The Movie Crash
Tonight I went to church for the inaugural Academy Awards movie night sponsored by the social action committee. I thought the new event was a great idea—a chance to see some good movies (most of which I would never otherwise get a chance to see), and to have some good, and, I hoped, deep discussion about the issues the movie addressed or reflected. Tonight’s movie was Crash. There were about 20 people there, ranging in age from five to 80-something.
I won’t even attempt to write an astute review of the movie itself. I have a terrible memory, and I need to see a movie at least three times before I feel like I’ve really taken it in—and while this is also true for the things I read, I seem to be especially flawed at following a plot on screen. I was excited nevertheless to talk about the movie afterwards, to see what a movie about race relations in L.A. might say to a bunch of liberal Christians living in West Central Minnesota.
After the movie, as usual, everyone was reluctant to talk. Maybe it was because it was 9:30 on a Sunday night, or because the popcorn had made everybody full and sleepy, or because the movie was so powerful and full of emotions most good rural Minnesotans don’t ever express, nasty things like loneliness and hate and anger, that to talk about it, to try to make sense of it, was threatening. But then a few people said a few things, like how the characters’ prejudices had been motivated primarily by fear, like how easy it can be to react to fear with violence.
There was a long silence, and then, an older woman said, “I have to tell you people something. It’s something I did 30, maybe 40 years ago.” She went on to tell about a black minister who was invited to come to our church to preach one Sunday. “There had never been a colored person in Morris before that,” she said, and I cringed at the word colored, but then I forced myself to keep my heart open, to listen to what she was saying. “The minister had a little girl exactly my daughter’s age,” she went on, “and so they asked me if I would have the family in my house for the night. He was coming from Minneapolis, and it was a long drive, you see, so they had to stay the night. I thought, now this is something I can do. But then I thought about how we only had one double bed for our daughter. My daughter would have to share a bed with that little colored girl. And you know what? I just couldn’t do it. I’m ashamed to say so, but back then, I just couldn’t do it.”
We were silent, all of us, looking away from her, down at our laps. And then, after about a minute of silence, she said, “I wonder if any of you have ever done something like that.” It was a statement, not a question, but when I looked up, everyone was nodding. Nobody else said anything, but that nodding, serious and honest, said it all.
I thought of the moment in the Greek Orthodox liturgy when the minister bows slightly toward the parishioners, and they bow back, to show that everyone is forgiven, that all the sins of the past week, all the major and minor hurts caused by the people we love, have been forgiven. In the old days you would go ask forgiveness at that moment in the liturgy of anybody whom you’d harmed, and there would be kissing and hugging and weeping, a noisiness God would certainly be pleased to witness, but today, there is just that bow, symbolic. And that was how it was with us, sitting in silence in a shared recognition of our guilt.
I was a 20-something out lesbian in graduate school before I came face to face with my own white privilege, my own racism. I was part of a lesbian discussion group that met weekly to talk about everything from politics to images of GLBT people on T.V. One week between meetings, out of the blue, a message came over the discussion group’s listserve, used mostly for announcements, from a woman of color who had been a regular attendee at the discussions. She wrote that the group made her feel left out and disrespected, and that she would not be coming back.
How could this be? I wondered. We talked about issues that matter to all of us. The group was diverse; at least 1/3 of the regular attendees were women of color. I felt my defenses go up. Why didn’t she say anything if she felt left out? I found myself asking. Why in the world would she send out an e-mail? Surely she was the only one feeling this way.
White women responded in anger and pain. We’ve done everything we can to make the group safe, they said, over and over, in language that ranged from incredibly hateful to gentle and sad.
But then more women of color wrote in to tell their stories. One of them, I remember, wrote, “You don’t get to tell us how we feel. If we say we feel the group is not safe for us, then you have to accept that we’re telling the truth. And then, you can either pretend you didn’t hear us or else try to figure out why.”
