"Crash" is a white-supremacist
movie.
The Oscar-winning best picture - widely heralded, especially by
white liberals, for advancing an honest discussion of race in the
United States - is, in fact, a setback in the crucial project of
forcing white America to come to terms with the reality of race
and racism, white supremacy and white privilege.
The central theme of the film is simple: Everyone is prejudiced
- black, white, Asian, Iranian and, we assume, anyone from any other
racial or ethnic group. We all carry around racial/ethnic baggage
that's packed with unfair stereotypes, long-stewing grievances,
raw anger, and crazy fears. Even when we think we have made progress,
we find ourselves caught in frustratingly complex racial webs from
which we can't seem to get untangled.
For most people - including the two of us - that's painfully true;
such untangling is a life's work in which we can make progress but
never feel finished. But that can obscure a more fundamental and
important point: This state of affairs is the product of the actions
of us white people. In the modern world, white elites invented race
and racism to protect their power, and white people in general have
accepted the privileges they get from the system and helped maintain
it. The problem doesn't spring from the individual prejudices that
exist in various ways in all groups but from white supremacy, which
is expressed not only by individuals but in systemic and institutional
ways. There's little hint of such understanding in the film, which
makes it especially dangerous in a white-dominant society in which
white people are eager to avoid confronting our privilege.
So, "Crash" is white supremacist because
it minimizes the reality of white supremacy. Its faux humanism and
simplistic message of tolerance directs attention away from a white-supremacist
system and undermines white accountability for the maintenance of
that system. We have no way of knowing whether this is the conscious
intention of writer/director Paul Haggis, but it emerges as the
film's dominant message.
While viewing "Crash" may make some people, especially
white people, uncomfortable during and immediately after viewing,
the film seems designed, at a deeper level, to make white people
feel better. As the film asks us to confront personal prejudices,
it allows us white folk to evade our collective responsibility for
white supremacy. In "Crash," emotion trumps analysis,
and psychology is more important than politics. The result: White
people are off the hook.
The first step in putting white people back on the hook is pressing
the case that the United States in 2006 is a white-supremacist society.
Even with the elimination of formal apartheid and the lessening
of the worst of the overt racism of the past, the term is still
appropriate, in ideological and material terms.
The United States was founded, of course, on an ideology of the
inherent superiority of white Europeans over non-whites that was
used to justify the holocausts against indigenous people and Africans,
which created the nation and propelled the U.S. economy into the
industrial world. That ideology also has justified legal and extralegal
exploitation of every non-white immigrant group.
Today, polite white folks renounce such claims of superiority. But
scratch below that surface politeness and the multicultural rhetoric
of most white people, and one finds that the assumptions about the
superiority of the art, music, culture, politics, and philosophy
rooted in white Europe are still very much alive. No poll can document
these kinds of covert opinions, but one hears it in the angry and
defensive reaction of white America when non-white people dare to
point out that whites have unearned privilege. Watch the resistance
from white America when any serious attempt is made to modify school
or college curricula to reflect knowledge from other areas and peoples.
The ideology of white supremacy is all around.
That ideology also helps white Americans
ignore and/or rationalize the racialized disparities in the distribution
of resources. Studies continue to demonstrate how, on average, whites
are more likely than members of racial/ethnic minorities to be on
top on measures of wealth and well-being. Looking specifically at
the gap between white and black America, on some measures black
Americans have fallen further behind white Americans during the
so-called post-civil rights era. For example, the typical black
family had 60 percent as much income as a white family in 1968,
but only 58 percent as much in 2002. On those measures where there
has been progress, closing the gap between black and white is decades,
or centuries, away.
What does this white supremacy mean in day-to-day life? One recent
study found that in the United States, a black applicant with no
criminal record is less likely to receive a callback from a potential
employer than a white applicant with a felony conviction. In other
words, being black is more of a liability in finding a job than
being a convicted criminal. Into this new century, such discrimination
has remained constant.
That's white supremacy. Many people, of all races, feel and express
prejudice, but white supremacy is built into the attitudes, practices
and institutions of the dominant white society. It's not the product
simply of individual failure but is woven into society, and the
material consequences of it are dramatic.
It seems that the people who made "Crash" either don't
understand that, don't care, or both. The character in the film
who comes closest to articulating a systemic analysis of white supremacy
is Anthony, the carjacker played by the rapper Ludacris. But putting
the critique in the mouth of such a morally unattractive character
undermines any argument he makes, and his analysis is presented
as pseudo-revolutionary blather to be brushed aside as we follow
the filmmakers on the real subject of the film - the psychology
of the prejudice that infects us all.
That the characters in "Crash" - white and non-white alike
- are complex and have a variety of flaws is not the problem; we
don't want films populated by one-dimensional caricatures, simplistically
drawn to make a political point. Those kinds of political films
rarely help us understand our personal or political struggles. But
this film's characters are drawn in ways that are ultimately reactionary.
