Gift link if you don’t have a sub: https://t.co/LEYW6Y7kmJ
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) August 26, 2023
When the movie “The Blind Side” came out in 2009, I watched it with fascination because it overlapped with three big parts of my life.
It’s the story of Michael Oher, a young Black athlete who moves in with a white family, the Tuohys, and goes on to play for Ole Miss and in the N.F.L. I grew up in Alabama, where college football is the dominant mode of sports fandom (you’re either an Auburn fan or an Alabama fan, and there are no other options). I was adopted, as Mr. Oher believed himself to have been. And I’m a former equity analyst who’s a fan of Michael Lewis, the author of the book on which the movie was based…
But both the book and the movie tell Mr. Oher’s story in a way that conforms to insidious stereotypes about Black athletes as well as about adoptions of Black kids by white parents. Those stereotypes, and the possibility that there is another very different way to tell his story, are at the center of the lawsuit Mr. Oher recently filed. On its surface, the lawsuit is about money, but beneath that lie profound and troubling questions about what Black Americans are permitted to own and what they are expected to owe.
Mr. Oher, now 37 and retired from the N.F.L., is suing the Tuohys because he claims they misled him to believe that the legal conservatorship they held over him was essentially the same as adoption. He also says they benefited financially from the film, sold his life rights and did not compensate him adequately. Most of all, however, he seems angry at the way he was portrayed by people who purported to care about him — as a poor, unintelligent Black kid who succeeded primarily because he lived with the Tuohys for a year during high school…
It seems that it was particularly important to Mr. Lewis to cast Mr. Oher as intellectually inferior. In an interview in 2007, Mr. Lewis said that Mr. Oher was on the dean’s list at Ole Miss, “which says a lot about the dean’s list at Ole Miss.” He went on to say that big football schools take athletes, “many of whom are from the underclass or Black kids from ghettos around America,” and put them in easy majors to ensure that they can keep their G.P.A.s up. At Ole Miss, he said, “all the poor Black football players are majoring in criminal justice.”
I don’t know if criminal justice is an easy major, but it did not seem to occur to Mr. Lewis that poor Black football players might be interested in it because young Black men are disproportionately targeted by a criminal justice system that is particularly brutal to poor people…
The Tuohys were already wealthy, but “The Blind Side” made them wealthier. They insist that they saw no real money from the film, but they went on to monetize their story via books and appearances. Beyond the money, they benefited in ways that are difficult to explain to anyone who lives outside the Deep South, where college football is practically a religion, good season tickets are a major status symbol, and your preferred college mascot is an acceptable major theme for home décor.
Considering the other Division I schools that showed up to recruit Mr. Oher, Ole Miss wasn’t remotely the best choice for Mr. Oher. But surely it was for the Tuohys. For college football boosters, an association with a star recruit offers a special kind of status, a prestige comparable to owning a small yacht or having been invited to the White House….
An unsympathetic reader might imagine that the Tuohys figure they ‘bought’ a valuable sports animal, the way another couple might buy a promising young Thoroughbred from an obscure Kentucky farm to race in the Derby — and they did it at a real bargain price, too!
It is often in the interests of adoptive parents and the adoption industry to imply that adoption is charity work, rather than something that benefits the adoptive parents as well.
This perception of adoption as an act of altruism is exponentially more pronounced when Black kids are adopted by white parents. Mythologizing the role of those parents goes beyond just suggesting that adoptees are second-best choices to biological children. It implies that Black children need to be rescued by white people, and that makes white people feel good about doing it.
Nowhere is this more apparent than at schools like Briarcrest, which were founded amid desegregation by people who regarded themselves as nice white parents and who did not want their children to attend school with Black children. These schools were informally known as segregation academies, and when they were finally integrated, it was often via football…
Black kids are not given football scholarships because those schools want to integrate; they’re given scholarships because the schools want to build successful football programs on the backs of Black bodies…
… The Tuohys don’t regard themselves as racist, and Mr. Lewis doesn’t see them that way either, but the book and the film portray Mr. Oher in ways that serve to reinforce racist stereotypes. It’s not unusual to discuss the physique of great athletes, but Mr. Oher is referred to repeatedly as a “freak of nature,” and Mr. Lewis insinuates that he’s not mentally capable of understanding simple things. In the book, Mr. Oher is portrayed as literally not knowing what an ocean is.
