Colors

White Hat

"White hat" is an expression meaning the hero of a story, or a person acting on the side of law and justice.  This is in contrast to the villain, who is described as a "black hat."

How It's Used

"Who's afraid of the bad big box? Who isn't? From small-town Vermont to downtown Toronto, it seems that everybody who cares about their community fears and loathes the new 'category-killer' retail stores. There is no ambiguity in this fight: Main Street wears the white hat and Wal-Mart the black.

"But why must we choose between the soulless power centres and old-fashioned Main Street? Why can't we have both?"

"Dirty Harry's law 'n' order sainthood may have fashioned an entire decade of modern police drama, but that white-hat American icon has long since been supplanted by the likes of Pembleton and Sipowicz -- TV cops who could easily pass for John le Carre's gray men, defined by inner torments and moral ambiguity. Gone are the stand-up heroes of the doughnut-and-Smith &Wesson beat, the fellows from 'Adam-12' or 'Hunter' who'd gladly break a few heads to defend the virginal myths of an America few of us ever really knew. Those cops were born from Pastoral Comix, two-dimensional Green Lanterns devoted to public service but void of private angst, and they wouldn't have recognized uncertainty if it had held a semi-automatic to their temples. Today's Odyssean Blues are flawed as well as introspective -- brooding anti-heroes who do battle not just with the dark forces of nature, but also with loneliness, a failure of nerve, the promise or absence of God. They may not throw their badges in the dirt in disgust, a la 'High Noon,' but neither do they wake to a world without irony or compromise. It's more likely a place where that morning's integrity could mean a visit from Internal Affairs by the end of day."

"The saga of Mickey Rourke is one of the saddest in the history of motion pictures. Some men have failure thrust upon them, but Rourke went out and seized failure by the throat. At a very early point in his career, Rourke made a fatal decision to turn down roles where he would play the man in the white hat and to instead appear in an interminable series of films lionising slimeballs. True, Bruce Willis and John Travolta and Nicolas Cage intermittently play cruds and sleazeballs, but the films where they play the proverbial good guy vastly outnumber them."

"In April, Ingalls watched customs agents raid his business, seizing 66 drums of honey imported by Chung and Coyle. Ingalls has insisted the honey is Thai and defended Coyle as 'a real white hat ... who has really fought against illegal honey imports for years.'"

"Of the many things Mexico lacks these days, clarity is near the top of the list. It is dangerous to know the truth. Finding it is frustrating. Statements by U.S. and Mexican government officials, repeated by a news media that prefers simple story lines, have fostered the impression in the United States that the conflict in Mexico is between Calderón’s white hats and the crime syndicates’ black hats. The reality is far more complicated, as suggested by this statistic: out of those 14,000 dead, fewer than 100 have been soldiers. Presumably, army casualties would be far higher if the war were as straightforward as it’s often made out to be."

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