Poseidon - Only the Whites Survive

Poseidon, the recently released remake of the 1970s shipwreck disaster movie, is being dubbed "Only the Whites Survive". Out of a multiracial cast, only the white characters survive by the end of the film as the others are killed off one by one in the fashion of disaster films. Wolfgang Peterson, the film’s German director, was interviewed on BBC News 24 and challenged about this. he said that it was a coincidence and thaty they (he and the producers etc) did not think about it.

In multicultural Britain and multiracial US, it takes effort selectively to exclude non-whites from your thought. The mix of races and cultures is present almost everywhere - it’s difficult to miss.

When writing my books, which are set in Malaysia, I thought carefully about how to portray the mix of Malays, Indians and Chinese that make up Malaysia. It was important to me to show all the races represented in the book with some good characters and some bad characters in each of the groups. That is reality in a multiracial and multicultural society. In Mindgame, we start out trusting the white American Carson Dean but then we find out more about his agenda…and the issue of race and expectations based on race become part of the story.

Wolfgang Peterson got more defensive when pressed by the BBC interviewer and tried to dismiss the criticism as "political correctness". That phrase is easy to trot out when cornered. What Peterson was really being asked is: what do you think it feels like to be a non-white watching all the non-whites in a movie not have a chance at survival, merely because they are not white and you didn’t think about saving them? Unfortunately, his answer seems to have been: I don’t care.