Avatar is a fantasy about ceasing to be white, giving up the old human meatsack to join the blue people, but never losing white privilege. Jake never really knows what it’s like to be a Na’vi because he always has the option to switch back into human mode. Interestingly, Wikus in District 9 learns a very different lesson. He’s becoming alien and he can’t go back. He has no other choice but to live in the slums and eat catfood. And guess what? He really hates it. He helps his alien buddy to escape Earth solely because he’s hoping the guy will come back in a few years with a “cure” for his alienness. When whites fantasize about becoming other races, it’s only fun if they can blithely ignore the fundamental experience of being an oppressed racial group. Which is that you are oppressed, and nobody will let you be a leader of anything.
…
Whites need to stop remaking the white guilt story, which is a sneaky way of turning every story about people of color into a story about being white. Speaking as a white person, I don’t need to hear more about my own racial experience. I’d like to watch some movies about people of color (ahem, aliens), from the perspective of that group, without injecting a random white (erm, human) character to explain everything to me. Science fiction is exciting because it promises to show the world and the universe from perspectives radically unlike what we’ve seen before. But until white people stop making movies like Avatar, I fear that I’m doomed to see the same old story again and again.
[Emphasis mine.]
This is pretty much every sci-fi book I’ve ever read (or at least the vast majority of them). It’s also the majority of fantasy novels–just put “elves” or “druids/forest magic-users” in place of “people of color (aliens),” and “wizards” or “city/urban magic-users” in place of “white people (humans).” (This is the problem I had with The Obsidian Trilogy by Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory.) It’s a sneaky way of feeling bad about what Europeans did to native cultures, while still maintaining that Europeans are the most relatable characters and the most reliable leaders of world culture. White people assimilate into a culture, become “natives” without losing their inherent whiteness, and then manage to ingratiate themselves as leaders who rescue the native society from the horrors of savagery–because only a white person is qualified to be an effective leader, and society can’t move forward without the influence of white people (I’m looking at you, S.M. Stirling, and your Change Series).
In other words, it seems like just another means (albeit a very sneaky one) of reinforcing the fact that white people are naturally superior.
