This viewpoint is in response to Desiree Valentine’s Feb. 2 viewpoint, “‘Avatar’ Racially Insensitive.”

While I can fully appreciate Ms. Valentine’s viewing of James Cameron’s newest blockbuster, I came away from the film with a different opinion on the subtext of the film. The movie certainly contains paternalistic elements and treats the native people as a technologically inferior race who are in need of white saviors, but as Ms. Valentine points out, this plotline is certainly not a unique one.

This got me thinking: Why do we keep telling this story? What is it about the repentant white savior motif that intrigues American audiences so much?

The only answer which makes sense to me is that this reccurring plotline taps into a subconscious white guilt held on the part of millions of Americans. Rather than viewing “Avatar” as conscious racist stereotyping on Cameron’s part, I saw it as a subconscious struggle with the elements of our country’s racial past.

The story of “Avatar” is simply a retelling of what Western European conquistadors, explorers and frontiersmen did to the Native Americans. Yet this is considered our nation’s darkest secret.

While slavery is an equally immoral element of our nation’s past, we have at least been forced to confront it to at least some extent through the Civil War, Reconstruction era and the 20th century civil rights movement.

We have never really dealt with the demons of the Indian wars, massacres and genocide of the past five centuries. There are no CNN programs entitled, “Native American in America.” Do we have a Native American History Month? If we do it hasn’t been advertised very well.

In my mind the reason this theme of white repentant saviors comes up so much is because millions of Americans have this guilt over our country’s racial history which we have never dealt with properly.

The Americans in “Avatar” certainly aren’t painted in a positive light, and I believe the film is really about a struggle with one’s own cultural identity with relations to others. I too would like to see a film about non-white peoples defending themselves, but maybe white Americans need films like “Avatar” to realize the significance of our nation’s sins.

Aaron Wegrzyn is a senior in the College of Arts & Sciences.