Media’s eagerness to tarnish ‘The Blind Side’ family
The Blind Side: A Controversial Film That Triggered the Left
In the final seconds of the 2009 film “The Blind Side,” Leigh Anne Tuohy, played by Sandra Bullock, reflects on the murder of a 21-year-old black athlete in a local housing project. The young man had dropped out of school, fallen in with the wrong crowd, and died in a gang-related shooting. “That could have been my son Michael,” Leigh Anne says right before the credits roll. “I suppose I have God to thank for that.”
A decade later, it’s hard to imagine a film from a major studio ending that way. The film began with Leigh Anne Tuohy seeing a homeless teenager named Michael Oher walking down the street in the cold. She and her husband Sean decided to take care of him. Finally, after years of sacrifice, Oher goes to college and eventually goes on to become a successful NFL player.
In 2009, when audiences weren’t lobotomized by procedurally generated Marvel slop, that plotline resonated. “The Blind Side” made over $300 million on a relatively small budget. Sandra Bullock won an Oscar, although as she herself admitted during filming, her acting wasn’t even that good. Leigh Anne Tuohy used the film’s success to help children find foster homes on social media. Outside of a few whiny articles on NPR or The Daily Beast, people loved the movie.
In the years that followed the film’s release, though, the tone changed. As Barack Obama set race relations in this country backward by 50 years, academics — the source of most bad ideas and cynicism in the world — for some reason began obsessing over “The Blind Side.” They kept writing about it years after everyone else had moved on. In 2015, for example, a Clemson professor wrote this article in the journal “Studies in Popular Culture.” Here’s the title: “Racial Discourse in ‘The Blind Side’: The Economics and Ideology Behind the White Savior Format.”
That same year, a University of New Mexico professor authored a piece entitled “The White Cinematic Lens: Decoding the Racial Messages in The Blind Side.”
As the years progressed, so did the Left’s obsession with “The Blind Side.” Their fixation continued after the Obama years. In 2019, a professor at Texas State University somehow attempted to connect Donald Trump with “The Blind Side,” with a piece entitled “Colorblind Racism, The Trump Effect, and The Blind Side.” If you want to lose 50 IQ points, you can read the abstract online.
That same year, in 2019, the popular YouTube channel “Be Kind Rewind” released this video, explaining that the movie has a “white savior problem”:
Got it? The film should have been about all the people who didn’t house or educate or care about Michael Oher. It should have been about the kids who played basketball with him. Why? Because they’re black, and the family that took care of Michael Oher is white. That’s the level of analysis.
All of these articles and videos — and plenty more examples I could have used — demonstrate that “The Blind Side” triggered a deep, underlying pathology that tortures the supposedly intellectual Left. They simply cannot tolerate the film’s message. To this day, they cannot get over it. And they definitely can’t allow any other major studio to make a film like it.
In the past few days, predictably, this effort has entered a new, somehow even more demented and tragic stage. Michael Oher filed a legal complaint against the Tuohys. The media is promoting it relentlessly. They could not be more thrilled by this development. Watch:
The crux of the legal complaint is that the Tuohys tricked Michael Oher into thinking he was adopted when, in fact, the Tuohys simply had a conservatorship over him, allowing them to take most of his money. So, they’re not good-hearted white people helping out a black kid. They’re evil white supremacist thieves. That’s the idea.
Before we get into the actual complaint, a couple of points. First of all, that report you just saw implies that the Tuohys defrauded Oher because they wanted money. What they don’t mention is that the Tuohys are extraordinarily wealthy. In fact, they’re far wealthier than Oher has ever been, even after his NFL career. But we’re expected to believe that this family — which is worth well over $200 million — schemed to rip off Michael Oher.
Is that plausible? Right away, it doesn’t pass the smell test, as I said a few days ago. It sounds a lot like a washed-up athlete who burned through the cash he made in the league, and now he’s looking for a payday and some relevance. And indeed, Oher’s claim is especially suspicious, since according to the Tuohys, Oher has been shaking them down for $15 million for a long time now. Allegedly, he filed this lawsuit only after trying to get the quick cash from a family he knows is rich, and which still loves him.
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But there are more problems with this complaint, beyond the ones I just mentioned. For this accusation to make sense, the Tuohys would have had to see this homeless teenager walking on the side of the road, and say to themselves, this kid is going to make us rich. His grades are terrible. No college program is interested in him. His father abandoned him. His mother is a drug addict. But he’s going to make us a lot of money some day. And then there’s going to be a movie about him, and we’ll get royalties from that. And through all this, as they raise him and send him to college, Oher is blissfully unaware of this scheme — for more than a decade. And then it hits him.
Quoting from Oher’s legal complaint:
“The lie of Michael’s adoption is one upon which Co-Conservators Leigh Anne Tuohy and Sean Tuohy have enriched themselves at the expense of their Ward, the undersigned Michael Oher. Michael Oher discovered this lie to his chagrin and embarrassment in February of 2023, when he learned that the Conservatorship to which he consented on the basis that doing so would make him a member of the Tuohy family, in fact provided him no familiar relationship with the Tuohys.”
So, the claim is that Michael Oher realized only in February of 2023 that he hadn’t been legally adopted. It took him until this year to figure that out. Is that possible?
Corporate media is certainly buying it, with no skepticism whatsoever. NBC wrote up the allegations without applying any form of scrutiny. MSNBC wants you to know that this is all your fault.
