’Crash’ Peddles Racial Stereotypes but Forgets About Class

"Crash" has sparked discussions across race lines and now sparkles with Oscar glory, but as an Indian-American, I’m angered that it won Best Picture. Why? Because the film has, in a strange way, reinforced my suspicion that there must be institutional methods for making racial stereotypes acceptable. "Crash" declares that all is well in the multicultural America, as all communities share similar misperceptions of each other.

"We made a choice to deal directly with race," Bobby Moresco, writer of "Crash," says in a DVD interview. "We just kept digging at the truth and just did not care what it sounded like. We knew it was ugly... Race is nothing if it’s not ugly, and no one is going to pay any attention to the storytelling if we try to get around that."

"Crash" is indeed ugly. But is Moresco right about "shock value" being an effective means of sparking discourse?

A South Asian friend of mine, a software engineer based in Virginia, says of the film, "I think it tells us that we are all capable of prejudices. Our comfortable prejudices are oftentimes plain shocking for others. But should we all profess them? Should we just laugh at bigotry and then forget it conveniently after a while?"

If mainstream cinemas educate and entertain at the same time, what does "Crash" teach immigrants about their shared histories of conflicts, their experiences of assimilation, acculturation and adaptation in a pluralistic society filled with social tensions?

The affirmations of identities are essential in the movie, but they are achieved through replays of stereotypes. There is a psychological numbing of rebelliousness and an uncanny triumph for conformity. For example, Anthony is the rebel, the film’s only potential revolutionary. He epitomizes angry black youth disenchanted by the system. The director even gets him to cite famous Black Panthers to justify his sentiments. He talks about issues of white supremacy and bigotry against blacks.

But what does he do in "real life" in the movie? He steals cars. He abandons a "Chinaman" after running him over with a stolen car. Quite paradoxical considering that he has been shown having a concern over how the poor are treated.

First, director Paul Haggis gets away with a gross portrayal of the ideals that the Black Panthers stood for, but omits their context. The Panthers were not fighting only to reclaim respect in a racist society, they were also demanding a just society based first on economic emancipation. The film gives an impression that the Panthers must have been wrong somehow, without exploring the economic backdrop of their social criticism. Nowhere in the movie is any anger ever directed at capitalism. The intersection between class and race is simply unexplored.

Sure, "Crash" deals with racial issues, but it addresses them through individuals alienated from a larger socio-economic context. It deals with serious stereotypes, but normalizes them by ignoring the causes of disparities. In an attempt to portray the "real thing," it deliberately exaggerates the commonplace (even a reformed Anthony says in the end with relief, as he frees several Asian immigrants from a van: "Dopey f---ing Chinamen").

As an Asian-American, I wanted to know how "Crash" would have treated us Indians. If a South Asian woman had caused a car crash, how far would the director’s imagination have gone? Women of Indian origin as doting housewives? Would they be honking at every intersection? It’s indeed easy to find stereotypes to describe distinct immigrant cultures. What is more challenging is tracing the commonalities that prevail among them as they navigate treacherous social tensions.