Blindsided
Michael Oher is calling out the people who profited from his story.
Dear Readers,
Apologies for the slight delay in timing on this week’s issue. We’re taking our August seriously, each of us spending a stint in Maine where we each attended college, and today was a travel day which made it difficult to get the newsletter out in a timely fashion.
On that note, a particularly loyal reader of ours who also grew up in Maine, Jane Ackermann, asked specifically this week that we include some press on the very sweet Maine kids who made it all the way to the Little League World Series that’s going on in Williamsport (that’s here). Unfortunately, the little Mainers are already out of the tournament, getting Mercy ruled 10-0 by the kids from Washington state and then losing 5-3 to a bunch of Pennsylvanians. Sorry, Jane!
This week, we want to talk briefly about the scandal surrounding Michael Oher and give you a reading list to keep you updated on the goings-on.
Even if you aren’t a particularly big fan of American Football, it’s likely that if you’re a reader of this newsletter you’ve heard of Sandra Bullock. Bullock has had an illustrious career that culminated in 2009 with the release of The Blind Side, a vaguely heartwarming and certainly white savior-y movie about a football player named Michael Oher and the family that took him in.
Bullock won an Oscar for playing the role of Leigh Anne Tuohy, the matriarch of the family that took in Oher. But now, it appears the story on screen (and depicted originally in Michael Lewis’ 2006 book by the same name) might be bullshit.
Oher now claims that the Tuohys asked him to agree to a conservatorship — rather than simply become his legal guardians — so that they could profit off of his name, image and likeness. According to NPR, the 2004 conservatorship filing claimed that Oher wanted the Tuohys to be his legal guardians until he became 25 years old — or until the conservatorship was dissolved by a court.
And the Tuohys now claim that if it Oher’s wish, they’re happy to dissolve the conservatorship. Their attorneys called his claims a “shakedown effort” and argued that he got every dime coming to him.
The courts will now parse through the details. But beyond what happens in the eye of the law, there are some obvious clues in the way that Lewis and John Lee Hancock (the movie’s director) told Oher’s story that point to the spirit of his claims being true.
First, there was a viral clip that circulated this week of Lewis joking about Oher’s college grades: “Google him now, he’s on the dean’s list at Ole Miss, which says a lot about the dean’s list at Ole Miss,” Lewis said. Compare that to a paragraph from one of Oher’s own memoirs:
“I don’t remember anyone ever having a job and no one in my family graduated from high school before me. Just about every adult in my life was addicted to crack cocaine. I barely knew my father before he was killed. I was on my own from age 7, going back and forth from foster care to living on the street. I attended 11 schools in nine years.”
From our point of view, coming from that background to making the dean’s list at Ole Miss is a feat, no matter what snide comments Lewis wants to make. No surprise, Lewis is now publicly supporting the Tuohys side of the story.
Then, there’s the source material itself. Lewis defended the Tuohys because the book and the movie center their story rather than Oher’s. On its face, that’s well within the rights of the writer and filmmaker. But rather than portray the Tuohys as complex individuals who might have all kinds of reasons for taking in a Black kid as a “project,” the source material is a total hagiography. And this isn’t just our complaint after taking a look at this situation: critics at the time dissected the fact that we barely got any sense of Oher’s own inner life throughout the film.
Finally, there’s how the Tuohys lashed out. If they loved him like a son so much, how come their PR blitz after this latest court filing attacked him so damn hard, calling him “outlandish” and including the “shakedown effort” comment.
For a moment, Oher was the quintessence of what white Americans want from their Black athletes. Grow up in poverty, have a heartwarming story about how you escaped it (preferably with the help of some white people) and go on to shut up and smile for the cameras.
He’s proven himself to be a more complicated figure than that — something that neither his guardians nor the people who so callously told and profited off of his story could comprehend then or now.