A Crash course in seeing beyond stereotypes.

>> THE LOCAL SPIN

The characters in the movie Crash, which won the Oscar this week for Best Picture, are more like symbols than flesh-and-blood people. Their personal lives are less important to the story than the stereotypes they represent. They aren’t individuals so much as members of this or that race.

These characters’ relationships are determined by what they are, not who they are. The Rich White Woman is afraid of The Tattooed Latino and so she brutally insults him. The Racist Cop is resentful of the Successful Black Man and must therefore humiliate him violently. The Young Black Thug sees racism everywhere, and sees fear in the eyes of everyone he meets, and so justifies their fear by attacking them. The One Good Cop is powerless.

This is a risky literary device, dangerous artistically and politically. It’s hard to care about a stereotype, and stereotypes are often just plain wrong. But in Crash, the trick works, because that is the whole point.

This is a dangerous moment in Monterey County history. The issue of race threatens to tear our community in two.

The characters in Crash don’t really see each other as individuals; they see each other as members of this or that race. Just saying it, the idea at the heart of the movie sounds banal: When we look at a person as a Latino, or a Black Man, or a White Woman, we’re not seeing the person. What the movie shows us, powerfully enough that we can feel it, is that racism defeats our humanity.

Maybe we’ve heard it too many times since grade school, but it’s still true, and it still happens.

Where I grew up, when a new kid would come to the neighborhood, one of the first questions he’d get asked was: “What are you?” Nobody balked at the question. The answer was “Italian” or “Irish” or “Jewish” or “Polish” or “Puerto Rican.” We were deeply interested in each others’ nationality or race, and more or less proud of our own. And we had opinions—prejudices, I suppose—about the various ethnic groups. Most were not all that harmful, but still, how strange.

I don’t know if kids in New Jersey or Monterey County still do this, but I’d bet they do. Maybe it’s something innately human. We recognize the differences right away. Maybe we have to grow up a bit to see the resemblance—that what we share is deeper and more important.

Somehow, I had missed all the hype surrounding the movie. Before I finally got around to watching it, just last night, I could not have told you what it was about. But I had been talking a lot with friends and acquaintances over the past week about the issue that the movie confronts. I’d wager that a lot of people who pay attention to local politics have been talking about race during the past week—even before Crash won the Academy Award.

At the County Supervisor’s meeting last Tuesday, during the debate before the “community general plan” initiative was blocked from the ballot, several people stood up to say that they believed the growth-controls contained in the initiative were biased against Latinos.

Sergio Sanchez, city councilman from East Salinas, described the overcrowded conditions in his district; this is something we all know about, but only he and his constituents must live with. He decried the fact that the initiative was not circulated in Spanish. Fernando Armenta, the supervisor who represents that district, described the initiative as “classist oppression” and “racial suppression” before voting to keep it off the ballot.

There is no doubt in my mind that neither of these men believe the initiative is racist in its intent. But several Latino leaders in our community have described the slow-growth agenda as racist in its effect, just as many of the initiative’s supporters see the opposition argument as race-baiting.

This is a dangerous moment in Monterey County history. The issue of race threatens to tear our community in two. If we allow that to happen, it won’t matter that we got more affordable housing built, or that we protected farmland and open space. We will have done violence to our community. Whatever our goal, it’s not worth that.

In the movie, the Racist Cop is a devoted son. The Tattooed Latino is a devoted father. The Rich White Woman has been betrayed and abandoned. The Young Black Thug does the right thing when it really matters. And the One Good Cop commits the most heinous act of violence—almost by accident.

In the movie, we are able to see that these are all good people, even as they act out in ways that we find deplorable. We are able to see beneath the racial stereotypes. Somehow, we need to learn to see this in real life.