Mr. Oher deserves, at the very least, the benefit of the assumptions made about the Tuohys’ biological children: that he is talented and capable and deserves the bulk of credit for his own success. The Tuohys may have helped him, but they did not rescue him, and he does not owe them his story. If you’re an N.F.L. fan, you’d probably know who Michael Oher is even if he had never met Leigh Anne Tuohy. The reverse is not true.
There’s also another kind of implied nastiness here that i didn’t talk about i the column: this guy assumes his genes would be better than that of any kid he might adopt.
— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) August 28, 2023
gwangung
This will probably piss off a lot of white people.
They’re the ones who’re living in Egypt (and have been for a long while).
Wag
When I watched the movie for the first ( and only) time I felt a profound sense of discomfort that I had a hard time putting my finger on. Now, years later, and after BLM and the rise of trump, I can look back through the 20/20 retrospectoscope and see the obvious racism. At the time it wasn’t as clear.
smintheus
The movie sounds appallingly bad, I’m not surprised it made so much money…for at least some people.
But, c’mon. Yes, criminal justice is famously one of the easiest majors pretty much everywhere it’s offered.
Villago Delenda Est
My question: is bbuckley88 related to William F.?
Mai Naem mobileI
I remember watching the movie and feeling uncomfortable about the way the Tuohys got the white savior treatment. And I would be pissed off if I was Michael Oher too. They portrayed him like he was mildly retarded. Also to have the two kids make a percentage profit off the movie and Oher got some miniscule set amount. GTFO. Oh, and I forgot Michael Lewis wrote the book. This is making him look really bad. BTW has anybody else been seeing those click bait ads with ‘the real story behind Michael Oher’ for a few years now? I never clicked on those ads but I wonder if this is what it was about.
eclare
I never read the book or saw the movie because I thought it would have some sort of white savior point of view. I live in Memphis, Ole Miss grads dominate the elites here. The Tuohys certainly would have gotten a bump in society for “helping” poor Michael.
The whole arrangement seemed skeevy to me.
eclare
This is also a reason that I question people like Amy Bony Carrot who adopt multiple disadvantaged children. Are you looking to really help, or do you want that white savior halo? Or do you want unpaid household help? Or maybe a mix, with the child told for the rest of their lives how “lucky” they were?
sab
Michael Oher had his own book out. Years later it is still well worth reading.
ETA And he wrote it when he still thought they cared about him.
ETA It helped me understand my own step-daughter, who spent her early childhood in bad foster care. His book was aimed at the kids like him, not the rescue parents.
Jay
In Canada, there was the whole 60’s Scoop.
Indigenous children were seized and “fostered” or “adopted” into “White Families”, many who wern’t “White”, but the money was good, $750 per kid.
I knew and grew up with the Tran daughters. They were sɪmʃiən. Their “Dad” owned a KFC where they worked as cheap labour. While they had the “advantages” of better schools, swim team, etc, man, they were messed up. I coached them privately, after practice, as they were both B team swimmers.
About 8 years later, I saw Noreen again in a club, and we hooked up for a while. She had her High School, but that was it, was working again at her “Dad’s” KFC, and had a boyfriend in prison, planning to wait 8 years for his release.
I talked her into spending a summer in Metlakatla. By then both her birth parents were dead, but she had aunties and cousins who hadn’t seen her since she was taken.
I ran into her again, two years later, at a squat. She was in her 2nd year of Indigenous Law at UBC, was doing really well and as part of the program, was reaching out to unhoused Indigenous peoples to provide legal aid. It was great to see her. I was at the squat because I needed a place to stay, the squat was political as hell, and I ran security. I saw her a few times a month, but then I left the squat and went to the War in the Woods. So about three years later, I saw her again, at our trials, representing the Tla-o-qui-aht peoples protesting along side us. Life is weird. She is now a Judge and has reclaimed her name.
VeniceRiley
That family got dragged raw in a twitter thread the other day by every waiter and shop staff they ever encountered. The mom in particular is horrible.
Brachiator
There is much about this article that pisses me off. I also think that some of the issues here may be much larger and much messier than the author of the opinion piece, Elizabeth Spiers, suggests.
I never saw the movie The Blind Side. I deliberately avoided this movie, much as I avoided stuff like Driving Miss Daisy and The Green Book, movies which are often well made and which garner a lot of praise, but which too often put a white person at the emotional center of a film which also includes black characters.
