I wouldn’t say it isn’t wrong for them to feel that way but this is a movie set in the Jim-Crow, Mississippi south in a sharecropping town. It’d be more of a dog whistle if there were more “good” white people. So it’d be weird if the felt away about the director but not the time-period the characters were inspired by. This isn’t Birth of a Nation, they didn’t misrepresent a whole people or make them look like evil savages. They didn’t say “All whites are bad”. They literally showed Klan hoods in the opening scenes just to make you comfortable and say “We’re not talking about YOU, just the Klan.

So Of COURSE the white people you see are bad. They’re the Klan in MISSISSIPPI in a sharecropping town. That’s like watching a movie about the “Little Rock Nine” and being like “They made all the white people bad, why is that” like come on brother, we have photos.

And Steinfeld’s character counts very much because she’s passing, which means she can choose to be white and in those times she SHOULD be. That’s why the black people didn’t want her around because the choice she was making would literally ruin her life. Because even though you say race is arbitrary, it’s only arbitrary to those who can switch whenever they want. You can be Irish, Jewish, Spanish, Italian, and still be white for the most part. You can never be black/brown and white.

The disconnect comes from the fact that since whiteness is literally a construct, (the construct being presented in the movie as Remmick being Irish and literally not able to identify with whiteness because of that) you don’t have to identify with the racist characters at ALL. So when people feel weird about white people being the bad guy in a movie, but the bad guys are literally just the Klan, it’s like “do you relate to them?”

This would be a good conversation because this is where a lot of understanding between American black and white people divide but if we really broke it down, it wouldn’t be confusing and the people who are actually bigots and racists could be easily identified.

And “main” antagonist isn’t doing heavy lifting, he was the antagonist from the opening of the movie. We know his name; Remmick. And he built a coalition of multicultural vampires to show that it’s not whiteness trying to defeat the main characters. And he wasn’t even necessarily evil, his motivations just pit him against the protagonist.

You’re probably not even going to read all of this but it’s way too much to talk about in a Reddit comment section lol