A Crash Course in Race

Article posted Fri May 6 18:49:38 2005

Screenwriter Mike Haggis, who penned Million Dollar Baby, has followed up with (and directed) Crash, a textured examination of assumptions, attitudes, and prejudices about race. Crash follows about a dozen Los Angeles residents representing a wide range of ethnicities and classes as their paths cross and yes, sometimes crash into each other. A Los Angeles district attorney and his wife are carjacked by two young men. A black actor is stopped by police and his wife sexually frisked by a racist cop, but the wife later berates her husband for not defending her honor. A Hispanic locksmith has two clients within 24 hours: the carjacked D.A. and a Middle Eastern man with a shaky command of English whose small store has been vandalized. “In L.A., nobody touches you,” says one L.A. police detective. “I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into each other just to feel something.”

The film juxtaposes people from different racial and cultural backgrounds and has insights into how each of us views ourselves and each other. What on the face of it might seem like a simplistic After School Special on the evils of prejudice is far more than that: just when you see a Message coming, the film undercuts your assumptions. The film has elements of Short Cuts, House of Sand and Fog, Falling Down, and Grand Canyon. The eclectic and uniformly excellent cast includes Don Cheadle, Matt Dillon, Sandra Bullock, and Thandie Newton.

Haggis’s script gets heavy-handed, and he isn't shy about bending plausibility to make his loose ends tie up as he wishes. The speechifying is evident; I’m sure that some people casually pontificate to their friends about issues of racism and classism, but frankly these are the sort of characters who, most people hope, won’t be taking a nearby bus seat. Still, if the caricatures are overwrought, and the multicultural elements seem picked from a catalog, in a way they have to be.

Give Haggis and co-writer Bobby Moresco credit for creating complex and compelling characters and offering insights into the politics of race. In a cinema world of often paper-thin characters who exist for no other reason than to propel the plot from point to point, Crash gives us a rainbow of skin tones and points of view. The simple fact of the matter is that stereotypes and assumptions we make about other people —racist, economic, and otherwise—are sometimes dead-on correct. Psychological factors also make us less tolerant of others, including how we often attribute others’ failures to some intrinsic, personal failing while blaming our own mistakes on factors beyond our control.

Crash is studiously, almost too studiously, devoid of heroes and villains. The script is not about easy answers and showing that racism is bad; it is about alienated, fragile, fallible, people of varied colors and cultures who are sometimes noble and sometimes cruel. Crash is not an unreserved success, but it is worth watching, and is the type of film that provokes thought and discussions afterward.

Who would like to share? No one? Okay, I'll start. In my third year of college at the University of New Mexico I took a logic and debate class. One task was to prepare and present arguments, both pro and con, on a given controversial topic. I was randomly assigned a partner (a clean-cut white manager-track, frat-boy type) to take an opposition view. We chose affirmative action, preferential treatment based on race. In the course of going over the talking point issues, this guy (I've forgotten his name, I'll call him Dave) noted the lack of black students in our debate class and at the university in general. Dave mentioned in passing that he had never encountered a black person who, Dave believed, was smarter than he was. I was raised by socially aware parents; my mother was part of an equal rights sit-in protest with Joan Baez and my father attended Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s “I have a dream” speech. Family friends in South Africa fought for decades against their racist Apartheid government. In short, the comment surprised me.

What was I to make of Dave’s comment? On the face of it, it seemed like a racist statement, and perhaps it was. But the more I thought about it, he might simply have been stating a fact, telling the truth. New Mexico has a very small percentage of blacks, and sheer probability suggests that meeting them--brilliant, stupid, and in between-- is somewhat unusual. For my part, off the top of my head I could think of several blacks I had met who were probably smarter than I. Maybe Dave's comment said more about his narrow experiences than about the low level of blacks’ education. After all, it's possible that the only blacks he had come across were working in low-end jobs, where everyone--black or white--is probably less educated than the average college student. I didn't really know Dave well, but he didn't seem to show a pattern of racist behavior or comments.

In the end, rightly or wrongly, I gave Dave the benefit of the doubt--- the same benefit of the doubt I gave to three black youths who I saw walking toward me on a city street one day in 1997. I could have crossed the street to avoid them, but I didn't, I stayed my course on the sidewalk and passed them. As I did, one pushed me into a wall, pulled out a four-inch knife, and held it to my chest. Another held my shoulder and demanded my money. I handed over my wallet. The man with the knife wanted what else was in my pockets. I pulled out a few rand notes (this was in South Africa) and a passport. He started to take my passport, but I asked him to please leave it, they already had my money and I needed the passport. He let me keep it and the three fled down the street, in broad daylight, with dozens of people around. No one lifted a finger to help. I was shaken, but my faith in people wasn't, not really. I could have been stabbed or killed (stabbings are not uncommon); I wasn't. I could have been robbed of my passport; I wasn't. Those three were not black thugs, they were thugs who happened to be black. I was a target partly because of my race, but mostly because I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It wasn't a racist event, and I refused to turn it into one. I will continue to give people like Dave and the black youths the benefit of the doubt, until proven otherwise.