Abstract

The 2005 film _Crash_ deals powerfully with personal racism. Its wide array of story lines raise issues of personal stereotyping, prejudice, racial humiliation, wielding of racial power, and racial and ethnic insensitivity and misconnection. _Crash_ is structured so as to calling its viewers’ own stereotypes, prejudices, and other ill-founded racial assumptions to our attention, then leading us to question them. It is also sensitive to a complexity of racist motivations. The film generally avoids false symmetry about race typical of popular thinking; it recognizes that white people hold racial power and that this matters morally. Yet as a totality the film somewhat undermines its own insights. By including so many different forms and modes of personal racism, involving so many different racial and ethnic groups, _Crash_ somewhat leaves the viewer with the false impression that they are all of equivalent moral seriousness. Finally, the film almost entirely ignores systemic racism.