PicoBlog

I’m going to watch “The Blind Side” tonight. I’ve seen it a few times over the years, and it’s not my favorite “football-as-a-metaphor-for-humanity” movie (that goes, and must always go, to “Brian’s Song,”) but it’s a feel-good reminder of the miracles that happen when we pay attention. Quick summary : Michael Oher, a talented but homeless Black teen is adopted by a white family in Texas that gives him a home, a place at their Thanksgiving table, and a chance at football glory. Yes, it’s somewhat fictionalized in the “Natalie Wood Was Not Puerto Rican” Hollywood way. It might have smoothed out the inconvenient edges and details that took away from the overall Disney glow. It went for the heart instead of the more discerning mind. But it was, overall, a great film based on a great book by Michael Lewis which was itself based in fact

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The movie made millions. It made so many Americans, desperate for proof of the thing that we know is true-that love transcends race-feel justified in our optimism. It showed the jaundiced and cynical race critics up for being the cannibals who feed off of human imperfection that they really are. It was, simply, a nice film about nice people that had a nice and believable ending.

Enter Michael Oher, the former homeless teen with a drug addict mother and a trash bag filled with clothes turned Super Bowl winning Baltimore Raven. Oher has now declared that the Touheys, the family that gave him a home and hope, tricked and defrauded him. Worse than that, he says they never cared for him but rather had an eye on the money they could make from his obvious natural athletic talent. In a lawsuit filed earlier this month, Oher accuses the Touheys of never sharing the proceeds from the book and the film. Much more insidiously, he accuses them of lying to him about being “adopted” when what they had actually obtained was a conservatorshop over him, similar to the one controlling Brittany Spears.

At first glance, this seems off. If Oher was deceived into believing he was adopted and wasn’t, and if this resulted in a financial windfall for the Touheys with no equal benefit to Oher, this clearly suggests that he was being taken advantage of. But that’s not the case.

For all intents and purposes, Oher was the Touhey’s son. He lived with them, not on a couch but in his own room, ate with them, went on trips with them, was financially supported by them and his success on the gridiron was in large part made possible by their mentorship. They were his biggest cheerleaders. His mother, with whom he seems to have to have reconnected as an adult, did none of these things. And he’s not suing her for abandonment or neglect.

As for the money, Michael Lewis has come out and stated that everything was equally divided up among the Touheys and Oher, and that a trust fund was set up for him. So far, that has not been credibly disputed.

This is a sad situation. It reminds me of Colin Kaepernick rejecting his adoptive white patents during the BLM moment, even going so far as to imply that they were racist. It seems quite similar to what Oher is doing, trying to make it seem as if this opportunistic white family took advantage of this Black teen. Let’s examine that theory. Is it likely that one day, Leigh Ann Touhey sees Black classmate of her daughter and says “he’s homeless and poor with a neglectful mother, let me take him in, give him a home, tutor him so he can graduate, take him on college tours, help him get an athletic scholarship and shower him with love just so that a few years from now Sandra Bullock can win an Oscar playing me?”

If you think that’s plausible, I have land in Florida that used to belong to Disney to sell you.

I cannot get away from the idea that this is about race, and the constant attempts to pit one group of people against another. I’m sure Michael Oher knows what he’s doing, and shame on him.

But I also think he’s being used by the race baiters out there who never saw a trumped-up bigotry conflict they didn’t love to exploit.

On second thought, I think I’ll skip the Blind Side and watch Brian’s Song for the millionth time. That’s much more reflective of the potential we humans have to love each other, from the color blind side.

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