In her essay "Freedom Writers: White teacher to the rescue" from Rethinking Popular Culture and Media, Chela Delgado dissects her dislike of “white savior” movies like Freedom Writers, a 2007 movie based on Erin Gruwell's time as a high school teacher in an inner-city classroom in the early 90's. In the film, Gruwell interrupts anti-Black bullying by a Latine student by making comparisons to the Holocaust. While on her soapbox, she realizes for the first time that the students in her class face violence daily. Gruwell uses The Diary of Anne Frank to “connect” with students by having the students relate to the oppression that Gruwell’s community has experienced.
Gruwell provides students with composition books and encourages them to write their own stories. The film frames the resolution of the story as the students making different individual choices to “escape” the problems in their community. The problems are systemic racism, which is never addressed in the film. On the Freedom Writers’ Foundation website, which promotes Gruwell as a teacher educator (she left teaching in 1998 after five years), the students “put down their weapons and picked up a pen” due to Gruwell’s interventions in the classroom.
Delgado points out that in the film, Gruwell attempts to use Tupac’s lyrics to teach poetry. Delgado points out that the film portrays the lesson as a failure, which is why Gruwell turns to The Diary of Anne Frank. I rewatched the scene after reading this article. Gruwell starts the class by playing Tupac’s 1993 classic “Keep Ya Head Up”. When the music starts, Gruwell smiles with a goofy grin on her face and does a little bop dance. She does this while trying to get the students’ attention. These are the unacknowledged lyrics that are playing in the background:
Some say the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice. I say the darker the flesh, then the deeper the roots. I give a holla to my sisters on welfare. 2Pac cares if don’t nobody else care. And uh, I know they like to beat you down a lot. When ya come around the block, brothers clown a lot, but please don’t cry. Dry your eyes. Never let up. Forgive but don’t forget. Girl, keep ya head up.
The person who was supposed to teach the students empathy and critical analysis sees one of Tupac’s most vulnerable and loving songs for his community as nothing more than a joke that could make her seem young, relevant, and hip. The students are rightly offended and begin reciting another Tupac song, "Papa'z Song". Gruwell takes this interest from the students and decides to go with the more “serious” work by having the students read The Diary of Anne Frank. Gruwell can only empathize with the students by relating their pain to her own, but the film indicates that the students are given the strength to "free" themselves using the words of a young white girl rather than a brilliant Black man who used music and lyrics to expose the forces that kept his community in a constant cycle of poverty and violence. I don't know if it was an intentional choice, but the filmmakers chose a song where Tupac directly calls out the systemic oppression: "they got money for wars, but can't feed the poor", while simultaneously embracing and supporting his community "I remember Marvin Gaye, used to sing to me. He had me feeling like Black was the thing to be. And suddenly the ghetto didn't seem so tough, and though we had it rough, we always had enough." Using this song in a movie where a white woman asks teens to reject their community to "save" themselves is insulting at best.
Delgado also questions why Gruwell doesn’t use the stories of Black and Latine people to help students to relate to each other and why hip hop can’t be analyzed for the poetry that it is without whitewashing or watering it down. Delgado states, “We teach hip hop so that students can learn Shakespeare.” (200). The students in the film were asked to learn empathy by examining their beliefs and rejecting the ways the people in their neighborhoods survive white supremacy. At the same time, their teacher doesn’t do any work to uproot her own white supremacist beliefs.
Delgado also points out that the other teachers in the film are white. Black, Latine, and other people of color are not represented as adults, even though studies have shown that children of color do better in school when they have a teacher who represents their identity. Delgado says, “There are undeniably ‘saviors’ of color, as well as students ‘saving’ themselves. They just don’t get movies made about them.” (201)
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