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Counterpoint with Cargill: Is
Avatar Racist?
What began as the low rumble of Internet navel gazing has grown into something of a fever pitch over the last few weeks as Avatar’s box office continues to climb to record worldwide levels. Currently on the precipice of shattering what has long been thought of as the glass ceiling of Titanic’s $1.8 billion worldwide gross, Avatar is the word on everyone’s lips as the letters 'A,' 'V,' 'T' and 'R' are getting dull and worn on the keyboards of bloggers the world over. But as its legend continues to grow, so too does the cacophony of claims that Avatar is a racist work of fiction. And while no one has yet gone so far as to call James Cameron a racist, the best one can surmise is that those who see racism in the film mean to say that he was subconsciously racist in his writing, directing and producing of what might soon be known as his magnum opus.
Of course, backing up those claims requires taking a very specific perspective, being at best willfully ignorant of -- or at worst deliberately loose with -- the facts for the sake of an agenda. Let’s, for the moment, assume that it is the former rather than the latter and allow the same sort of “ignorant unknowing racist” claim to befall the accusers as it seems to fall on the accused. In order for those claims to hold, you have to bend the facts a little. You need to use the word “most” every so often while hoping the audience buys it as meaning “enough to infer always,” and you also need to choose how you divvy up the cast, define the natives and ultimately cast the actions of the hero. But while it is quick and easy to simply say that this is a tale of a great white savior delivering a native people from the evil white man while drawing a few poorly cast allusions to Pocahontas, Dances With Wolves and The Last Samurai, dumping the sheer volume of evidence out against such claims takes a bit longer, so this will have to be in two parts. The first part, will deal with the argument about the racial breakdown of the cast and the identity of the Na’Vi while Part II will focus on the "Great White Hype," Jake Sully.
The first and seemingly most damning part of the racist argument is that MOST ALL of the human characters are white while MOST ALL of the Na’Vi are played by people of other varying ethnicities . This is mostly true. In order to make this true, however, you must qualify this by discussing only the main characters with major speaking parts. You cannot include Na’Vi motion-capture models nor any of the mercenaries working for the mining corporation. This math nets five white characters, one Hispanic and one Indian human character with three black and one Native American major Na’vi characters. Pretty convincing, huh?
Of course, what happens when, instead of drawing the lines down the Human/Na’vi sides, we begin to look at it as a screenwriter would? In terms of the heroes and villains. Jake Sully and his group of cohorts are five strong -- three white (one Jewish character played by a goy), one Latino and one Indian -- and team up with four other main characters, three black and one Native American, making for what is one of the most racially diverse casts of main characters in blockbuster history: three whites, three blacks, one Hispanic, one Indian and one Native American. They are pitted against two white characters. But wait, why is it only two villains versus nine heroes? Because in order for the racist argument to have any weight, we have to ignore the Pandoran Corporate Mercenary force made up of men and women of seemingly every race, color and creed. When Col. Quaritch looks out over the sea of faces that he is rallying to battle against the Na’vi, he isn’t marshalling an army of white soldiers. He’s commanding an army of mercenaries reflective of today’s American Armed Forces. That is to say it is as diverse as our cast of heroes. 
So when one breaks down the races of the actors and pits them along the film’s battle lines, we see a director who has found actors from many nations, representing the many peoples of Earth, and pitted them against one another to showcase a battle between the wanton consumption of resources and the whole-Earth notion of self-sufficiency. Cameron uses the corporate-versus-native archetypes because it is a metaphor that even children can understand. The film isn’t about the guilt of our American past as much as it is about our present and future. To believe that the wholesale slaughter, displacement and enslavement of a people are practices confined to our distant history is to be both naïve and blind to the world we live in. And to think that the Na’Vi could only represent Native Americans and not the African tribes of old or the Mayan civilization or even the uncontacted, hidden tribes of South America that we keep sheltered from our existence even today, is to peer at this film through a very narrow lens.
This argument becomes even harder to substantiate when you realize that Jake Sully is not the great white savior that these arguments also make him out to be…Click Here for Part Two of 'Is Avatar Racist'?
