This genre contextualization has done little to sway Confederate\u2019s<\/i> detractors. Roxane Gay, writing about the series in an article for The New York Times<\/i> entitled \u201cI Don’t Want to Watch Slavery Fan Fiction,\u201d<\/span><\/a> asks why seemingly all the examples of alternate history in film and television revolve around the continued subjugation of historically oppressed communities:<\/span><\/p>\n “These creators can imagine a world where the Confederacy won the Civil War and black people are still enslaved, but they can\u2019t or aren\u2019t interested in imagining a world where, say, things went in a completely different direction after the Civil War and, say, white people are enslaved…It is curious that time and again, when people create alternate histories, they are largely replicating a history we already know, and intimately. They are replicating histories where whiteness thrives and people of color remain oppressed.”<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Gay’s argument brings to mind a film that has been conspicuously absent from this and other recent debates: White Man’s Burden.<\/i> The 1995 film portrays exactly the premise that Gay cites as missing from mainstream examples of alternative history: one that sees blacks as the ruling class within modern America, and whites as the oppressed minority. <\/span><\/p>\n With the exception of an opening credits sequence that includes a heavy-handed visual metaphor (the factory where Pinnock is employed makes candy bars, and we watch as the white confections are covered in chocolate during processing) and a cheesy piece of ’90s blues-rock, the film is surprisingly undated, while still serving as a decent snapshot of its era. If White Man\u2019s Burden<\/i> doesn\u2019t have the bravura filmmaking of Spike Lee\u2019s films from the same period (to which it is clearly indebted, especially in its use of a crescendoing jazz score), or the same sense of narrative propulsion or re-watchability factor of the similarly themed \u201cone bad day\u201d current-issue thriller Falling Down<\/i>, it still mostly works as a tightly made, pseudo-noir-cum-social-drama in its own right.<\/span><\/p>\n This is not to say that it\u2019s an overlooked classic by any means. The narrative never achieves its full potential in terms of tension, partly because the stakes are kept murky until the final 10 minutes (for a movie that revolves around a kidnapping, there are almost none of the requisite scenes where the kidnapper’s plot risks being discovered), and partly because the main characters never truly challenge or believably change one another. Neither is the chemistry between Travolta and Belafonte, in what is essentially a two-man show, anything special. Aside from a questionable choice of accent, Travolta turns in a good performance, though nowhere near the best of his ’90s career renaissance period. Belafonte, meanwhile, brings to the role the gravitas of his legacy as both an actor and an activist, but his performance is too awkwardly stilted to make good on either. (Belafonte starred in a darker \u2014 and better \u2014 noir that examined the irreconcilable differences between blacks and whites 34 years earlier in Odds Against Tomorrow<\/i>, a film that Burden <\/i>can’t help but bring to mind, to its own detriment.) <\/span><\/p>\n One of the film’s other shortcomings is its refusal to exploit its stark \u201cwhat if\u2026” premise. With the exception of a few lines of dialogue, nothing about the story need be changed for it to work as is. As presented, the plot revolves more around the conflicts of class than race, and though the two are inextricably linked, the film never takes the time to make that point or examine why or how.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n\n
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<\/a>White Man’s Burden<\/i> stars John Travolta as Louis Pinnock, a diligent factory worker angling for a promotion so as to better provide for his family (which includes a son on the cusp of adolescence and a new-born daughter), until a misunderstanding with his rich, casually bigoted boss, Thaddeus Thomas (Harry Belafonte), leads to his sudden termination and quick fall into poverty. Pushed to the limit of his sanity by his inability to secure anything but minimum-wage work, eviction from his home, and unprovoked harassment by the police (including a beating that is clearly meant to invoke the Rodney King assault from three years earlier), Pinnock snaps and kidnaps Thad at gunpoint, holding him hostage in order to extract a particular sum of money that he feels adequately covers his recent losses. Unfortunately for both men, the kidnapping takes place on a Saturday evening. With the ransom being too large to withdraw from an ATM, they must wait until the banks open for business the coming Monday. What follows is a long weekend in which the two men traverse the urban landscape beset by poverty and gang violence, Pinnock trying to remain free, Thad struggling to remain alive.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n