{"id":242,"date":"2007-01-07T11:14:35","date_gmt":"2007-01-07T10:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/ijwp\/mt.php\/2007\/01\/07\/joe_queenan_the_recurring_white_hope"},"modified":"2025-10-10T11:32:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T10:32:12","slug":"joe_queenan_the_recurring_white_hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/mt.php\/2007\/01\/07\/joe_queenan_the_recurring_white_hope","title":{"rendered":"Joe Queenan: the recurring white hope"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arts.guardian.co.uk\/filmandmusic\/story\/0,,1982574,00.html\">From Friday&#39;s <em>Guardian<\/em> film\/music review section<\/a>, Joe Queenan on a recurring theme in Hollywood films prominently featuring Africa or black people generally: that &quot;no matter how bleak the situation seems, they can always rely on some resourceful, charismatic and, in some instances, shapely white person to bail them out&quot;.  In this particular case, it&#39;s the movie <em>Blood Diamond<\/em>, due for release in the UK on the 26th, in which a corrupt former Rhodesian mercenary, &quot;serving a shockingly brief stint in a Sierra Leone prison for violating that sovereign nation&#39;s contraband smuggling rules&quot;, comes to the aid of a fellow prisoner who hid a priceless pink diamond in a riverbank somewhere while enslaved by some rebels in Sierra Leone.  The trend for white lead characters saving black people, he says, started with <em>To Kill A Mockingbird<\/em>, &quot;a beloved, fabulously successful, thoroughly absurd novel&quot; about a white lawyer defending a black man accused of raping a white woman at a time when such a man would most likely have been murdered rather than charged.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Friday&#39;s Guardian film\/music review section, Joe Queenan on a recurring theme in Hollywood films prominently featuring Africa or black people generally: that &quot;no matter how bleak the situation seems, they can always rely&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p17bgV-3U","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=242"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42162,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/242\/revisions\/42162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blogistan.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}