There was some criticism about the Green Book during the Oscar season, and the Hollywood Reporter printed comments from anonymous Oscar voters, one of whom admitted that he enjoyed the film and would vote for it precisely because it was mainly about the white character.
So, we have long-standing problems with the Hollywood entertainment industrial complex and its portrayal of people of color.
Ole Miss and sports irregularities just get worse all the time, and include overt attempts by the state government to oppress its poorest citizens. This case is still ongoing.
I don’t know if Mr Oher got cheated. I know that he lived in many foster homes when he was younger. And he also seemed to blossom in high school and college, with the support of many people and through his own efforts.
The claims about his relationship with the Tuohys are deeply tangled.
It appears that Oher got some compensation for his story, but was it adequate? When securing the rights for these pseudo biographical films, the studios like to keep to a minimum the number of real life people who will receive compensation. It is unclear here whether Oher had independent representation when deals were made.
But this part of the opinion piece really bothered me.
I know that Oher was depicted as neglected because of his problems with his family and with the foster care system. And he certainly was disadvantaged because of the absence of stability in his life growing up. But I wonder why the writer chose to suggest that the young athlete was being portrayed as “a poor, unintelligent Black kid…” Unintelligent?
eclare
@Jay:
That is an amazing story. So glad she reclaimed her name.
sab ...
@Brachiator: I think Oher was balancing between two families, both of whom demanded total allegiance.
Just projecting here. My stepdaughter had the same balancing act. She inevitably sucked us in. How could she not. We were both her families. We both failed her. How could we not. She wanted us to choose them, but we deeply believed they had failed her and they deeply believed we had stolen her.
My ground star was her two step-brothers, who loved her like the sister she was to them, and never let the crazy adults in their lives interfere with their relationship with their sister.
ETA I was very happy to see that he (Oher) had a girlfriend from early on who stuck with him and is now his wife, that he didn’t write about her in his book.
Kept his important parts of his life to himself.
eclare
@Brachiator:
For the author, Mr. Lewis, to be asked how Michael was doing at Ole Miss, and for Mr. Lewis to answer “he’s on the dean’s list, which tells you a lot about the dean’s list at Ole Miss” tells me he was portrayed as unintelligent. Because that is how Mr. Lewis saw him. He could have stopped with “he’s on the dean’s list,” but he didn’t. I wonder if Mr. Lewis would have said that about the Tuohy’s biological children.
The full article goes into more detail about another scene in the movie. Note, like you I haven’t seen it.
Shalimar
@Brachiator: I have read that Oher was a good student before the Tuohys took him in, so he wasn’t and clearly isn’t unintelligent.
I also don’t think it’s really about the money as much as them continuing to profit off of him. Oher made many many times more money from his NFL career as the family did from the book and movie. It seems unlikely he needs the million or two we’re talking about.
JeffH
@Villago Delenda Est: At the very least he’s got Nazi code in his username…
Shalimar
@eclare: Lewis was a friend of the Tuohys before he wrote the book, so he’s going to be on their side of the dispute. The details really destroy his reputation though. He seems to go out of his way to sound like a racist piece of shit.
sab
My comment in moderation just disappeared into the ether. Why?
sab
@Brachiator: He was portrayed as unintelligent in Lewis’s book. They were amazed that with tutoring his IQ went up substantially when IQs shouldn’t go up. So that without their tutoring his IQ would have stayed low.
All that assuming it was low to begin with. I don’t believe that.
Jay
@eclare:
The last time I saw naumasia was in the early aughts. I was fishing the Telkwa in November for steelhead. She was the key speaker at a presentation on Restorative Justice at the library. I saw her name in the local rag and showed up. It was an excellent presentation. She did not like my goatee, and wondered what had happened to my hair. (I used to have Patrick Swazy hair, not the mullet). We had coffee afterwards. Turns out that my guide, Symion, was one of her cousins. It was nice. I was doing okay, (first marriage, great job, nice house), she was doing great. She is now a Federal Judge, in line possibly for Canada’s Supreme Court, according to some rumours.
Sadly, her sister died of an overdose in the late 80’s.
sab
@Shalimar: He didn’t hide his relationship. He just failed to realize, as a racist piece of shit, that his book, viewed in context, would show that he is a racist piece of shit.
Jay
@sab:
If they arn’t rescued in time, they disappear.
