Equalizing Economic Inequities Will Not Fix This: Learning How to Navigate Difference Might Be a Start
by Prof. Margi Nowak
Recently, a student in one of my courses, talking with me about her research paper, mentioned the scene in the movie Crash in which a white policeman savagely humiliates an affluent African-American Hollywood movie producer and his wife. He does this by forcing the husband to watch helplessly as his wife, wearing a cocktail-party dress, and still slightly buzzed from the party they have just left, is subjected to an excruciatingly intrusive “pat-down search”.
This one story in this particular movie, like so many of the other partial and intertwined narratives that swirl through this 2004 postmodern cinema classic, punctures the guts of the cool and calm academic assertion that “race as a biological category does not exist”. Acknowledging the factual nature of the biological claim (Yes, there is only one human race) does not preclude us from also acknowledging more complex social realities. Racism, whatever one says or does not say about “race”, is all too much alive and omnipresent among us. Just two weeks ago, in fact, according to a survey conducted by Public Policy Polling, 46% of Mississippi Republicans stated their opinion that interracial marriage should be illegal. Inter-what marriage? Never mind the academic/biological clarifications. These 46%, like the racist cop in the movie Crash, just know…
With my student’s observations about race and class in my mind (as she pointed out, the Hollywood producer was from a far higher economic class than the policeman), I watched Crash once again. True to its postmodernist viewpoint, the movie – set over a two-day period in quintessentially multicultural Los Angeles – over and over again proceeds to pull the footing for any secure understanding of “what is going on here” right out from under us. For example, the white policeman who sexually humiliated the African-American woman and her husband is also shown, at another point in the movie, tenderly caring for his elderly suffering father who is probably dying from prostate cancer, but whose inadequate health care plan does not allow him to get a referral to a specialist. This additional information, revealed later in the movie, does not in any way excuse the cop’s racism throughout the movie, but this and the other partial views of him that we see in the film gradually uncover more and more contributory pieces of the man’s vehement antipathy toward African-Americans.
A parallel, also partial, story in the movie involves a financially struggling elderly Iranian (“Persian”) couple. Trying to protect their Mom-and-Pop grocery store against burglaries, the man buys a gun from an insulting gun dealer who calls him “Osama”. He also hires a Hispanic locksmith to fix their store’s broken lock, and then, after the store is vandalized and the phrase “rag head” is spray-painted on the wall (“They don’t know that we are not Arab” is his wife’s plaintive reaction), the man makes a nearly fatal misjudgment about who the culprit is, with nearly tragic results.
These and other “crashes” of misjudgments stemming from multicultural differences, punctuated by actual crashes of real cars, constantly challenge viewers’ ability to arrive at confident conclusions about “how best to fix” such deeply problematic encounters between people who see themselves and others as having opposingly different, even mutually threatening, group loyalties. Clearly, the process anthropologists call “boundary-maintenance” is going on in all of these vignettes, but why, in this movie, does this process of distinguishing “one’s own” from “other” groups take on such an exclusively negative, defensive character? The question begs for more discussion.
The absence of this kind of audience-led reflection and discussion is a main part of what upset me so much at the March 30 talk on “A Left-Wing Critique of the Diversity Program”. I am an anthropologist whose disciplinary raison d’être – Vive la différence! – is indeed the affirmation of both the universality of humanity as well as its incredible variation. I am also a long-time member of a department – comparative sociology – whose explicit primary goal and mission, as stated in the Bulletin, is “to provide students with a program that enables them to: 1) comprehend the diversity and similarities of societies from a broad range of cross-cultural and historical settings.” Hence I could not disagree more strongly with most of the ideas expressed at that event.
And so, like the postmodernists who influenced the scriptwriter and filmmaker of the movie Crash, I would like to offer the university community an opportunity to consider the topics of racism and diversity in a way that is far less “top-down”-directed than was the March 30 PowerPoint presentation. In this connection, I share with you some of the questions posed in a book-length compilation of ten chapters by different authors on the subject of this movie and its interconnections: Crash Politics and Anti-Racism: Interrogations of Liberal Race Discourse, edited by Philip S. S. Howard and George D. Sefa Dei. The questions below come from the editors’ lead chapter, “Up to No Good: Crash Politics and the Liberal Race Discourse.”
When do we (as a community of diversity) get to talk about, acknowledge, and address race and racism?
- Upon whose terms do we conduct these conversations?
- Under whose understandings and acknowledgement can we engage one another in an intellectual manner with reformative intentions?
- How do we explain the arrogance of the dominant in telling the racially oppressed when or whether race is relevant?
Toward that end, I have organized a campus opportunity to view and discuss the movie Crash – divided into two viewing and discussion sessions so that there will be time, after each half of the movie is shown, to hear and reflect on the comments of audience members, especially those who may themselves, or through someone close to them, have lived through similar experiences. I will only serve as facilitator for this event, rather than act as any sort of discussion leader or PowerPoint presenter. If we are to try to (in the words of the editors cited above) “engage each other in an intellectual manner with reformative intentions,” we must first listen to each other about what we think needs reformation.
I would also propose that this invitation be extended in a heartfelt manner to all members of the university community – including not just students and faculty, but also staff members, administrators, and fellow members of our civic community.
We have here on this campus a rich and varied assortment of people from many backgrounds, ethnic groups, and yes, “races” (however inaccurate that term may be biologically). At a time when voices within our country are calling for the celebration of Civil War-era “states’ rights”, when the president of the country is depicted as a witch doctor and his wife as a gorilla (with “animality” being the not-so-hidden subtext), when almost half the members of a state’s major political party want to make inter-racial marriage illegal – we owe it to ourselves and our children to face these painful realities and talk, not just about class and culture (which are certainly relevant factors in this discussion), but also, and openly, about race and diversity.
[PHOTO COURTESY / CRASHMOVIE.COM]