Abstract
Crash (2005), Paul Haggis’s account of racial intolerance in Los Angeles, stages a seemingly intractable conflict between white and black. The tension starts with a scenario of white racism familiar to most contemporary American audiences: an incident at a traffic stop. John Ryan (Matt Dillon), a working-class LA policeman, pulls over a young professional black couple, Christine and Cameron Thayer (Thandie Newman and Terrence Howard), ostensibly for a moving violation. While the husband looks on helplessly, the cop submits the wife to a body search, which she will characterize later as a “finger fuck.” Ryan pins the black woman against the couple’s car, first putting his hand between her legs, and then running his fingers slowly toward her crotch. The white policeman’s prurience aligns him with a common trope of the American slave narrative: the white plantation master who uses his black female slaves for sexual satisfaction.
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It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness.
—Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents1
And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited.
—Leviticus 16:22
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Notes
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey. New York: W. W. Norton, 1961, 61.
See Edward Said’s Orientalism, which uses “Orientalist” to refer to Western stereotypes of the Middle East (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Mari Yoshihara, Embracing the East: White Women and American Orientalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
René Girard, “Mimesis and Violence,” in The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 12.
Eve Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 160.
Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 117
Melvin Donalson, Masculinity in the Interracial Buddy Film (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006).
Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 5–6.
Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1999), ix.
Karen Shimakawa, National Abjection: The Asian American Body Onstage (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 1–2
Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), xiii.
Claire Jean Kim, Bitter Fruit: The Politics of Black-Korean Conflict in New York City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 10.
Like Kim, Angelo N. Ancheta’s analysis has a double-pronged structure. One “axis” he calls “white versus black,” the other “American versus foreigner.” Race, Rights, and the Asian American Experience (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 64.
Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1993), 127.
Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia Univbersity Press, 1986), 227–30.
Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 63
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edn. (New York: Routledge, 1994), 123
Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties, eds. George Bridges and Rosalind Brunt (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1981), 36
Tali Mendelberg, The Race Card: Campaign Strategy, Implicit Messages and the Norm of Equality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 8–12
John Fiske, Media Matters: Everyday Culture and Political Change (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 37–8.
Howard L. Bingham and Max Wallace, Muhammad Ali’s Greatest Fight: Cassius Clay vs. The United States of America (New York: M. Evans & Company, 2000), 119.
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© 2009 Brian Locke
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Locke, B. (2009). Introduction Three’s a Crowd: Crash (2005). In: Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101678_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230101678_1
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