Bunch of reason’s for the automated “moderation”, so I try at times to copy the comment, when I can, and then try to figure out what the issues is.
tokyokie
When I heard the plot for the movie, I stayed away from it because I knew it was bullshit. If the Tuophys cared about the kid, they wouldn’t have pushed him to a crappy school like Ole Miss.
eclare
@Shalimar:
Yeah, I knew that. It’s too bad, because another book of his that I did read, The Big Short, was very good.
eclare
@Jay:
Lots of sadness in that story.
eclare
@sab …:
Good to know that he wrote his own story and has stability in his personal life.
Jay
@eclare:
Yeah. naumasia was a nice girl, big heart, but her sister Mary, (aaneaht) was “stunning”. After a couple of dirt bag boyfriends, got into modelling. Drugs, high life. It was the days.
Still, naumasia is doing well, and is one of the few people I know from that time in my life who is still alive, or not a dirtbag.
sab
I was very happy to read that he had a high school girlfriend from age 17 that nobody ever wrote about but who he married. Some continuity and love and loyalty in his life.
sab
@Shalimar: But they totally betrayed him. Projected him as unintelligent when he wasn’t, got a conservatorship, profited their own kids but not him from their conservatorship, claimed they adopted him when they hadn’t. The whole set-up was vile.
Brachiator
@Shalimar:
I’m a tax guy. Sometimes it is not just about whether you “need” the money. It’s about whether you are being correctly and adequately compensated, and about whether contractual obligations are being honored.
Also, some professional athletes have very short careers. What they earn over 10 years may have to last them a lifetime. And there are also people pretending to be their friends who try to drain as much money from them as they can.
Added to this mix is the fact that a lot of entertainers, artists and athletes are terrible money managers.
Jay
@sab:
yup.
Ruckus
@Brachiator:
So, we have long-standing problems with the Hollywood entertainment industrial complex and its portrayal of people of color.
Like a lot of things it is a hell of a lot better than it was when I was a kid. Is it good enough? Some parts seem to be not all that bad. Long ago I knew folks who worked in TV and from what they have told me it is a lot better than it was early on. Is it perfect? Yeah what is. So sure it, like a lot of life could be a lot better. There is still a huge percentage of black people who live on the street here in Los Angeles. There are obvious homeless black men and sometimes women who ride the electric train all day long because the seats are more comfortable to sleep in than the sidewalk and the AC works. Is it better than it was 50-60 yrs ago? I’d say absolutely. Could it be far, far better than it is. Fucking Absolutely. I know a lot of effort is being put into this in the LA area, I’m just not sure that it’s doing more than scratching the surface. I know I have seen some housing with a lot of units and that helps, in the last couple of years the number of units has tripled.
Jay
@Brachiator:
athlete’s don’t get residuals for their play.
Book sales and Movie deals often do.
eclare
@sab:
Exactly. Again, I live in Memphis, and it’s what I call a big small town. Ole Miss is ninety minutes away, lots of grads here. The sainthood of the Tuohys was instant. Glad I never bought it.
Jay
@Ruckus:
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/new-leaf-project-results-1.5752714
sab
@eclare: I liked that book too. My RWNJ brother, a finance guy, says that book was basically okay, but that Lewis got very basic checkable facts, like people’s names, wrong or mis-spelled. So we should take all of his reporting with a big grain of salt. Michael Lewis writes well. He reports less well.
Ruckus
@Jay:
Income, and food are the two biggest issues. Solve, or at least make those two a lot better and that helps the situation far more. Look at your own link, the $7500 was $600 less than the shelter cost/yr and seemingly did a better job. My experience is that the vast majority of those living on the street, really, really do not want to be but because they don’t have job history, they can’t get a job. Because they don’t have an address or likely even a phone, they can’t even leave their name for a possible/future job. It’s often not just one thing, it’s everything, all of it is fucked up and fixing it costs money, time, square footage, money, effort, a possible future/better life, and oh yeah, money. Maybe if billionaires paid one percent more income tax, we could solve a shit ton of normal human problems, instead of how many cases of what wine to purchase, you know those billionaire problems.
eclare
@sab:
Interesting. Sounds like your conclusion, writing vs reporting, is apt. Thanks.
Brachiator
@Jay:
Residuals often apply to actors and writers for TV shows.
I don’t know much about all the variables of football contracts, but that is not the issue here.
A real person might get a payment when a studio is going to make a picture about their life. This is separate from anything related to the book deal. I don’t know whether the family got any profit participation from the movie. And as I noted, I don’t know if Oher had anyone negotiating for him independent of the family that he lived with.
