Distorted Representations of Rwandan Tutsis in American Popular Culture: Ignorance, Racism, and the Hollywood Gaze

This essay examines early musical, dance, and film representations of Rwandan Tutsis in American popular culture. It illustrates how these representations distort Rwandan and Tutsi heritage, history, and culture and reflect a range of prejudiced, discriminatory, and racist attitudes toward Africans in general and Tutsis in particular in the United States and the West more generally. It illustrates how Tutsis have been directly harmed by these pejorative attitudes and beliefs. The ultimate, most extreme harm resulting from these prejudicial attitudes and willful ignorance was American and Western misrepresentation of the genocide against the Tutsi, indifference to the fate of the Tutsi before, during, and after the genocide, and complicity in the genocide and in the case of France, participation in it. The essay examines how Tutsis and Rwandans continue to be misrepresented in American popular culture today in movies such as ‘Hotel Rwanda,’ which distorts the history of the genocide and how the Tutsis experienced it.