I was repulsed by the trailer alone. The year The Blind Side was up for an Academy Award (barf) I'd been dragged to some Oscars party by a friend. When they played a clip from the movie I made some flip remark--probably about how, y'know, it's about a white woman treating a Black youth like a stray dog--and some demon twink said to me "Have you ever seen it?" I saw all I needed to see, bitch!
I AM SHOCKED! SHOCKED I TELL YOU! To find out that Southern, rich, white, fuckwads, would exploit and misuse a strong,healthy, black man for profit. This would NEVER happen in a bastion of civilization such as Mississippi..........wait......what?
Ugh. [insert insults here] This is some kind of shit Oher has to deal with.
I've long since lost what tiny interest I may have ever had in white savior stories (They're just boring to me, since before I had a clue about its problems) and have never seen the movie. Now i'm actively glad I haven't
I should have known it was too good to last for me to feel giddy joy when the Trump indictments dropped before some other evil, vile, smug human shit stains would make me feel stabby again. I hate this timeline.
I always used to think Oher was the kid who was supposed to go to Alabama but ended up at Ole Miss because a Bama booster supposedly offered the 'parents' money and got busted.
I'm convinced that I had the wrong guy in mind b/c I've never heard that episode talked about when discussing his life.
Oh yeesh. This is real milkshake-duck stuff. Very disappointing.
IIRC, Oher's main beef with the film was that it depicted him as never having played football until the Tuohys enrolled him in White Christian Academy. In reality, like most elite football players, he started in Pop Warner. I had no idea the exploitation ran this deep.
Side note: Oher's career of eight years is about par for the course for NFL players, especially linemen. Something to keep in mind the next time anyone starts crabbing about how "overpaid" those guys are.
What is it with Hollywood and their need to promote the white savior myth? “Green Book” is another example of them taking a true story and grossly distorting it in similar manner.
John Coffee wasn’t a simple giant either. He was very thoughtful and insightful despite his lack of formal education. But he was a fictional character. Michael Oher is a real person who was exploited for his talents by people who took advantage of his need for a family.
This is a terrible story that does not surprise me one bit and I hope Michael sues them for buckets of money. But I'd like to present a true story with a different ending. My cousin Liz inherited the "Wandering Gene" from her father, who never stayed in one place more than a few months. Eventually my aunt divorced him in the late 1940's and took her 2 children to live with their grandparents because she was fed up with moving from one boarding house to another in the middle of the night because they couldn't pay their rent because he couldn't settle to any job for more than a few weeks. Liz was 3 or 4 when her parents divorced and she never saw her father again.
Well, Liz married a Black man in 1969, as soon as the law in Missouri allowed it, and then she divorced her husband in the early 70's and took their mixed-race son to California to live in a Hippie Commune. She wasn't happy there, and so she just kept moving around northern California with her son Nathan, living out of her car most of the time. She'd settle down in one town long enough for Nathan to enroll in school, get a job cleaning people's houses, then a year later pick up and move again.
She settled in Santa Cruz, CA one year when Nathan was in junior high so that he could go to a school with a good basketball team. You see Nathan was 6'4" tall when he was only 14, and eventually grew to 6'8" in high school, and he was a very good basketball player.
But one year later her Traveling Gene kicked in and she wanted to move. Nathan was unhappy because he wanted to go on to play in the high school basketball team. And so white friends of theirs, a man who was a local Quaker minister, and his wife who was the director of the local library, offered to take Nathan in so he could stay in the Santa Cruz school system. They had no children of their own, you see, and they had grown to love Nathan like a son. Liz left town without Nathan and kept wandering around northern California, and Nathan spent the next 4-5 years living with the friends. Nathan then got a basketball scholarship to a California university and spent all his summers and vacations with the white friends. There was never any adoption, real or false, they just gave him a home to live in and the emotional support and stability he never got from his mother.
Nathan went on to start his own I.T. recruitment business and is now a millionaire, happily married to Ann, living in San Jose with three gorgeous children. The Quaker minister officiated at their wedding. I was there too, so I met him and his wife, and what wonderful people they were. They did a lot of charitable work, but Nathan was their pride and joy. Here's a picture from the wedding showing Nathan, Ann and the minister friend administering the vows. This sweet man died less than a year after the wedding.
No, she didn't drop out, she came back for occasional visits, and sometimes even showed up for her son's basketball games. She came to the wedding, and she still pops in now and then to visit the grandchildren.
My wife's BFF adopted a Hispanic kid who was about to age out of the foster care system some 20 years ago. She put him through college and he has become a happy, very successful husband and father of two. I think about all the other kids who aged out of foster care who didn't have someone looking out for them when they were kicked out.
I hear some terrible stories about kids who age out of foster care, and I'm THRILLED to hear about someone who was able to do so successfully with some help.
Yes, he really did have some good luck, but he deserved it because he was a very fine young man and is now a very fine adult. My cousin Liz is still following her Wandering Gene, but she pops in every now and then to see the grandchildren.
Not sure all of the facts are out there yet, but if what Michael Oher says is true, it is indeed repulsive.
I was repulsed by the trailer alone. The year The Blind Side was up for an Academy Award (barf) I'd been dragged to some Oscars party by a friend. When they played a clip from the movie I made some flip remark--probably about how, y'know, it's about a white woman treating a Black youth like a stray dog--and some demon twink said to me "Have you ever seen it?" I saw all I needed to see, bitch!
