As the legal battle continues to unfold between NFL star Michael Oher and the Tuohy family, we’re being hit with a fusillade of he-said, they-said headlines between the estranged family members whose stories were the subject of the 2009 hit film “The Blind Side”.

On Monday (Aug. 14), Oher asked a Tennessee court to end his legal conservatorship with the Tuohys. The lawsuit also revealed the bombshell claim that the family never adopted Oher and he was tricked by the Tuohys into relinquishing the rights of his story.

Oher claimed to have never received any significant earnings from a movie that grossed more than $300 million. He’s seeking back pay from the film and to prevent the Tuohys from using his likeness any further.

The issue of compensation from the film is outside of my purview – and probably relates to why everyone is on strike right now. But if Sean Touhy, Jr., depicted in the film as a little boy who used condiment bottles to teach Oher how to play football, really made around $70,000 from the film over the last five years, as he claimed. Then Oher himself should be getting broken off.

Oher’s claims have forced a reexamination of the veracity of The Blind Side. Actress Sandra Bullock, who earned an Oscar for her portrayal of Leigh Anne Tuohy, has caught some very unfair strays. For many Black folks, however, the controversy is just a cherry on top of a film that many of us have already written off as a shining example of white savior tropes.

As we reconsider the social propriety of films that came out before the 2010s  — which is around the time we started doing better (I’m looking at you, Superbad) —  we should also put a discriminating lens on films about Black people written and directed by white people.

In “The Blind Side,” Oher was depicted as a hapless oaf of sorts. He was ripe for salvation via the Tuohys – a depiction the real Oher does not appreciate. That narrative was cast via Michael Lewis, author of the book from which the movie was made, who inelegantly (read: like an asshat) shared his perception of Oher’s intelligence to a studio audience.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen white filmmakers take liberties with the stories of real Black people to the degree that the subjects and their families are vocal in their dissent.  The 2018 film Green Book depicted the “true” story of Black pianist Don Shirley and his journey through the sundown towns of the 1960s American south with bouncer-turned-actor “Tony Lip” Vallelonga.

The film scooped up several Oscars, including Best Actor for Mahershala Ali’s turn as Shirley. But it seems as if director Peter Farrelly drew more from writer Nick Vallelonga (Tony’s son) than Shirley’s family. The family insisted they were left out of the creative process and that certain elements of Shirley’s character were inaccurate. These embellishments included his isolation from his family as a queer man or that Shirley and Vallelonga were ever true friends.

The movie even marginalized its own namesake – the actual “Negro Motorist Green Book” created by postal worker Victor Hugo Green as a means of protecting Black people when moving throughout the country. It’s only evoked as a passing reference in the film.

Director Norman Jewison and company took a notorious amount of creative license in 1999’s The Hurricane — the film that Denzel Washington should’ve won a Best Actor Oscar for before Training Day. It told the story of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, a Black boxer wrongly imprisoned for murder in the 1960s, having done nearly 20 years behind bars before his conviction was overturned.

The Hurricane essentially deleted the significant story of John Artis, Carter’s Black co-defendant. While it bolstered the roles of the white Canadians who, along with Lesra Martin, helped get both of their cases overturned.

What do all three films have in common? They have white directors, white writers and – with the exception of Green Book – were adapted from books written by white people. Since Hollywood has proven ad nauseam that it’s mostly interested in centering white people and their stories, it should come as no surprise that not-so-unconscious decisions are made to coat Black stories in a shade of alabaster.

If the Oher vs. Tuohy fracas demonstrates anything, it’s that the viewing public should take every film adaptation of a true story with a grain of salt. Because it’s easy to trick a population more inclined to turn on a screen than crack open a book.

Sure, embellishing details in biopics will always exist to some degree. But doing so with Black history films has the added consequence of erasing significant parts of our story – or worse, whitewashing it.

Even in 2023, we still have to worry about the likes of PragerU re-whiting our history in classrooms. But we should at least try to keep the foolishness away from our entertainment.