300 is racist.
Anyone who is not Spartan, pure-blooded and pure-shaped Spartan, is lesser or evil. Xerxes’ emissaries are black, his soldiers are Asian and African and Persian and God knows what else. He employs the monsters of Africa against the plucky band of Spartans, and all are inferior, barbarous, cowardly. They hide behind numbers, they hide behind masks, they hide behind sorcery and arrows and treachery and anything else they can think of, while the true Spartan men are unashamed of their faces, their bodies, their pure god-derived blood. And yet…
300 is not racist.
The Spartans treat all who come before them the same, regardless of color. The worst contempt is reserved for the Ephors, men of Spartan blood and ancestry, bloodless and pale. At the end of the film, there is a message of unity, of joining the greater whole regardless of one’s origin or blood. And yet…
