A couple of weeks ago, my sister recommended that i see the movie Crash. Of course my first response was “that movie about people who get off on car crashes?” (turns out this is a common response). She informed me that it was a new movie by the same name. How unfortunate.
When i asked what it was about all she could say was that it was about race and that she thought i’d be a good persyn to talk to about it. Well i finally got around to seeing it the other night. I definitely recommend it, especially to those of us self-proclaimed anti-racists. I can now see the reason for my sister’s difficulty in explaining the movie. Overall, it is just that - a complex portrait of the intricate and damaging ways that racism plays out in all of our lives. But the plot gets to be just as complicated as race itself.
The movie intertwines the lives of a slew of characters. Two White cops, a Latina investigator, a Black investigator, a white DA and his White wife, two young Black men, a Persian family who owns a small shop, a latino locksmith, a Korean man and his wife, and a number of other characters who find themselves bound by circumstance and generations of racist programming. One reason i loved this film so much was because it continued where most other films fail to go. Instead of creating a White-centered film (where the conflict is between White people and Black people or White people and Latinos or White people and Asians or so on), the film focused on how racism has created a dynamic of stereotype, bigotry, and hatred between all races.
A Black female manager for an insurance company yells at a White male cop (rightfully so) for implying that she is underqualified and only got the job because of affirmative action, and then she later goes on to yell at an Asian man with an accent for not speaking “American” after he hit her car. The hypocrocies are abound in this movie, which will hopefully allow for a more indepth discussion of how racism is systematically carried out horizontally(between people of color) and vertically(from White people against people of color).
While the movie could serve as a primer beyond racism 101, it could also prove to have some damaging effects from the non-critical eye. For example, someone who wishes to maintain the system of White Supremacy, whether consciously or not, could watch the movie and say “see, White people aren’t the only ones who are racist”. Its an argument i’ve heard time and again, and a Hollywood budget could potentially serve to legitimize this thinking. After all, we are (subconsciously) taught to defend the way we live, and therefore are always on the lookout for small ways to prove that the way we think and act are justified. Easier to justify the path we have always been on than to begin the work of creating a new path, eh?
Well, i say grab the machete and begin hacking. Watch the movie with a friend or a group of ya. In fact, you may want to watch it a couple of times (there’s a lot to it). Challenge yourself to think critically about what the movie is saying. Then pick up some books and start reading about how racism was created as a tool to divide people. And how different groups of people were pitted against other in order to maintain the status quo of those who have and those who ain’t got.
