College English - Volume 69, Issue 4, 2007

“Crash” is a means for classes to explore the complicated interpersonal, social, and political legacies of the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, it is important for students to examine how, on the subject of racism, the movie blurs the distinction between individual moral choices and larger institutional practices.

Teaching films like Crash gives teachers and researchers the opportunity to discuss films as social texts that engage students in critical thinking and self-reflection. This particular movie is especially effective in its use of a pulp-fiction visual rhetoric. Unfortunately, the film equates and replaces the term “race” with the term “prejudice” and then argues that everyone is a little prejudiced. The result is a missed opportunity to investigate whiteness as a powerful social construction.

“Crash” has value insofar as it dives into the muck and dirt of racial and ethnic tensions. But the film de-voices African Americans in the face of white privilege, and it papers over significant social tensions by ultimately emphasizing love and redemption.

“Crash” strives to show that just as culpability belongs equally to all racial groups, so, too, is redemption equally available. But that promissory note goes unpaid when it comes to the film’s Asian characters.

“Crash” does better than the Sidney Poitier looks at racism, but it still engages in stereotyping. In fact, the film becomes interesting if you see it as a study of stereotypes as a maze you can’t walk out of.

“Crash” is the worst kind of representation of what passes for multiculturalism today. A class will gain most from studying its construction of whiteness, including whiteness’s inextricable connections to “otherness(es).”

“Crash”’s most disturbing lesson seems to be that everybody—even a mean, sadistic cop—has a good side and reasons for his or her racist acts, for which they can be forgiven. This emphasis is a failure to analyze the heterogeneity of experiences among members of various races and ethnicities. Nevertheless, the film is worth teaching, especially if a class compares it with a film such as Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. Lee’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans is a model for reconstructing with students a history and system of beliefs and practices, so that they deepen their analysis of any cultural phenomenon, artifact, or event.

Stephen Parks’s book "Class Politics" fails to convey the complex interplay of social movements (including Black Power and socialism) behind the Statement on Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Attention to this rich history enables a better understanding of African American discourses than is provided in another influential book, Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children.

Reviewed are What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain and Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year by James M. Lang.