Conrack Movie Essay

This brief essay examines racism in the 1974 motion picture Conrack. The movie is an adaptation of Pat Conroy's autobiography, The Water Is Wide. The main character, Conrack, a young white male teacher portrayed by Jon Voight, is assigned to teach students from poor black families on a small island off the coast of South Carolina. The small community has little contact with the outside world and develops its own language. He finds the students essentially illiterate and their education neglected by state authorities. Poverty and their race cause neglect of their educational needs. The black school principal has convinced the students they are stupid and lazy. Conroy begins teaching the students useful, essential life skills. The community has no interest in learning about anything away from the island. The community has lived in fear of a nearby river because none can swim. While trying to improve the students' level of knowledge and their enthusiasm for

He shows respect and kindness for his students (who eventually love and appreciate him) while using humor on occasion to find common ground and a new attitude about race relations. The knowledge he offers dampens the oppression of their ignorance and instills pride in who they are and what they know about the outside world and about themselves. The school principal perpetuates ?? her disdain ?? for what she calls her "babies" as she prepares them for the hard knocks of the world she experienced and envisions for them. She tells Conrack, "I don't have your advantages. I've always known I was colored. When I was a negro, I knew I was colored. And now that I'm black, I know which color that is" (Conrack, n.d., "Did you know?"/Quotes section). Vineberg (2015) characterizes her as "a formidable mixture of African American resentment and righteous superiority and black self-hatred." Eventually, she tells him she sees that he loves the