"The Blind Side:" A Story America Wants To See
11/25/2009
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When I first heard of Michael Lewis's 2006 book "The Blind Side ," about a giant homeless black teen who is adopted by a white family, I thought to myself the same thing Lewis did when he heard the story: this is what America wants to hear.

On the Hollywood Stock Exchange prediction market, where people bet on how much money films will make in their first four weeks of domestic release, "The Blind Side" was trading at $20 million all summer, then slowly rose to about $40 million last Thursday. Right now, it's trading at over $108 million.

Of course, I'm not claiming that, literally, many white Americans want to adopt giant black children. I'm just saying that the success of "The Blind Side" fits into a growing cultural trope that what black children need is to be taken away from their black parents for as much of their waking hours as possible and raised right. Look how it worked out for the President!

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