Crash

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The movie Crash depicts the stereotypes and prejudices each of us experiences in our society. Most of the characters are racially biased and become involved in incidents which force them to confront their own prejudices. As the plot unfolds, the characters realize that perspectives about people can change.
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use activity or discuss reactions to certain scenes, from pdf file...

What is the message(s) attempted by the writers/directors ofthis movie? *         Is this a realistic account of human nature, or is this morefictitious? Life imitating art or art imitating life? *         What one scenario in the film strikes you the most?  Why.  Isthere a scene that you personally relate to based on your experience(s)in life?  Describe. *         Pick one of the characters and work to defend theiractions/behaviors/thoughts toward one of the other characters in thefilm.  Intentionally select a controversial/provocative person in themovie.

 Crash is set in Los Angeles and (with its controlling visual metaphor of the car crash) depicts how people often exhibit racist behavior, even when defending themselves from racist behavior, during collisions (with and without cars). They do so when anxious and insecure: when frustrated with problems beyond their control, when threatened with a loss of self-esteem, and when frightened that racial others may dislodge them from their place in the social structure. Racialized behavior is an easy response because racial categories were invented to confer superior and inferior status and still function that way.

Without knowing the people they confront, each of these characters, including the ethnic minority characters, easily reacts to frustrating situations by tapping into a normalized, internalized racial ideology that characterizes racial minorities as inferior

CRASH DRAMATIZES HOW DIVERSE PEOPLE BECOME RACIALIZED AND QUESTIONS RACE ITSELF

Crash not only dramatizes how reactions to fears, frustrations, and perceived threats are often racialized in the U.S., but––as an important part of the national conversation––also works to deconstruct the ideology of racial differences that its characters have internalized. Crash dramatizes how racial categories are fluid rather than fixed and have an historical rather than a biological basis. Scholars have chronicled how Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants came to be considered white,⁹ while Crash shows the reverse: how the racialization of Muslims (and Iranians in particular) as Arab terrorists since 9/11 is creating a new racial group portrayed as opposed to something other than white¹⁰ and lumps together (as always) diverse groups of people, including those who are not Arab. The film’s Iranian-American family is shown in the process of racialization. As the father tries to buy a gun (in response to a man who harassed his wife) and takes some time to consider his ammunition choices, the Euro-American gun salesman calls him “Osama” and tells him to “plan a jihad on [his] own time.” When the Iranian American’s store is vandalized, graffiti labeling his family as “rag heads” and “Arabs” prompts his wife’s protest: “When did Persians become Arabs?”¹¹ The film suggests that the U.S. is a gun culture of fear exacerbated by creating terrorists abroad and at home, as the Iranian-American shopkeeper becomes as paranoid as the gun salesman and those who vandalize his store. Here Crash echoes real-world news accounts of harassed Muslim Americans and the media mislabeling of Barack Obama to discredit him as a viable presidential candidate.¹² Crash can help students understand how historical circumstances and xenophobic fears, rather than biological realities, create and sustain racial groups, and how, as newly racialized others, Muslim and Arab Americans now serve as additional scapegoats for fears and frustrations that fuel more fears and frustrations.

while the U.S. Census Bureau continues to count people by racial categories, as if there really are racial differences, it also undermines its own distinctions by periodically changing both the categories and who it says belongs to each one. And it mixes what it now says are major categories of race––white, African American, American Indian, and Asian American––with what it says is one ethnic group, claiming Hispanics (or Latinos) constitute a distinct cultural group that can be of any race, including white.¹⁴ Students can research the history of the U.S. Census Bureau’s changing racial categories from its first 1790 Census to its 2000 Census to chronicle the fluid nature of what we call race and to understand how race is a believed fiction that needs to be questioned and can be replaced with categories of cultural heritage that are not linked to essentialist ideas about superiority and inferiority.

INSTITUTIONALIZED / SYSTEMIC RACISM IN CRASH

In illustrating how ignoring institutionalized racism maintains it, Crash defines institutionalized racism as that which has become normalized as part of a social system to the point that everyone finds it in their best interest to ignore it, if they even recognize it. Crashportrays institutionalized racism in a number of scenes, but perhaps most effectively with the Euro-American rookie policeman, Officer Tommy Hansen. Officer Hansen, after witnessing Officer Ryan’s racial profiling and molestation, complains that he wants a new non-racist partner. The African American LAPD Lieutenant in charge refuses to report the complaint about Officer Ryan, who has been under the Lieutenant’s supervision for 11 years, based on his fear that it could reflect poorly on his supervision and cost him his hard-earned job. Since the African-American Police Lieutenant will not publicly admit that the LAPD has any racist policemen, because he would likely be targeted as the problem, racial profiling goes unreported, unrecorded, and unchecked. Students can analyze how Crash emphasizes that even non-racist whites such as Officer Hansen can help to maintain institutionalized racism. Trained as a police officer to consider that all African-American males may be criminals with loaded guns in their pockets, when Officer Hansen picks up a hitchhiker, he inadvertently continues the racial profiling he earlier complained about. Armed with prejudices, he does not believe that any African-American male could enjoy ice skating and hockey and he shoots Peter for trying to remove a St. Christopher statue (which he mistakenly thinks is a gun) from his pocket. Students can analyze how, in exposing instances of institutionalized racism embedded in our law enforcement system, Crash invites viewers to understand that eliminating racism is not just a matter of ending individual discrimination through education. It also means uncovering and eliminating the racism perpetuated by simply maintaining the status quo in race relations.