Can White Hollywood Get Race Right?

By Jeff Chang and Sylvia Chan, AlterNet. Posted July 19, 2005.

Oscar award-winning screenwriter Paul Haggis' directorial debut, "Crash," is the movie many people are still talking about this summer. Writing in the New Yorker, David Denby said it "makes previous movie treatments of prejudice seem like easy and self-congratulatory liberalizing." Ella Taylor of Los Angeles Weekly hailed it as "one of the best Hollywood movies about race."

Set in post-riot, post-9/11 Los Angeles, "Crash" literally slams together a number of racialized "crashes" that drive the film forward. It openly draws on L.A. films like "Grand Canyon" and "Falling Down," as well as the works of Spike Lee. Although studios have shied away from dealing with race since 9/11, "Crash" is being marketed as "a provocative, unflinching look at the complexities of racial conflict in America." It is meant to challenge its viewers "to question their own prejudices" through the multiple perspectives of its star-studded, multiracial cast.

So what does it mean to be a post-9/11 race movie? Is "Crash" better than its Hollywood predecessors? Is Hollywood finally dealing with race? Cultural critics Jeff Chang and Sylvia Chan sat down, Ebert and Roeper-style, to figure it all out.

Keeping it Real

Jeff Chang: They're pitching "Crash" as a "race movie," a genre that has been anathema to Hollywood after 9/11. There isn't any explicit reference to the Iraq war, but I think the war is what "colors" the entire movie.

Sylvia Chan: What is a post-9/11 race movie? How have perspectives on race changed since 9/11? Besides the fact that there's an Iranian shop owner, this film could very well have been made before 9/11. What does it mean to be a good "race" movie, period?

JC: To begin to answer that, we have to go back to the 80s. After the blaxploitation era, a particular kind of race movie really took off: stories that were essentially about blacks or people of color redeeming whites. Start with Spielberg and "The Color Purple" and move on to "Mississippi Burning," "Cry Freedom," "Driving Miss Daisy." "Grand Canyon" is the crowning point of this genre.

SC: It continues to now with "Monster's Ball."

JC: And let's please ignore most of Queen Latifah's recent work. At the end of the 80s, Spike Lee says that he wrote "Do The Right Thing" to confront exactly this kind of movie. In turn, "Do The Right Thing" opened up the door to Black films being financed by the major studios, a trend that accelerated after the Los Angeles riots in 1992.

The other thing that happened after the riots is that Hollywood naturalized race by actively casting non-white co-stars or supporting actors. Race but without the racism, or as Greg Tate would put it, "everything but the burden." These days, the subtext of most movies is that we're all working and shopping in this beautiful, multicultural America together. It's the suppression of racial conflict through easy images of pluralist capitalism.

So "Crash's" neo-realistic take on race--the slurs, the appropriation of hip-hop, the tensions that refer back to pre-Rodney King Los Angeles--can be received literally as the real deal.

Black and White and Everyone Else

SC: I thought "Crash" was so unrealistic. Matt Dillon's cop character Sgt. Ryan walks into that HMO office and says, "My father helped black people and you just have a job because of affirmative action and that's why I don't like you, you bitch. Now give me what I want." If people spoke like that it would be great, because then you would know exactly where people stood. But it's not like that, and that's what's so unrealistic. Most people don't even know how to talk about race like that.

JC: For Haggis, the "crash" is the metaphor that holds everything together. He seems to believe race is only discussed when we collide with each other, and friction starts. It's a very interesting concept that resonates post-riots, post 9/11. But there's very little character development in the movie, and even less insight into race.

SC: The entire notion that racism can be instigated by "crashes" and collisions is steeped in a certain perspective: if I don't crash into you, I'll never get to know you, because you don't live in my neighborhood, and I don't have any friends that are not of my race or class.

The whole idea that you don't have to think about race until you "crash" into it is not what most people have the luxury of doing. And that is what white privilege is. White privilege is not having to think about race. Which is why I think many people have the reaction they do of coming out of the movie and bawling, thinking they've learned something.

Jeff Chang is the author of Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (St. Martins Press, February 2005), which today won a 2005 American Book Award!! AlterNet congratulates Jeff! Sylvia Chan is a Ph.D. candidate in Ethnic Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

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