Intimidating White Presence

Playing nice, but in reality...

"All I know is sometimes if there's too many white people, I get nervous, you know?"

— Chris Washington, Get Out

The Opposite Trope of Scary Black Man, this is the Intimidating White Presence. While the Scary Black Man will usually be intimidating because he is big, strong, and angry, the Intimidating White Presence is generally more nuanced. Earlier media featuring the intimidating white presence will favor the outwardly racist, prejudiced type. In later examples, though, the intimidating white presence is as likely to be condescending, patronizing, well-educated, and of course, will aggressively deny being racist, though secretly feel oppressed by their existence. The Angry White Man may be a participant, but he's far from the only one. It's also very likely to appear in a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant setting. Sometimes the presence can be architectural rather than human, in the form of Stepford Suburbia.

Like with Scary Black Man, a villain or even a group of villains simply being white is not enough to qualify them for this. There has to be an emphasis on the fears of people of color (generally black people) surrounded by white people. The intimidating white presence doesn't have to consist of explicit bigots, and they may not even be racist. They may be simply currying in the fear that can be generated by the racial clash, not necessarily a true believer in such ideology. Pragmatists who understand how to turn the fears of their subjects against them are also covered by this trope. Due to how ingrained this is in popular culture, the white person in question doesn't even need to do anything, necessarily, to justify fear of them; their mere presence can be enough.

This trope has been largely associated with the 2010s and 2020s due to a growing focus on diversity in front of and behind the camera in media, particularly American media. However, needless to say, this is a trope that is Older Than They Think, dating back to anti-slavery literature. Though this pattern is most easily observed with black characters, it can apply to any non-white dynamics.

Often overlaps with a distrust of police, due to suspicions of profiling and Police Brutality disproportionately affecting minorities. The Minority Police Officer may be called on to defuse the tension somewhat. Then again, that officer himself might be subjected to an intimidating white presence if he's the only minority on the force.

Though neither demands racism, Bigot with a Badge and Obnoxious Entitled Housewife are very common subtropes, generally on either side of the gender line.

This is Truth in Television. However, as a stereotype trope, No Real Life Examples, Please!

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Examples:

Anime

• Enforced in Ryu the Cave Boy where pale skin is seen as a bad omen. When baby Ryu is born with it, the Big Horn Tribe force his mother, Esta, to feed him to dinosaurs.

Art

• The Problem We All Live With by Norman Rockwell:
  • Ruby Bridges is a six-year-old, black girl going to her newly desegregated school, so she's the farthest thing from menacing one could think of. However, The mob of angry white protesters (not seen in the frame) sees her like this. Someone clearly wrote the racist graffiti, threw the tomato, and made a guard of federal marshals necessary. The viewer is meant to see the scene from the perspective of a person in the mob, forcing them to confront their own prejudice.
  • The marshals are intimidating white presences themselves, as even though they are meant to protect Ruby, they surround her in a cold manner and are extensions of the system that is part of the problem.

Comic Books

• The Black Mage: Tom Token finds himself accepted into a prestigious magic school to be their first black student. But naturally with all the students and facility being white and the former going off of second-hand information about black people, Tom's not exactly pleased about his situation. It's only Lindsay who at least tries to make him feel welcomed (though he needs to get over his own prejudices first).