Finally, the white family were able to profit from publicity after the success of the movie. Again, it is unclear whether Oher got a fair share of any of this income.
Jay
@Ruckus:
pre covid, and until I got covid, I volenteered for DERA, providing basic medical care and support for the vast array of homeless encampments in the Lower Rainland.
Most of the people I dealt with had jobs.
Here, right now, average rent is $2800 a month
Minimum wage at 40 hours a week is $2840.
And then, of course to rent, you need first month, last month, and damage deposits, so $6400 up front to $7200.
And 50% of our housing stock are either empty or short term (72% empty) short term rentals.
Our home, a rental, is owned offshore, and is only rented because there is a 12% tax on top of property taxes, if it is unoccupied, that and covid. If we had to move, even with T’s good job, we could not afford a place to live. We moved at the conjunction of the tax and covid, when nobody knew how to do a rental. We are lucky, with the rental caps, we are paying $1000 less than what our place could rent for today on an open market.
We are also lucky, in that out Landlord, doesn’t give a shit.
In the first 6 months, we sent out notice about 5 “cheap assed shit*” that was broken. He paid to fix one, probably cost him close to a grand.
Now we just sent him notes that “this is broken”, then another note later that “Jay” had fixed it.
*everything is cheap, built to a price point. The deadbolt I had to replace was $1.25 each, if you bought 200 of them, vs a $12 Slage. The kitchen sink was leaking, at the P trap, because there was no compression ring.
Jay
@Brachiator:
it’s not unclear.
Brachiator
@Jay:
The article makes some plausible damning claims, but does not provide details. The family claims elsewhere that they provided Oher with an accurate accounting. Hopefully further investigation will reveal more.
I have problems with the article, and also wonder why the author of the book didn’t dig more deeply into possible problems. There are also a lot of people with connections to Ole Miss, a university that does a lot of shady deals.
Jay
@Brachiator:
there are a lot of other articles that go into greater detail.
Oher got 25% less at best than the “other kids” that were marginal characters in the story in payment and residuals, for both the book and the movie, and the pay out are all controlled by the “family”..
Slavery lives,………
eclare
@Brachiator:
The author did not dig into problems because he and Sean Tuohy have been friends since high school.
Brachiator
@Jay:
I’ve seen other experiments like this. I think a number have been in Canada. And even though the results are often successful, the federal or state (or provincial? ) governments say “We can’t do this on a larger scale. Too expensive. “
Jay
@Brachiator:
Reganomic’s still have an impact.
NB, Sask and Alberta are going after LGTBQ and Trans,
Our “conservatives” have since Regan, just copied US ReTHugs.
Why couldn’t our border be with Mexico instead.
Jay
@Brachiator:
BTW, it’s %55 less than what we are spending on those few social supports now,
Math is hard.
WV ain’t teaching it any more, makes it easier.
Nukular Biskits
Holy cow.
I knew of the existence of this film, maybe having heard mention of it on NPR or elsewhere, but I never knew the details until now.
That it (initially, at least) took place in MS doesn’t surprise me at all.
I hope Mr. Oher wins his case and is awarded significant damages.
lowtechcyclist
Never heard of this guy or the book or the movie before I woke up this morning, so I’m in no position to judge who’s got the facts right.
But if someone else was telling my life story to the world in a way that didn’t match up with the way I experienced it, that makes them look like saviors and makes me look like an idiot who got lucky that they’d rescued me, I’d be pissed as hell about that, completely aside from the money.
And then add in that these people are making bank off that story…
raven
It looks like we got out of Hatteras at the right time!
eclare
@raven:
It does! Were a lot of people leaving?
Betty Cracker
@raven: Did you catch anything before you left? (ETA: fish, I mean — not communicable diseases!)
raven
@eclare:
I don’t know, we left on schedule but the lady next door to our rental lives there and she warned us that the really crappy road was going to flood and be impassable.
@Betty Cracker:
I went on an inshore Monday and caught some nice bluefish. Great fighters but not eating favorites on the gulf. They are really good right out of the water and we enjoyed them. It’s the old “they don’t freeze well because they are oily”. I vacuum froze the wahoo and blue and tried lining a cooler with a towel, putting the fish in an insulated bag and stuffing paper in the top. They were in there for 24 hours and most were still frozen solid and a couple were a bit soft so I just put them in the freezer
I think I’ll send in a bunch of photos.
Bostondreams
@Brachiator: what are your issues with the article?
