Crash and Clash of race in modern America

Speaking of race in a modern context can no long be defined simply as "the color of one's skin". While the textbook definition is still true in it's own right, race can not be treated as a singular characteristic that only acts upon one aspect of an individual's life.


I personally wanted to watch The Joy Luck Club (1993) for this week's movie but I couldn't mange to get ahold of it. I did find a rather old a dusty copy of Crash (2004) that I ended up settling on. And wow, am I glad I did. The incredible part of the film lies in how Crash precisely exemplifies the intersections of all race (and even gender) relations that exist between majority races and minority races, and even between minority and minority.


In Coates article "The Case for Reparations", the proposition, and bottom line evidence, are brought up to address the past hundreds of years of black and white race relations in America. In the flip side, the certain realm presented in the film shows a much-needed look into each aspect of what the race relations in modern day America actually are. As Coates mentions the oxymoronic examples in the article as "celebrat[ing] freedom and democracy while forgetting America’s origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte", and exemplifying same ideology that crafts the corrupted and sleazy character of Officer Ryan in Crash. As presented in the dynamic of Officer Ryan, a blatantly racist and misogynist cop in Los Angles who uses his power for manipulation. The kind of systematic racism of everyday life in modern day America is shown as a local police officer. This is exactly the decades old justifications of countless white individuals in real situational accounts that have been occurring since slavery and even after it's abolition.


Even in a closer and more dramatic example are the instances that Coates writes per the multiple interviews of modern day black men and women facing blatant discrimination and racism in Detroit.  But, through the trails and tribulations documented, it is not the actions and offences that the black population of Detroit and the "Contract Buyers Leagues", those who were cheated out of fair homeownership, demand from modern conscience America. They want a fundamental change, a change of mindset, a change of laws that root in historic discriminatory ideology, and a change of population-wide norms. They demand a similar situation like that of post-WWII Germany, one with a fundamental cultural shift to right the wrongs of the past. Coates states the exact change needed as "a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history". 


Thus, movies like Crash, in which this systematic problem is addressed and showed in such a light, that the world must continue to be examined even 13 years after being released. The problems of racial tension in American life did not simply go away after the abolition of slavery, nor the Civil Right movement, nor the election of the first black president of the nation. The problems exist in such a way that a complete re-evaluation must take place before anything can begin to be "fixed".