To Sir, With love: Racist?

The progress of different types of people to achieve social and political equality is often marked by expressions of popular sentiment through the arts. In particular, the plight of people of African decent is a topic explored in 1960s film. The film To Sir, With love (1967), portrays an London school teacher who came from British Guinea to instruct a group of teenagers from the London ghetto. The story is about how the new teacher wins over a group of rascals and changes them for the better. 


This film is another example of subtle racism in the pulp of modern culture, with modern culture extending back to the late 1960s and spanning to the present day. African Americans, Hispanics, and people of Middle Eastern,i.e. non-white, descent are typically portrayed in movies as expressions of their stereotypical roles. To Sir, With love, is yet another example of films created by white people to process a feeling of guilt that they have for their race’s past actions against another race.


The director of To Sir, With love, James Clavell, was an Australian who latter became a naturalized American. The Australians and the American perpetrated extensive racial crimes against different populations across time. From the mid-1700s throughout the 1960s, African-Americans were treated as slaves and then as second class citizens. It is only now, in modern times that those sentiments of racism are dwindling away. A bell-weather of this change is the election of Barrack Obama as president of the United States. This is not to say that racism is not present in America, but a significant change has occurred since the 1960s. The Australian aboriginal population was treated in a similar fashion. The government came up with a clause of Terra Nullis, which stated that the land had no owner so it could be claimed by the Australian-Europeans. Additionally, a movement was created to try and prove that the  aboriginal population was not human, but some ancient form of earlier hominid; another attempt to subjugate a race.

With this extensive history of persecuting other races, it is not surprising that living people of European descent have a cultural guilt when dealing with the crimes of the past. As the direct descendants of the people who were involved in acts of racism, there is a feeling of guilt ingrained in their cultural memory. This causes culturally awkward movies such as Last of the Mohicans (1992), Avatar (2009), and To Sir, With love to be created. To put it bluntly, these are ‘white’ movies made for ‘white’ audiences because ‘white’ people have money to spend on luxuries like entertainment.

In To Sir, With love, there are several instances where racism is revealed. A colleague of the main character constantly barrages the protagonist, Mark Thackeray with asides involving, ‘black sheep’ and ‘voodoo rituals’. This is explicit racism that is placed in the film to put it into the mind of the audience that this film is not about helping kids learn the error of their ways, but to portray a white-man’s ideal black man. Quiet, strong, patient, intelligent, these are all qualities that when expressed by a person of African origin and perceived by a person of European descent, a level of shock or surprise is induced. The audience warms up the the black man and becomes emotionally connected. As a ‘white film’, To Sir, With love capitalizes on this disposition to create a story. In a homogeneous situation, with a black teacher and black students, To Sir, With love, would fall away from the spotlight as a ‘classic’ and take its place among the outdated and mediocre films of the past. These gimmicks are frustrating to watch.


To Sir, With love, attempts to address racial issues in a subtle way and creates a lovable character for audiences to enjoy watching but at the same time perpetuates these racial lines by creating a character that is so different from the stereotype that it takes advantage of the audience’s perceptual disposition.