Orrin Konheim
3 min readApr 5, 2021

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If you have this much sensitivity with the film, you're probably going to think that anyone who criticizes your mode of thought is doing so because they're racist and misogynist since you happen to be a female POC, but I digress:

In my day, when I studied the humanities (I was a geography major and film studies minor with anthropolgy coursework), we would look at Indiana Jones as illustrative of the exploitation of the developing world by the developed world.

We would use this paradigm over your primmitive intersectionality models because the world is a lot more complicated than what you want to believe (white skin = bad, POC = delicate, coddled treasures). You can go on thinking that anything and everything in your purview is a result of White Supremacy but let's face it, that's the easy way out.

The developed world isn't just a product of white people and they didn't colonize solely based on racist beliefs. Most of their spheres of influence in the Global South extended in those directions because at a certain point in history, civillization developed imperial needs to expand their territory and certain people were more advanced than others.

By no means was this universal that white people were the aggressors (Japan, China, the Mayan empire, or certain African kingdoms) or that people of color were the victims at every point in history (try telling that to the victims of Serbian genocide). As for why the 3rd world is dysfunctional, whites didn't put South American or African dictators in power like Robert Mugabe, Rafael Trujillo, the perpetrators of Ivory Coast's Civil War or the Dirty War in Argentina, Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti, or the perpetrators of the dirty war. In many cases, the US is directly responsible for certain totalitarian regimes like Guatemala, Castro, or Agosto Pinochet in Chile. But let's separate what the white US man is and isn't responsible for.

It's also worth noting that the scene in question takes place in Brazil and the current Brazilian president is an inhumane dictator and his choice to be an affront to human rights is nobody's doing but his own. It has nothing to do with any European or US power.

It's also worth noting that Spielberg actually goes to the third world in the sequel (Temple of Doom), he was very conscious to spell out the degree to which the British were complicit in the corruption of India and spelled out the wealth differences by contrasting the enormity of the governor's palace with the squeamish poverty of the natives.

I think Indy's far from a perfect character because, well, he kills people and it's hard to tell whether each kill is in self-defense, and there's the question of looting verse preservation, but I don't need to see it as a paradigm of white man vs people of color. Your analysis of him as a white supremacist hero is all the more blind because his enemy in the film is literally the most famous movement in 20th century history for white supremacy.

What's also funny is that people who want to preach the gospel of "...is because of White Privilege" insist that this doesn't mean that white people have to constantly carry the burden of slavery on their shoulders but these kinds of essays exist exactly that.

Indiana Jones just can't be a random dude who's simply trying to navigate the present and not get killed. No, he must be pure virtue by a standard that didn't exist in 1982.

Even the fairly liberal Upworthy eased up on the virtue signalling in praise of Olivia Newton-John when she countered the Grease criticism by saying "hey, it's an older movie judge it by the context by which it was made"

https://www.upworthy.com/olivia-newton-john-has-a-refreshing-response-to-people-who-say-grease-is-problematic

It's your right to get offended by the movie and decide not to watch it but a more responsible reading (and preaching of that reading) would be to place it in the context of its time and take the characters as cultural artifacts worth examining.

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Orrin Konheim

Freelance journalist w/professional bylines in 3 dozen publications, writing coach, google me. Patreon: http://www.patreon/com/okjournalist Twitter: okonh0wp