I was asked to co-facilitate a series of discussions with a lesbian of color to get us back on track. I was neutral, trusted by at least some of the women of color, my peers told me. I would be a good choice, non-threatening. I decided I would do it, but I knew that in order to do it, I had to take a good, hard look at my own reaction when the first e-mail was sent over the listserve. I had to think about how comfortable and easy it is to walk around in my white skin. I can be anyone, really, with my white skin—nobody has to know where I came from or who I love or what language we spoke at home or how much money I had growing up.
I also knew I would have to talk to the women who had written in, face to face if possible, to let them know I wanted them there, that I, for one, needed to hear their voices, to learn from them. "It’s not about me teaching you white women how to get over your racism," one of them said to me, and I answered, "You’re right, but let me be honest and say I don’t know how else I will learn." She decided to come back—not to teach me, exactly, but because she could tell I honestly didn’t know how else to move forward now that I had seen the truth about the group and about myself.
It wasn’t going to be easy, this new understanding of myself as a white woman with white privilege. The world suddenly looked different to me, startlingly brighter and more painful to the eyes. Whenever the guilt of my white skin got to be too much, I would think, but my life hasn’t been easy. Surely there are people of color whose lives have been easier than mine. It’s not all about color, is it?
And then I would remember that I had not felt left out of the group because of my “hard life.” I had felt left out of discussions in college classes, maybe, or in the dorms, or in the bars or the activist groups or wherever—this haunted feeling of being so different than nobody would love me if they knew the real me—but I could hide those insecurities however I wanted, with alcohol or jokes or silence or lies.
I co-facilitated a series of tearful, gut-wrenching discussions, circular and confusing and angry and also full of a deep hope and trust. Most of us (though not all) stayed with it; we got the group back to a place that was safer, at least, for everyone, a place from which we could move forward with a new kind of vision.
I long to have those kinds of conversations at my church. I long for all of us to do what that old woman did, to confess our sins of bigotry and hate. I long to talk openly about why our church is so white, even now, when 10% of Morris’ population is comprised of people of color.
Walking out of the church tonight, I had so many conflicting feelings. I had to fight the feeling that I was so far ahead of everybody in that room because I had thought about my own racism, had faced it and chosen to be an advocate for people of color. I started to make my “I’m so open minded and progressive” list: I thought about the books I’d read and the people I’d spoken with and the marches I’d attended and the letters I’d written and the classes I choose to teach with larger numbers of students of color and immigrant students, classes nobody else wants.
It’s easy to feel smug.
It’s also easy to feel hopeless. I wondered if I should have said something, should have tried to push open the door that old woman had cracked, should have told stories about my own racism or, better yet, stories my students have told me about their experiences of living as people of color in this town, in this world. I should have suggested a study about racism in our community, a series of open dialogues that looked carefully at what we could do to live out our faith.
I also worried about what the silence meant in terms of the church’s open and affirming struggle. If we couldn’t go further than a simple confession of racism from one old woman, if a movie like Crash couldn’t lead us to open, honest dialogue about how we might be keeping people of color from coming through our doors, then how were we ever going to be able to vote yes to openly welcome GLBT folk into the church? Was I deceiving myself by believing this was a place I belonged?
But then I remembered the power of silence. There is a time to be silent, as Jesus taught us, a time to simply listen, to take in, to not talk back in defense of one’s actions. There is also a time, of course, for anger and honest, harsh words, but perhaps tonight was not that time. The only witness for a confession like that elderly woman’s, honest and flawed and full of grief, is silence, after all.
There was no way to make her feel better. There was no answer—even our own confessions would not have worked as an answer, because her story is a story all of us have lived, are living, if we really think about it. I have to believe her story changed each of our hearts ever so slightly, just enough so that a little clarity and humility got in. I know I could use more of both; I’ve grown a little too smug about my work as an ally to people of color recently, and that means that I’m probably not seeing what else needs to be done. But tonight, the old woman’s flawed, honest, heartbreaking story was enough to open me up. There's nothing like a little humble honesty to inspire someone to act out of integrity and love when the time is right. Tomorrow and the next day and the next, I hope her story gives me the strength I need to know what to do next.
