Crash: Reaction

My experience with big cities is limited, having lived in Durango, Colorado for most of my life. Durango is quite small, and very homogenous; according to the 2000 census, less than 100 African Americans live in the Durango area.

Living in such a sheltered town, l get culture shock when arriving large multiracial communities, but after spending time immersed there, I grow accustomed to the diversity. Because of this, I assumed that tolerance and metropolitanism went hand in hand. People in big cities are constantly exposed to various different people from various different cultural and ethnic backgrounds. It followed from my experience that this exposure must become routine; after a while, people must stop paying much heed to trivial things such as skin color.

After watching "Crash," I learned that this is not the case. The 2004 film provides a narrative counterexample to the supposition that metropolitan communities are less racist. The movie illustrates the complex and convoluted state of racism in Los Angeles, where a variety racial stereotypes are overtly present in a racially varied community. "Crash" forced me to rethink my views on racism and diversity; perhaps, instead of growing accustomed to a variety of peoples in a diverse community, one becomes irritated by them. Perhaps we in Durango are no less racist than those in LA; we're just not given as much opportunity to let our racist inclinations show. Whatever the case may be, the movie makes it painfully clear that the US still has quite a ways to go in order to recover completely from the damage inflicted by institutional slavery in the sixteen to eighteen hundreds. And unfortunately, metropolitanism and increased population density do nothing to expedite the healing process.