruction while promoting the advancement of other characters who represent nonwhite races. This article doesn't even mention the "salvation by replacement" theme common in so many films. 24.126.12.131 (talk) 02:59, 27 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