I won’t even attempt to write an astute review of the movie itself. I have a terrible memory, and I need to see a movie at least three times before I feel like I’ve really taken it in—and while this is also true for the things I read, I seem to be especially flawed at following a plot on screen. I was excited nevertheless to talk about the movie afterwards, to see what a movie about race relations in L.A. might say to a bunch of liberal Christians living in West Central Minnesota.
After the movie, as usual, everyone was reluctant to talk. Maybe it was because it was 9:30 on a Sunday night, or because the popcorn had made everybody full and sleepy, or because the movie was so powerful and full of emotions most good rural Minnesotans don’t ever express, nasty things like loneliness and hate and anger, that to talk about it, to try to make sense of it, was threatening. But then a few people said a few things, like how the characters’ prejudices had been motivated primarily by fear, like how easy it can be to react to fear with violence.
There was a long silence, and then, an older woman said, “I have to tell you people something. It’s something I did 30, maybe 40 years ago.” She went on to tell about a black minister who was invited to come to our church to preach one Sunday. “There had never been a colored person in Morris before that,” she said, and I cringed at the word colored, but then I forced myself to keep my heart open, to listen to what she was saying. “The minister had a little girl exactly my daughter’s age,” she went on, “and so they asked me if I would have the family in my house for the night. He was coming from Minneapolis, and it was a long drive, you see, so they had to stay the night. I thought, now this is something I can do. But then I thought about how we only had one double bed for our daughter. My daughter would have to share a bed with that little colored girl. And you know what? I just couldn’t do it. I’m ashamed to say so, but back then, I just couldn’t do it.”
We were silent, all of us, looking away from her, down at our laps. And then, after about a minute of silence, she said, “I wonder if any of you have ever done something like that.” It was a statement, not a question, but when I looked up, everyone was nodding. Nobody else said anything, but that nodding, serious and honest, said it all.
I thought of the moment in the Greek Orthodox liturgy when the minister bows slightly toward the parishioners, and they bow back, to show that everyone is forgiven, that all the sins of the past week, all the major and minor hurts caused by the people we love, have been forgiven. In the old days you would go ask forgiveness at that moment in the liturgy of anybody whom you’d harmed, and there would be kissing and hugging and weeping, a noisiness God would certainly be pleased to witness, but today, there is just that bow, symbolic. And that was how it was with us, sitting in silence in a shared recognition of our guilt.
I was a 20-something out lesbian in graduate school before I came face to face with my own white privilege, my own racism. I was part of a lesbian discussion group that met weekly to talk about everything from politics to images of GLBT people on T.V. One week between meetings, out of the blue, a message came over the discussion group’s listserve, used mostly for announcements, from a woman of color who had been a regular attendee at the discussions. She wrote that the group made her feel left out and disrespected, and that she would not be coming back.
How could this be? I wondered. We talked about issues that matter to all of us. The group was diverse; at least 1/3 of the regular attendees were women of color. I felt my defenses go up. Why didn’t she say anything if she felt left out? I found myself asking. Why in the world would she send out an e-mail? Surely she was the only one feeling this way.
White women responded in anger and pain. We’ve done everything we can to make the group safe, they said, over and over, in language that ranged from incredibly hateful to gentle and sad.
But then more women of color wrote in to tell their stories. One of them, I remember, wrote, “You don’t get to tell us how we feel. If we say we feel the group is not safe for us, then you have to accept that we’re telling the truth. And then, you can either pretend you didn’t hear us or else try to figure out why.”
I was asked to co-facilitate a series of discussions with a lesbian of color to get us back on track. I was neutral, trusted by at least some of the women of color, my peers told me. I would be a good choice, non-threatening. I decided I would do it, but I knew that in order to do it, I had to take a good, hard look at my own reaction when the first e-mail was sent over the listserve. I had to think about how comfortable and easy it is to walk around in my white skin. I can be anyone, really, with my white skin—nobody has to know where I came from or who I love or what language we spoke at home or how much money I had growing up.