Films — Live-Action

• The 1980 British drama Babylon has racial tensions between black and white Britons as a primary theme, with the white presence representing the "outwardly prejudiced" variety. Almost every white character exists to provide conflict by hurling racial slurs or physical abuse upon the British Jamaican lead and his friends. The central friend group does include the likeable Token White Ronnie, though he too receives his share of scrutiny.
• Parodied in Blazing Saddles when Bart gets surrounded by the hostile racist townsfolk. He ends up taking himself hostage to get away.
• Emergency: Kunle, Sean, and Sebastian immediately agree that the cops and majority-white college environment will not be sympathetic to them if they seek help with Alice, the white girl passed out in their shared house. It's then played with, because their increasingly desperate flight from Alice's sister Madison looks completely different on both sides, before finally being played straight when they finally get to the hospital and get Alice help, where the police turn on them and hold them at gunpoint.
• A major theme of His House. The main characters, Bol and Rial, are South Sudanese refugees who have fled to London. Their nearest neighbour is an unfriendly, chain-smoking old woman who never waves back and tells it would be better if they went back. Their case worker seems to mean well, but is Innocently Insensitive and tells Bol he hopes he's "one of the good ones". At one point, Bol is approached outside a church by a tough-looking guy who says he has "got something" for him, but it turns out to be a welcome package the church group had put together. Still, the scene shows just how on-edge Bol has become. At one point, Rial asks a group of black teenagers for directions, hoping they'll be more sympathetic, but they make fun of her accent and tell her to "go back to Africa".
• Get Out: Black man Chris attends a party thrown by the family of his (white) girlfriend Rose, which is entirely populated by white people (with black servants). He describes to Georgina who is actually the cult's victim that he gets nervous when there are too many white people around, and the combination of microaggressions and downright creepy behavior proves him right, leaving Rose the Token Good Teammate. And she's possibly the worst of the lot.
• Karen is a thriller/horror film based on the suburban white woman Obnoxious Entitled Housewife as the main antagonist. Her menacing of the lead couple Imani and Malik ranges between knocking over trashcans to trying to kill them.
• In Knives Out, main character Marta is a Latina-American woman of unspecified heritage; it's a Running Gag that every member of the all-white Thrombey clan refers to a different home country whenever they talk about her. Marta is the nurse to Harlan Thrombey, and it's clear that while she likes him, she's deeply uncomfortable around nearly everyone else in the family, especially when they use her as a prop for their arguments or treat her with Condescending Compassion. Things take a turn for the serious when Harlan is revealed to have left Marta the entirety of his vast estate and publishing company in his will, and the Thrombeys turn on her with a vengeance.
• Master: Jasmine gets flooded by white people chanting the N-word at a college party, and Gail struggles with being the black master of a college where the upper echelons are almost all white. Liv is arguably the ultimate example if, as is heavily implied, she's actually white but posing as black, given that she menaces Jasmine for making a complaint against her, and possibly kills her.
• Midsommar: The Hårga are all-white, and the three non-white visitors (Josh, Simon, and Connie) all die horrible deaths: Josh's skull is caved in, Connie is publicly drowned, and Simon is strung open in a "blood eagle" formation. In Simon and Connie's cases, this is heavily implied to be intentional, as Hårga member Ingmar seems to be in love with Connie and punishing her for not returning his feelings, as he refers to her as his ex-girlfriend despite her obvious confusion.
• Rush Hour 2: Humorously pointed out by Carter when he's on a winning streak at a casino. When one of the security guards offer to take him to cash in his winnings, Carter jokes that he was getting nervous about being attacked by the many rich white people surrounding him.
• Parodied in Undercover Brother, when, in order to go undercover and investigate by pretending to be The Whitest Black Guy, the titular hero is made to watch a ton of film footage of white people by Smart Brother. By the end of it, Undercover Brother is panicking about "CAUCASIAN OVERLOAD!" and how "That's too much white for a brother to have!"

Jokes

• Chris Rock:
  • His HBO special Bigger & Blacker discusses being afraid of white teenagers in the wake of the Columbine school shooting.
    "I'm getting in the elevator, and these two high-school white boys try to get on with me... and I just dove off. I said, "Y'all ain't killing me!" I am scared of young white boys. If you white and under 21 I am running for the hills!"
  • Another stand-up routine had him talking about how the most dangerous thing wasn't being a white man in a poor black neighborhood, it was being a black man in a poor white neighborhood, because they'd blame everything on him.
    "The Space Shuttle exploded! That n***er must have done it!"

Literature

• Animorphs: Averted for the most part, with the team being made up of one white guy, one white girl, one black girl (best friends with the white girl), one Hispanic guy, a white Bully Magnet in a bird's body and an Alien (whose human form is a combination of all the humans). However, one example sticks out: In Megamorphs 3: Elfangor's Secret, the team find themselves in an alternate timeline version of Princeton University (one where the American Revolution failed and the French won Trafalgar). Marco notices that there are less than half a dozen women in sight, and absolutely no black people, then one student calls Cassie a very bad word indeed. Having just witnessed the death of her boyfriend and her best friend in very short order, the kind, sweet, good-natured Cassie smiles as she tells the racist that she can become white, no problem. She turns into a polar bear, opens her jaws around his head and roars in his face. Rachel reappears at that moment to complain that Cassie is stealing her act.