“Oher’s lawsuit is an indictment of movie audiences that over and over again lap up stories about white people saving some downtrodden Black person.”
You might listen to that quote from the MSNBC article and wonder what universe MSNBC is living in. Because in this universe movies about white people saving black people are extremely rare. And at this point basically non-existent.
For its part, The Guardian brought out the big guns. They report that, “The Blind Side’s white savior tale was always built on shaky ground.” According to the piece:
“The movie version of The Blind Side has come to represent a low point for the white savior trope – the unlikely story of the rich white lady who turns a downtrodden Black teen hulk into an improbable Sunday pro. Jeffery Montez de Oca, the founding director of the Center for Critical Study of Sport at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, took aim at the film’s framing of adoption as ‘a signifying act of whiteness that obscures the social relations of domination that not only make charity possible, but also creates an urban underclass in need of charity.’ In her seminal tome White Fragility, Robin DiAngelo excoriates the film as ‘fundamentally and insidiously anti-Black.’”
What all these stories have in common is that they don’t interrogate the claims in Oher’s lawsuit at all. The media is so giddy that “The Blind Side” is under attack that they don’t care to do any actual journalism. They just trot out the usual fake experts to call it racist, as they’ve been doing for a decade.
Inside Edition even got in touch with the actor who portrays Michael Oher in the film, to ask him whether Sandra Bullock should surrender her Oscar. A question so stupid that the actor should respond by laughing hysterically, but that’s not exactly what happens:
Notice the snark at the end. The movie grossed over $300 million, the anchor notes, implying that the Tuohys somehow received all of that money, or even a significant amount of it. In reality, they received less than 3% of the proceeds, which is nothing compared to the $200 million they sold their company for. This is the level of “reporting” we’re seeing on this, with one exception.
Over at The Blaze, Jason Whitlock decided not to simply rewrite Oher’s complaint to push a narrative. He wrote some fantastic articles on this topic you should read, and he motivated me to personally go and read some of the many pieces of documented evidence contradicting Michael Oher’s claims. These are pieces of evidence that every major media outlet is ignoring.
For example, Here’s what Oher wrote in his memoir in 2012:
“Since I was already over the age of eighteen and considered an adult by the state of Tennessee, Sean and Leigh Anne would be named as my ‘legal conservators.’ They explained to me that it means pretty much the exact same thing as ‘adoptive parents,’ but that the laws were just written in a way that took my age into account. Honestly, I didn’t care what it was called … My mother was going to be at the hearing to agree that she supported the decision to have the Tuohys listed as my next of kin and legal conservators.”
That was more than a decade ago. Michael Oher, an adult in his mid-20s at the time of that memoir’s publication, clearly acknowledges the distinction between being adopted and being a legal conservator. He admits that he was NOT adopted. He uses the term “conservators” several times in the book. But we’re told to believe that more than ten years later, he finally decided to look into it and realized he had been tricked. We’re supposed to believe that he just realized some truth that he himself had already publicly acknowledged in a book he published over ten years ago.
So how was Michael Oher supposedly not aware of any of this? Did he not read his own memoir? Did he not watch the movie “The Blind Side”? There’s a scene in the film where Leigh Anne establishes legal guardianship over Michael Oher. There’s no scene where she says that she’s legally adopting him. Why is that?
To be clear, I can’t say for sure who is right or wrong in this case, though I have my very strong suspicions. It wouldn’t surprise me if all parties concerned are at least partially in the wrong to some extent. That’s usually how these kinds of conflicts go. And if the media wants to tell us that the Tuohys aren’t really “saviors,” I would certainly agree with that. There’s only one Savior, and his name isn’t Tuohy. But then again, the Tuohys never claimed to be saviors. They also never claimed to be saints or martyrs. They did a nice thing for a kid who needed help. That’s a fact. And that’s all. Does this conflict stem from the fact that although the Tuohys became Oher’s guardians and treated him like a son, they don’t intend to actually pass their fortune down to him because they want it to go to their actual kids? Is Michael Oher upset that he’s not now, today, as a 37-year-old man, reaping the financial benefits of being a blood relation to the Tuohys? These are purely speculations. But I think reasonable ones.
The key point is that the media’s complete lack of curiosity on all of these obvious red flags tells you everything you need to know about the Left’s perspective on race. A decade ago, only a handful of insufferable outlets complained about “The Blind Side.” Now all of academia and the major media outlets are doing it. They’re united to smear a family that helped save a young black teenager’s life, without any regard for facts or contrary evidence. After eight years of Barack Obama, and all those BLM riots and George Floyd funerals, we’ve arrived at this moral guidance: “Let the black teenager on the side of the road freeze to death. Don’t help him, or you’re a racist.”
At least now we have some clarity from the party of “Black Lives Matter,” and from the corporate media. Somehow a sports movie from 2009 has led them all to admit what they really think. Better to leave the black kid languishing in the gutter than reach out and help him. Better to look the other way than be a “white savior.” That’s the message coming in loud and clear. And I suspect that a lot of white people who have watched this Michael Oher saga play out, and who have seen everything that’s happened over the past decade or so, are going to take the message to heart and respond accordingly. The next Michael Oher, the next disadvantaged black kid who needs a helping hand, might not get it. He might end up suffering the fate that Oher likely would have suffered had the Tuohys not stepped in. That’s apparently what the Left wants. And now, tragically, they’ll get it.
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