I also knew I would have to talk to the women who had written in, face to face if possible, to let them know I wanted them there, that I, for one, needed to hear their voices, to learn from them. "It’s not about me teaching you white women how to get over your racism," one of them said to me, and I answered, "You’re right, but let me be honest and say I don’t know how else I will learn." She decided to come back—not to teach me, exactly, but because she could tell I honestly didn’t know how else to move forward now that I had seen the truth about the group and about myself.
It wasn’t going to be easy, this new understanding of myself as a white woman with white privilege. The world suddenly looked different to me, startlingly brighter and more painful to the eyes. Whenever the guilt of my white skin got to be too much, I would think, but my life hasn’t been easy. Surely there are people of color whose lives have been easier than mine. It’s not all about color, is it?
And then I would remember that I had not felt left out of the group because of my “hard life.” I had felt left out of discussions in college classes, maybe, or in the dorms, or in the bars or the activist groups or wherever—this haunted feeling of being so different than nobody would love me if they knew the real me—but I could hide those insecurities however I wanted, with alcohol or jokes or silence or lies.
I co-facilitated a series of tearful, gut-wrenching discussions, circular and confusing and angry and also full of a deep hope and trust. Most of us (though not all) stayed with it; we got the group back to a place that was safer, at least, for everyone, a place from which we could move forward with a new kind of vision.
I long to have those kinds of conversations at my church. I long for all of us to do what that old woman did, to confess our sins of bigotry and hate. I long to talk openly about why our church is so white, even now, when 10% of Morris’ population is comprised of people of color.
Walking out of the church tonight, I had so many conflicting feelings. I had to fight the feeling that I was so far ahead of everybody in that room because I had thought about my own racism, had faced it and chosen to be an advocate for people of color. I started to make my “I’m so open minded and progressive” list: I thought about the books I’d read and the people I’d spoken with and the marches I’d attended and the letters I’d written and the classes I choose to teach with larger numbers of students of color and immigrant students, classes nobody else wants.
It’s easy to feel smug.
It’s also easy to feel hopeless. I wondered if I should have said something, should have tried to push open the door that old woman had cracked, should have told stories about my own racism or, better yet, stories my students have told me about their experiences of living as people of color in this town, in this world. I should have suggested a study about racism in our community, a series of open dialogues that looked carefully at what we could do to live out our faith.
I also worried about what the silence meant in terms of the church’s open and affirming struggle. If we couldn’t go further than a simple confession of racism from one old woman, if a movie like Crash couldn’t lead us to open, honest dialogue about how we might be keeping people of color from coming through our doors, then how were we ever going to be able to vote yes to openly welcome GLBT folk into the church? Was I deceiving myself by believing this was a place I belonged?
But then I remembered the power of silence. There is a time to be silent, as Jesus taught us, a time to simply listen, to take in, to not talk back in defense of one’s actions. There is also a time, of course, for anger and honest, harsh words, but perhaps tonight was not that time. The only witness for a confession like that elderly woman’s, honest and flawed and full of grief, is silence, after all.
There was no way to make her feel better. There was no answer—even our own confessions would not have worked as an answer, because her story is a story all of us have lived, are living, if we really think about it. I have to believe her story changed each of our hearts ever so slightly, just enough so that a little clarity and humility got in. I know I could use more of both; I’ve grown a little too smug about my work as an ally to people of color recently, and that means that I’m probably not seeing what else needs to be done. But tonight, the old woman’s flawed, honest, heartbreaking story was enough to open me up. There's nothing like a little humble honesty to inspire someone to act out of integrity and love when the time is right. Tomorrow and the next day and the next, I hope her story gives me the strength I need to know what to do next.
Comments