Antiracists reject Crash for ignoring institutional racism

Evidence

But, to their dismay, the discourse would not quiet down. Segregationists hardly minded the animalistic Black Savior flicks, featuring physically supernatural Blacks saving Whites (The Green Mile, 1999); or the paternalistic White Savior flicks, featuring morally supernatural Whites saving Blacks (The Blind Side, 2009); or the flicks depicting amazing real-life stories of personal responsibility overcoming extreme adversity (The Pursuit of Happyness, 2006). But segregationists did mind Paul Haggis’s 2005 Academy Award–winning Best Picture, Crash, a film that intertwined the racial experiences over a two-day period of characters from every racial group except Native Americans. Each character is shown as both prejudiced and the victim of prejudice, and the characters’ prejudiced ideas and actions are depicted as stemming from both ignorance and hate. While segregationists over the years rebuked Crash’s explicit racial discourse, and assimilationists hailed the film’s masterful portrayal of the pervasive, illogical, and oppressive effects of individual bigotry, antiracists argued that the film left much to be desired. They critiqued especially the lack of complexity on race relations in the film and the absence of any exploration of institutional racism. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 1197

Categorization

• XREF: Illustrates all three of Kendi’s categories applied to a single cultural artifact — directly useful for the reader’s goal of placing any argument into segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist buckets.
• SEED: Could be an essay angle: analyzing a beloved cultural text through Kendi’s three lenses to show how one film satisfies two camps while failing the third.