I AM SHOCKED! SHOCKED I TELL YOU! To find out that Southern, rich, white, fuckwads, would exploit and misuse a strong,healthy, black man for profit. This would NEVER happen in a bastion of civilization such as Mississippi..........wait......what?
Mea Culpa......but really.....Mississippi, Tennessee.........difference?
Also.....NEVER trust a state that has 3 double letters and only one, repeated, vowel in it's name.....
Ugh. [insert insults here] This is some kind of shit Oher has to deal with.
I've long since lost what tiny interest I may have ever had in white savior stories (They're just boring to me, since before I had a clue about its problems) and have never seen the movie. Now i'm actively glad I haven't
I should have known it was too good to last for me to feel giddy joy when the Trump indictments dropped before some other evil, vile, smug human shit stains would make me feel stabby again. I hate this timeline.
"He was never their child."
OMG. What utter betrayal.
I wonder how Michael Lewis (the guy that wrote the bestselling book) is reacting to this
I always used to think Oher was the kid who was supposed to go to Alabama but ended up at Ole Miss because a Bama booster supposedly offered the 'parents' money and got busted.
I'm convinced that I had the wrong guy in mind b/c I've never heard that episode talked about when discussing his life.
THESE are the white people who make me ashamed of my own whiteness, not those who point out the inequities of our "classless, color blind" society.
Oh yeesh. This is real milkshake-duck stuff. Very disappointing.
IIRC, Oher's main beef with the film was that it depicted him as never having played football until the Tuohys enrolled him in White Christian Academy. In reality, like most elite football players, he started in Pop Warner. I had no idea the exploitation ran this deep.
Side note: Oher's career of eight years is about par for the course for NFL players, especially linemen. Something to keep in mind the next time anyone starts crabbing about how "overpaid" those guys are.
Interesting. White people making money off the labor of black people while not earning any of that money. Where have I seen this before?
So happy I never even wanted to look at this movie.
What is it with Hollywood and their need to promote the white savior myth? “Green Book” is another example of them taking a true story and grossly distorting it in similar manner.
'Sound of Freedom' comes to mind.
John Coffee wasn’t a simple giant either. He was very thoughtful and insightful despite his lack of formal education. But he was a fictional character. Michael Oher is a real person who was exploited for his talents by people who took advantage of his need for a family.
I remember when this movie came out and it looked like trash to me then. I still haven't seen it. I hope he sues their asses off.
When the movie came out, Micheal Oher spent denounced it as promoting distortions.
This is a terrible story that does not surprise me one bit and I hope Michael sues them for buckets of money. But I'd like to present a true story with a different ending. My cousin Liz inherited the "Wandering Gene" from her father, who never stayed in one place more than a few months. Eventually my aunt divorced him in the late 1940's and took her 2 children to live with their grandparents because she was fed up with moving from one boarding house to another in the middle of the night because they couldn't pay their rent because he couldn't settle to any job for more than a few weeks. Liz was 3 or 4 when her parents divorced and she never saw her father again.
Well, Liz married a Black man in 1969, as soon as the law in Missouri allowed it, and then she divorced her husband in the early 70's and took their mixed-race son to California to live in a Hippie Commune. She wasn't happy there, and so she just kept moving around northern California with her son Nathan, living out of her car most of the time. She'd settle down in one town long enough for Nathan to enroll in school, get a job cleaning people's houses, then a year later pick up and move again.
She settled in Santa Cruz, CA one year when Nathan was in junior high so that he could go to a school with a good basketball team. You see Nathan was 6'4" tall when he was only 14, and eventually grew to 6'8" in high school, and he was a very good basketball player.
But one year later her Traveling Gene kicked in and she wanted to move. Nathan was unhappy because he wanted to go on to play in the high school basketball team. And so white friends of theirs, a man who was a local Quaker minister, and his wife who was the director of the local library, offered to take Nathan in so he could stay in the Santa Cruz school system. They had no children of their own, you see, and they had grown to love Nathan like a son. Liz left town without Nathan and kept wandering around northern California, and Nathan spent the next 4-5 years living with the friends. Nathan then got a basketball scholarship to a California university and spent all his summers and vacations with the white friends. There was never any adoption, real or false, they just gave him a home to live in and the emotional support and stability he never got from his mother.
Nathan went on to start his own I.T. recruitment business and is now a millionaire, happily married to Ann, living in San Jose with three gorgeous children. The Quaker minister officiated at their wedding. I was there too, so I met him and his wife, and what wonderful people they were. They did a lot of charitable work, but Nathan was their pride and joy. Here's a picture from the wedding showing Nathan, Ann and the minister friend administering the vows. This sweet man died less than a year after the wedding.
https://substack.com/profile/155713940-queen-meabh/note/c-22871554
What a great story!
That is a wonderful story. Thank you for sharing it.
Did his mother just completely drop out of his life? That's cold.
No, she didn't drop out, she came back for occasional visits, and sometimes even showed up for her son's basketball games. She came to the wedding, and she still pops in now and then to visit the grandchildren.
My wife's BFF adopted a Hispanic kid who was about to age out of the foster care system some 20 years ago. She put him through college and he has become a happy, very successful husband and father of two. I think about all the other kids who aged out of foster care who didn't have someone looking out for them when they were kicked out.
I hear some terrible stories about kids who age out of foster care, and I'm THRILLED to hear about someone who was able to do so successfully with some help.
Sounds like Nathan really lucked out in finding people who truly cared about him.
Yes, he really did have some good luck, but he deserved it because he was a very fine young man and is now a very fine adult. My cousin Liz is still following her Wandering Gene, but she pops in every now and then to see the grandchildren.