The Civil Rights Movement According to Crash: Complicating the Pedagogy of Integration
David Holmes

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.

Talking about Race and Whiteness in Crash
Joyce Irene Middleton

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: Rhetorically Wrecking Discourses of Race, Tolerance, and White Privilege
Vorris Nunley

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.

Asians: The Absent Presence in Crash
Catherine Prendergast

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.

3D Stereotypes: Crash
Victor Villanueva

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, Or How White Men Save The Day, Again
Sangeeta Ray

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 Course: Race, Class, and Context
Christine R. Farris

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 he or she 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.

“I Want To Be African”: In Search of a Black Radical Tradition/ African-American-Vernacularized Paradigm for “Students’ Right to Their Own Language,” Critical Literacy, and “Class Politics”
Carmen Kinyard

Steve 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.

Review: Teacher Lessons
Patricia Donahue

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

Comment & Response: A Comment on “Politicizing the Personal: Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, and Some Thoughts on the Limits of Critical Literacy”
Donald C. Jones/Timothy Barnett