Probably one of the main reasons why I never got into watching the flick. I honestly wanted to check it out because I loved Gene Hackman's work, but I'm kinda over the white master of freedom being the key element in every fukking movie about civil rights and slavery.
I don't know why, I went in thinking it was going to be good because I'd heard it praised so much and the CRM is really important to me. Then I actually saw it and was just knocked over by its portrayal of Black folk in Mississippi.
I'm not against CRM movies with white role models involved, there were some heroic white people in the CRM (like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the civil rights workers who were clearly risking their lives and ended up losing them solely to help Black folk). But you can depict a positive white role model in a film and still depict the black folk well too. The black folk in Mississippi Burning were like a fukking afterthought to the writer/director, as if they had jack shyt nothing to do with the Civil Rights Movement at all and were just silent witnesses getting brutalized by white racists until the "good white folk" came to town.
Even the portrayal of the white people in the movie is cartoonish. There are good white people and bad white people in the film, and 90% of white viewers are going to immediately identify with the "good white people". The good white people hardly have any flaws and the bad white people are just cartoonish bad guys. An actually challenging movie would have created "good" white characters and then had them supporting the racists, to show how pervasive the racism was in Mississippi at the time.
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