"White Lady Saves the Day" is a common trope where people of color's lives are teetering on the edge of despair... until a white person shows up to save them. Films such as Dangerous Minds, Finding Forrester, The Blind Side, and Freedom Writers employ this trope and it's all too likely it'll be seen again.
The stories are meant to come off as uplifting and inspiring, but instead only reinforce the idea that POC have no future without the help of a white savior. However, there are quite a few times when a POC would actually want a white person to intercede and save their lives. Here are those moments:
1. When you're about to read the latest ill-conceived thinkpiece about black culture but an intrepid editor deletes it before anyone can read it and fires the person who wrote it.
2. When your Film Studies teacher tries to make the class watch The Birth of a Nation because it's "innovative and groundbreaking" and a white person smashes the DVD into pieces and burns it.
3. When you ask for guacamole on your burrito at Chipotle, the cashier says "guac is extra," and a white person steps in to say, "Hey, lemme get that for you."
4. When you're new in town, you've been invited to a white co-worker's Thanksgiving dinner, AND they have macaroni and cheese as one of the sides.
5. When a white executive at VH1 says, "Hey, you know what? Maybe Bye, Felicia isn't a great idea for a TV show."
6. Furthermore, when a white person looks up how to spell Felisha before they say good-bye to her.
7. When you're the only black person in a brainstorm for holiday party music and a white person just hires a professional DJ instead of asking, "What hip-hop songs are people listening to?"
8. When you use a word that's popular in African-American slang and a white person doesn't chime in "I hate that word can we all stop using it?" because they've only heard other white people use it incorrectly.
9. When the world is being swallowed by Galactus and the white people who come to save you are literally the Fantastic Four.
10. When someone says they "don't see color" and Tobey Maguire helps you escape from Pleasantville where color doesn't exist and everyone is in black and white.
11. When someone accuses you of earning your degree/landing your job because of affirmative action and the white person who hired you prints out your credentials and hands them around the office, showing that you are in fact, the most qualified of anyone in the office.
12. When someone claims reverse racism and Doc Brown turns his DeLorean from the reverse gear back to drive.
13. When a white person says they have a strong, independent black woman inside them and then they make an appointment with a surgeon to help said black woman escape to safety and return to earning a paycheck.
14. When you're the only black person at a predominantly white party and people don't look to you for permission to say the n-word during rap songs.
15. When you're stopped for driving while black and Scotty beams you up to the Starship Enterprise and replaces you with a white person until the cops drive away.
16. When you're a white person and the only "I Am Darren" paraphernalia you own is in reference to the 1964 television show Bewitched.
17. When you go to read the comments on an article about problems black people face and Sabrina the Teenage Witch makes any racist comment vanish from sight.
18. When someone pitches a movie about slavery and a white Hollywood executive says, "Hey, maybe there's another story we could tell about black people besides the fact that they were slaves?"