Live-Action TV

• Atlanta has several examples. In general, much of their intimidating white presences are of the "well-meaning liberal" type, such as when Van's friend is shown to be married to a white man who fetishizes black people, and when a gang of white people turn on an (also white) woman at a party in an angry mob after she tells Darius than a lot of black men are attracted to her (which doesn't bother him at all). However, the two clearest examples of them all are the wives from "Three Slaps", who are white women with eight adopted black children that they abuse, starve, and work like slaves before trying to kill them in a car accident (and are assisted by an also white, well-meaning, liberal school system), and Teddy Perkins, who is in eerie whiteface who holds Darius at gunpoint, nearly kills him, and abused his brother. Also invoked by a student in Van's class who paints his face white and defies Van.
  Loquareeous's mom: If you don't start using your common sense and acting right, these white people, they gonna kill you. Kill. You.
• The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: Will and Carlton are thrown into a holding cell on suspicion of being car thieves. There's a white guy in the next cell over, which freaks Will out, because, as he states to Carlton, if there's a white guy in jail, he must've done something truly bad to be there.
• Discussed in an episode of Golden Palace, the sequel series to The Golden Girls. Blanche hosts a meeting of Southern women at the hotel and hangs a Confederate flag in the lobby, much to the chagrin of the Black manager Roland. The two have an argument over the flag's meaning—to Blanche it's a symbol of Southern pride and a reminder of her childhood, and to Roland it's something very different—but it isn't until another woman makes a racist comment about Roland that Blanche realizes her mistake. When she apologizes, Roland explains that the flag is a living reminder of the discomfort he and his Black friends feel whenever they're in a predominantly-white area.
• Reconstructed in Little Fires Everywhere. Elena doesn't seem intimidating, but she is the classic Obnoxious Entitled Housewife in the all-white suburb of Shaker Heights. It seems to be subverted in the relationship between Pearl (who is black) and Elena, which seems at times closer than Pearl's own mother Mia. However, Elena gradually shows her true colors when she and the remainder of her white friends, specifically the wealthy doctor Linda, conspire against Bebe Chow, who is Asian, to make sure that she loses any chance of regaining parental rights to her daughter, who is also Linda's adopted daughter. At the girl's party, Linda gives her an entire party that is all-white (in food, decoration, and attendance).
• Midnight Mass: Hassan Shabbaz is Muslim, which appears to be a bigger barrier to his acceptance on the very Catholic Crockett Island than his race. The islanders are also generally more accepting of his son Ali because Ali starts attending Mass and turns away from Islam. However, the intimidation across racial lines is pretty clear when Hassan tries to intervene to save Ali from them. Led by the explicitly racist Bev Keane, she encourages the white congregants to hold Hassan down, sadistically forcing him to watch as Ali kills himself. Even the (white) heroes in the congregation are helpless and don't stop it.
• The Twilight Zone: "Replay" is an allegory for this experience. Nina is unable to get Bigot with a Badge Officer Lasky and the other white cops to leave her son Dorian alone on the road, no matter what course of action she takes. Even when she uses the camcorder to escape completely and the story moves decades into the future, Dorian leaves home one day and Nina has an Oh, Crap! moment as she sees a police car coming around the corner.

Theatre

• Come from Away:
  • All of the characters who are outwardly racist are played by white actors (at least in the original Broadway cast and film): Plane People who express fear that some guy from the Middle East who got questioned and searched (out of racial profiling by a white volunteer processing the Plane People earlier) is on [their] bus, two white men who accost and accuse Ali of being a Muslim terrorist, the flight attendant who refuses to board the plane unless Ali is thoroughly strip-searched for being "suspicious" and have his religious belief greatly violated, etc.
  • Muhuzuma, an African man who speaks no English, and his family (alongside a bus full of fellow Africans), are terrified when they see the "soldiers everywhere" in the majority-white town of Gander (and the surrounding areas). They are actually locals who put on their long unused Salvation Army uniforms to welcome the displaced Plane People.
  • Bob, a black man from New York, spends most of the show scared that he would get robbed, shot, or killed for making the slightest wrong move, and highly suspicious of the residents. He wasn't written as black, but then a black actor was cast, and his character fell into place for the actor as someone who is very insulated and keeps to himself out of extreme(ly justified) fear of white people.
  • Ali, an Egyptian Muslim, is wary around people who treats him like he has committed a crime. He says as much in an unsubtitled phone call to his mother right before two white Plane People jump on him and accuses him of being a terrorist "telling [his] Muslim friends where to bomb next". A hijabi Muslim American who comes to his defense is a black woman born in Connecticut.
  • The unnamed Ganderite who connects with the Orthodox rabbi has hid his Jewish identity his entire life, even from his own wife, out of fear and the fallout of The Holocaust.

Webcomics

• As The Crow Flies: Charlie arrives at a girls' summer camp and is discomforted to realize that she is the only black camper there, with all the others being white.

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