Predator or Savior? White Women/Black Men in Alien Romulus and American Cinema

• In Event: Black Cinema and Resistance

Abstract

A continuing pop cultural theme which is a legacy of enslavement and its afterlife is the fraught relationship between white women and Black men in America. Because such relationships were taboo, Black men have been beneficiaries of white benevolence or victims of misplaced anger and violence by white counterparts—either master/overseers or white mistress/employers from the age of enslavement through Jim Crow to the present. Even after the Civil War when master/slave relationships and restrictions were supposedly eliminated, Black Codes and lynching rituals escalated the dangers of friendship between Black men and white women. The precarity of Black/white relationships flourished in pop culture, newspapers and novels, as well as pulp fiction and American cinema of the 20th century—ensuring a continuing attraction for those who risked violence on screen and in real life. Films such as “Get Out” (2017), “Zola” (2020), and “Alien Romulus” (2024) depict white women as allies who could turn into predators rather than saviors—extending genres of everyday horror into the bleakness of Space itself. I examine cinematic dangerous liaisons (friendships and possible sexual relationships) between Black men and white women and assess continuing fascinations with racialized relationships that provide a wellspring for tragedy. My focus is “Alien Romulus”—an articulation of how such relationships remain pertinent even when the "Black" protagonist is an AI/robotic “other.” The dual consciousness of fraught Black/white relationships embodies unresolved tensions that threaten violence and death, but which—in the end—confirms enduring racial/gender conflicts on film and in society.

Keywords: White predators; Black men; American cinema; AI/robots; interracial relationships; Alien Romulus

Author

• Ricardo Guthrie, Fisk University