Betty Cracker
@raven: Great! Always good to have fillets in the freezer.
raven
@Betty Cracker: Yea, I have some nice big chunks of wahoo!
raven
92,000 at a Nebraska women’s volleyball match!
eclare
@raven:
I’m sure they have screens, but I don’t see how a stadium that size works with volleyball.
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
I’m in full sympathy with Oher if he feels like he was portrayed inaccurately in the book and movie and didn’t get the compensation he was entitled to from either of them. The movie did lean into the White Savior angle hard, which was a trifle nauseating. I saw it once and that was more than enough.
That said as a transracial adoptive parent the shade thrown at us and our motives by the author of the article rankles a little. We’re not all doing it out of some white savior motivation despite what the author implies.
Betty Cracker
@raven: That’s good eating!
zhena gogolia
This movie gave me the creeps the minute it came out, just from reading about it
eclare
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Thank you for your real life perspective.
raven
@eclare: It doesn’t. The NCAA men’s final four is held in football stadiums. My sis went to the championship in Glendale and couldn’t see shit.
eclare
@raven:
Gotcha. Thanks.
Ramalama
@Jay: Good job. Connecting her with Noreen’s relatives. Easy to see now how bad it could have gone for her if she hadn’t linked up with them.
EarthWindFire
I don’t have anything to say about the movie that hasn’t been said. But that tweet on not adopting children because of their ingratitude…hilarious. Guy thinks he’s going to get gratitude from his biological children for raising them? Hahahaha. You want gratitude? Get a dog.
Eolirin
@Jay: Housing costs are killing us everywhere. It’s the biggest economic issue we’re facing, bigger than wages.
That your area is facing that while seeming to have a surplus of housing is kind of nuts.
Eolirin
@Brachiator: Which is not actually true, and is covering for a different reason, since a consistent feature of those pilots is that they cost less per person served than the existing programs.
They save money in addition to having better outcomes.
But they’d also eliminate a bunch of government jobs if adopted and they involve directly giving money to poor people instead of giving money to other, not poor, people to provide assistance to poor people. And that’s just not done, data be dammed.
Freemark
@Eolirin: Unfortunately the corporate buying of real estate is a big issue, especially in urban/suburban growing areas. Add ABNB and you have some major artificial housing issues.
lee
We watched the movie when it was released. As movies go it’s pretty middling. There was already some controversy about the portrayal of Oher when it was released. Yes the movie does lean pretty heavily into the ‘white savior’ bit.
The one thing that comes to mind about the entire ‘adopted/guardianship’ issue: You mean to tell me that during all of his contract negotiations with the NFL his manager, lawyer, etc did not figure this out? Did not notify him? Either that is pretty fucking negligent on their part or they were part of the scam.
As for the adoption part: I’m adopted (same race so I can’t speak to that) and I have biological kids. If someone thinks their is an iota of difference they can go fuck themselves.
sab
I have an adopted kid who has had an unpleasantly interesting early life. I have friends and relatives who are reporters. I sure as hell would not let any of the reporter friends wander through my house gathering information to write a book about the adopted kid. If they had written a book about the kid we wouldn’t be on speaking terms anymore, much less signing contracts for a movie.
Shalimar
@lee: This is a personal impression from what I have read, so there is a good chance I’m wrong. I think Oher knew what the guardianship meant long ago and saying he just found out is about tolling the statute of limitations on his lawsuit. I think what has changed is that he has reflected more and more on the way he was treated and realizes now how selfish their supposedly benevolent behavior was.
Ruckus
@Shalimar:
I think a lot of all of this in many directions is/can be real life. It isn’t always pretty, realistic, idilic, good, bad.
In this particular case it seems that the bad actors were actually bad. It seems that they weren’t in it for any of the right reasons, only their own, very self interest. And I see a person who thought it was good, till he figured out it really wasn’t, that he was actually the victim rather than the saved. Life can be complicated, life has many pitfalls and often seems one thing when it can often be something completely different. And emotions at a moment can cloud a lot for a long time. We are human, we are all imperfect, some are far more imperfect than others. And life isn’t always fair or good or proper. And someone always suffers. It’s what they do with their life after the shit that is dealt them. This man suffered because of these people because they did not respect him, they used him. He’s not better for it, he’s better in spite of it. He’s a better human than them. Seems like quite a bit better.
