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Dunkirk

Photo by Melissa Sue Gordon/Warner Bros. Pictures via AP

Dunkirk dominated box offices everywhere from Japan to South Africa to Germany. Still, it weathered a barrage of critical complaints, most notably that it was somehow racist for featuring only white male characters – despite the fact that the actual Dunkirk evacuation was pretty white and male itself. The U.K. would eventually win the Second World War with one of history’s most ethnically diverse military alliances, but in the spring of 1940 it was still mostly a low-melanin conflict.

Shooting Nazis in video games

Photo by Internet Game Database

Speaking of Nazis, the video game Wolfenstein II, the New Colossus depicts an alternate reality 1961 in which Nazis have conquered the United States. So, a white protagonist joins a multi-ethnic resistance group and shoots Nazis until they’re all dead. Pretty standard video game stuff, really. Nevertheless, gaming forums soon lit up with accusations that the game was “anti-white” politically correct propaganda. In response, a representative for the game’s developer said “we don’t feel it’s a reach for us to say Nazis are bad and un-American.”

Get Out!

Photo by Universal Pictures via AP

Another film that tore up box offices regardless of the colour of the ticket-buyer. Given its low budget and massive returns, in fact, Get Out! was the most profitable film of 2017. Spoiler alert: The movie is a kind of black Stepford Wives. In the film, black protagonist Chris Washington visits the family of his Caucasian girlfriend. What begins as an awkward encounter with earnest white liberals, however, soon transforms into a horror film about a gruesome conspiracy to steal and inhabit the bodies of black people. Nevertheless, the National Review’s Armond White accused the movie of being a “get-whitey” film that was somehow simultaneously racist against black people, too. “The actor’s dark-skin/bright-teeth image inadvertently recalls the old Sambo archetype,” wrote White (note: lead actor Daniel Kaluuya was appearing in his natural skin and teeth). A handful of Rotten Tomatoes reviews similarly took offence, claiming that the film was literally an attempt to frame all white people as mad scientist body-snatchers. “All white people are bad. That is the plot,” wrote one.