Although the film follows a number of
story lines, its politics are most clearly revealed in the interaction
that two black women have with an openly racist white Los Angeles
police officer played by Matt Dillon. During a bogus traffic stop,
Dillon's Officer Ryan sexually violates Christine, the upper-middle-class
black woman played by Thandie Newton. But when fate later puts Ryan
at the scene of an accident where Christine's life is in danger,
he risks his own life to save her, even when she at first reacts
hysterically and rejects his help. The white male is redeemed by
his heroism. The black woman, reduced to incoherence by the trauma
of the accident, can only be silently grateful for his transcendence.
Even more important to the film's message is Ryan's verbal abuse
of Shaniqua, a black case manager at an insurance company (played
by Loretta Devine). She bears Ryan's racism with dignity as he dumps
his frustration with the insurance company's rules about care of
his father onto her, in the form of an angry and ignorant rant against
affirmative action. She is empathetic with Ryan's struggle but unwilling
to accept his abuse, appearing to be one of the few reasonable characters
in the film. But not for long.
In a key moment at the end of the film, Shaniqua is rear-ended at
a traffic light and emerges from her car angry at the Asian driver
who has hit her. "Don't talk to me unless you speak American,"
she shouts at the driver. As the camera pulls back, we are left
to imagine the language she uses in venting her prejudice.
In stark contrast to Ryan and his racism
is his police partner at the beginning of the film, Hanson (played
by Ryan Phillippe). Younger and idealistic, Hanson tries to get
Ryan to back off from the encounter with Christine and then reports
Ryan's racist behavior to his black lieutenant, Dixon (played by
Keith David). Dixon doesn't want the hassles of initiating a disciplinary
action and Hanson is left to cope on his own, but he continues to
try to do the right thing throughout the movie. Though he's the
white character most committed to racial justice, at the end of
the film Hanson's fear overcomes judgment in a tense moment, and
he shoots and kills a black man. It's certainly true that well-intentioned
white people can harbor such fears rooted in racist training. But
in the world "Crash" creates, Hanson's deeper awareness
of the nature of racism and attempts to combat it are irrelevant,
while Ryan somehow magically overcomes his racism.
Let us be clear: "Crash" is not a racist movie, in the
sense of crudely using overtly racist stereotypes. It certainly
doesn't present the white characters as uniformly good; most are
clueless or corrupt. Two of the non-white characters (a Latino locksmith
and an Iranian doctor) are the most virtuous in the film. The characters
and plot lines are complex and often intriguing. But "Crash"
remains a white-supremacist movie because of what it refuses to
bring into the discussion.
At this point in our critique, defenders of the film have suggested
to us that we expect too much, that movies tend to deal with issues
at this personalized level and we can't expect more. This is evasion.
For example, whatever one thinks of its politics, another recent
film, "Syriana," presents a complex institutional analysis
of U.S. foreign policy in an engaging fashion. It's possible to
produce a film that is politically sophisticated and commercially
viable. Haggis is clearly talented, and there's no reason to think
he couldn't have deepened the analysis in creative ways.
"Crash" fans also have offered this defense to us: In
a culture that seems terrified of any open discussion of race, isn't
some attempt at an honest treatment of the complexity of the issue
better than nothing? That's a classic argument from false alternatives.
Are we stuck with a choice between silence or bad analysis? Beyond
that, in this case the answer may well be no. If "Crash"
and similar efforts that personalize and psychologize the issue
of race keep white America from an honest engagement with the structure
and consequences of white supremacy, the ultimate effect may be
reactionary. In that case, "nothing" may be better.
The problem of "Crash" can be summed up through one phrase
from the studio's promotional material, which asserts that the film
"boldly reminds us of the importance of tolerance."
That's exactly the problem. On the surface,
the film appears to be bold, speaking of race with the kind of raw
emotion that is rare in this culture. But that emotion turns out,
in the end, to be manipulative and diversionary. The problem is
that the film can't move beyond the concept of tolerance, and tolerance
is not the solution to America's race problem. White people can
- and often do - learn to tolerate difference without ever disturbing
the systemic, institutional nature of racism.
The core problem is not intolerance but white supremacy - and the
way in which, day in and day out, white people accept white supremacy
and the unearned privileges it brings.
"Crash" paints a multi-colored picture of race, and in
a multi-racial society recognizing that diversity is important.
Let's just not forget that the color of racism is white.
Robert Jensen is a journalism professor at the University of
Texas at Austin and the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Confronting
Race, Racism and White Privilege. He can be reached at [email protected].
Robert Wosnitzer is associate producer of the
forthcoming documentary on pornography "The Price of Pleasure."
He can be reached at [email protected]. |