Uncle Cosmo
And then add in that the Tuohys aren’t (and weren’t) zackly poor with an estimated family fortune of $75-100M, mostly from buying >100 fast food franchises in the South (subsequently sold). Whatever they got from The Blind Side book and movie was change found under the sofa cushions by comparison – they could have passed on every penny to Oher and never noticed it.
Belafon
@Brachiator: I’m definitely late to this, but yes, in the movie, he was portrayed as dumb at first. That was one of the things that killed my interest in the movie.
Belafon
@lee:
What? An entire group of people designed to take advantage of a football player are going to be honest with them?
artem1s
I did see the film. Did not read either book. There were some pretty icky moments in the film that were obviously designed to make the Tuohy’s look like upstanding, God fearing, gun loving, austerity bootstrap Republicans. It is not clear from the movie that he was only living with them for one year and that they did not adopt him. Another of the icky exaggerations(?) was Michael’s mother – straight up stereotype out of a GOP stump speech – welfare, public housing, drug addict, etc, etc. But the scene that really pissed me off was the NCAA representative (Black woman) who was questioning Oher’s relationship with the Tuohy’s and whether he was pressured into choosing Ole Miss. Let me tell you that was a heap of ‘too much protesting’, gaslighting and playing the victim. How dare the NCAA question whether the Tuohy’s benefited from Oher’s admission to Ole Miss? How dare you insinuate that we have anything but Michael’s best interests at heart. Doesn’t surprise me at all that they were doing exactly what the NCAA was worried about.
wonkie
I haven’t seen the movie or read the book. The impression I got, based on the trailer, was that the black teen adopted by the too pretty and soooo white family had a developmental disability. I found the trailer cringy but didn’t give much thought to why. I am glad he’s suing, and I hope he wins.
Jerszy
@Wag: The movie’s title was telling you where the racism was hiding *the whole time*!
a thousand flouncing lurkers (was fidelio)
@sab: The trouble with IQ testing is that it is, at best, a snapshot of intellectual functioning at a specific point in time. It can be affected by things such as whether the person tested is sick that day, how well-rested or well-fed they are, or anything else that could affect the ability to concentrate and work out problems.
In addition, the verbal component of tests such as the Wechsler scales has been not unfairly criticized for what works as racial bias, intentional or not.
So I can easily believe a big jump in test scores for a youngster coming from an unstable, not very supportive background into a more stable setting with reliable academic assistance. He was underperforming at first, and later testing would be a more accurate reflection of his capacities.
Paul in KY
I have never seen the movie, as I hate Ole Miss in general, and I also heard that Sandra Bullock’s performance/looks was not at all like the real Mrs. Tuohy (who supposedly was very, very, very pleased by Ms. Bullock’s performance).
MCA1
I’d like to take a slightly more glass half full approach here: could it be possible that Oher was helped out by the Tuohy’s on balance, while at the same time the Tuohy’s may not be angels (and Oher’s perfectly in the right to be pissed at them)? I think it’s all a bit more nuanced than the Tuohy’s are just shitty money-grubbing white savior wannabes.
I guess a lot of it is dependent on what the truth is in the fog of Lewis’s depiction of Oher’s past before Leigh Anne met him, but so far as I know, there are some things that are fairly well-established and that I haven’t heard Oher dispute: his mother was indeed a crack addict. His father was in and out of jail. He repeated a grade or two and was shuttled between different foster homes as a kid. He had extremely low grades for a large portion of his high school career and had to repeat some courses online to remove failing grades with good ones in order to get his GPA to a level where he was NCAA eligible. Whatever the longterm structural and systemic failings, many based on racial history, that led to all of those circumstances, they were there, and I’d put good money on Oher’s life outcome being a lot shittier than it is now had people not interceded.
Is it great that it’s entirely plausible the Tuohy’s and Briarcrest and the University of Mississippi would never have noticed him were it not for his football talent (and size)? No, not great, and it says a lot about how we as a society value things. Whatever their motivations and/or corruptions, though, the Tuohy’s provided stability and resources to navigate the system that put him on a path to the NFL. That’s not all evil. I have a hard time believing that an already very wealthy couple looked at a talented kid in Oher’s position and the first and only thing that popped into their heads was dollar signs.
Side note re: the discussion upthread about athletes having a very short span of employability in their profession: NFL players receive, through the success of their players union, very generous pensions (obviously, it may still be the case that Oher deserves/should have gotten a heck of a lot more compensation out of Hollywood turning his life story into megamillions, though).