Levees Broke Research Articles

Katrina: A History, 1915–2015

Katrina: A History, 1915–2015

Moral Outrage and Teaching about Hurricane Katrina

This article is a pedagogical case study reflecting on the Teaching the Levees curriculum (Crocco, 2007), written in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and in tandem with the Spike Lee film, When the Levees Broke (2006). Over 30,000 copies of the curriculum, underwritten by the Rockefeller Foundation, were distributed widely throughout and beyond the United States. In a review of the curriculum, the writer praised it but felt that it had not done enough to express “moral outrage” (Kavanagh, 2009) about the situation of individuals caught in New Orleans as a result of the levees breaching and the city flooding. This review prompted this article, which uses several works of Nel Noddings, including her book (with Laurie Brooks) on Teaching Controversial Issues (2017), to take up the question of whether and how moral outrage regarding this event should shape approaches to teaching about Hurricane Katrina or other natural disasters in social studies classrooms.

When the Levees Broke: A Teaching Tool to Initiate Discussions in Undergraduate Teaching of Health Disparities

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how the documentary film When the Levees Broke can be used to initiate discussions about health disparities in an undergraduate health education course. In the fall semester of 2014, the documentary When the Levees Broke and the companion curriculum Teaching the Levees were used to initiate discussion of health disparities in a health education methods course. Specific units from the Teaching the Levees curriculum were selected for relevance to the training of entry-level health education specialists and the potential for generating meaningful class discussion. Questions from the following units within the Teaching the Levees curriculum were selected due to their relevance to the study of health disparities: Citizenship, Economics, Geography. Two additional novel sets of questions were added that related to Community and the Synergistic Effects of Poverty. Over a 3-week period, students watched the film, completed questions in a written format, and engaged in lengthy discussion during the class period about the lessons learned relative to health education practice. Quotes were compiled and selected to illustrate the discussions that took place. Implications for the training of entry-level health education specialists in recognizing and addressing health disparities are discussed.

Home on Home Box Office: Sound, home, and disaster in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke and David Simon’s Treme

Abstract This article focuses on the ways two HBO productions, David Simon’s television series Treme and Spike Lee’s documentary film When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Three Acts, rely upon sound to construct senses of loss, home and place. Drawing upon personal experience, textual analysis and interviews, the article examines the conditional possibility for television and film to function as ‘reckoning texts’ in relation to Hurricane Katrina.

“Not Just the Levees Broke”: Jazz Vernacular and the Rhetoric of the Dispossessed in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke

This essay proposes the notion of the “jazz vernacular” as a tool specific to the Creole culture in New Orleans for understanding racial discourses of disposability both geographically and historically. We argue that the jazz vernacular is a discourse structured by musical repertoire. The jazz vernacular provides a channel for the historical pain of the black diaspora by playing in the background, both literally and figuratively, of communication in and about New Orleans. This essay considers Spike Lee's documentary When The Levees Broke to understand how the jazz vernacular frames hurricane Katrina as well as how it frames Lee's film as an intervention into “neoliberal” racial discourses. We argue that Lee's film utilizes the jazz vernacular as a metadiscourse to reinforce the ways in which residents used jazz to restructure cultural memory around the rhetoric of the dispossessed in New Orleans after Katrina. When the Levees Broke uses testimonials and affective communication to structure the narrative of Katrina through elements of the jazz vernacular like: displacement, embodiment, brashness, and improvisation to connect contemporary Creole New Orleanians to a long history of structural oppression and violence. By harnessing performative elements, Lee's film performs a jazz intervention into neoliberal discourses about freedom, defense, safety, and heroism that contrasts these discourses with the despair and the resistance of black America. Consequently, Lee's use of the jazz vernacular relies on native musical culture to recontextualize what neoliberalism had erased.

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory by Lynnell L. Thomas (review)

Reviewed by: Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory by Lynnell L. Thomas Yuya Kiuchi DESIRE AND DISASTER IN NEW ORLEANS: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory. By Lynnell L. Thomas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. 2014. Lynnell Thomas, native of New Orleans and an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, demonstrates how tourism contributed to one-sided and often distorted popular memories about New Orleans. On the one hand, New Orleans is a very popular tourist destination. It is a place of “desire.” Many tourists from all over the U.S. visit the city looking for African-American culture including music and food. On the other hand, it is also a city characterized by “disaster,” not just because of Hurricane Katrina, but also because of racism and politics. Commonly, New Orleans is viewed as a city that has overcome various hurdles and now welcomes visitors from all over the U.S. and the world. Thomas suggests, however, that such a view on New Orleans is far from its reality. The city’s history of tourism has not been simple. Thomas explores this gap between “desire” (what tourists see) and “disaster” (what tourists do not see) by examining the ways in which African American tour guides, tour owners, and the tourism industry used their own Black heritage to reveal the reality of New Orleans. In other words, the book records how African American heritage tourism enabled more accurate remembering of the city’s history, interpretation of its racial and cultural dynamics, and establishment of “a blueprint for reenvisioning New Orleans’s future (25). To provide historical contexts, Thomas outlines the recent history of New Orleans tourism. Although she recognizes the positive role that tourism played in New Orleans and for its African American population, especially after the civil rights period, she is critical of the negative impact it had on the city’s Black population. As New Orleans became a popular tourist destination, African-American culture such as jazz music, parades, voodoo ceremonies, and creole cuisine were turned into objects of consumption. Additionally, many Black tourism workers were often confined to low-paying jobs. Although such a narrative about gentrification and commodification of African American culture that mostly benefits non-Black businesses is common outside of New Orleans, Thomas’s work provides valuable and little-documented evidence of African-American heritage tours resisting the mainstream tourism industry and discourse while simultaneously “craft[ing] counternarratives to the city’s racialized mythology” (12). For Thomas, New Orleans is not only a popular tourist destination, but is a place where popular memories and public policies are discussed and formulated. In other words, for many African Americans, tourism has become a political tool to showcase their Black heritage and to create the future of the city based on proper historical memories. In the process of revealing the intricate relationship between “desire” and “disaster,” Thomas touches upon various facets of the city’s history. For example, commodification and consumption of African American culture that was often problematic in itself also enhanced the tourism industry’s interests in Black culture, leading to the increased African-American cultural representation in New Orleans. It eventually translated to the rise of Black political agency. Furthermore, African American guides utilized their own racial and ethnic background in their tours by showing parts of New Orleans that mainstream tour guides intentionally or unintentionally miss or ignore. Thomas’s case study [End Page 114] about Le Monde Creole French Quarter Courtyards Tour also reflects similar revisionist efforts to recognize the city’s pluralistic ethnic background. Since 2005, much has been written about New Orleans. Michael Eric Dyson’s Come Hell or High Water (2006), Keith Wailoo and Karen O’Neill’s Katrina’s Imprint (2010), and others have captured the racial dynamics of the city suffering from the consequence of the disaster. Spike Lee’s documentary, When the Levees Broke (2006) also recorded the lives of New Orleans’s residents. Desire and Disaster is a significant addition to these works on the city and its African American residents. First, it reminds its readers that the city’s recovery was not an equal process. Many...

Do you know what it means to miss New Orleans? Historical metaphors and mythical realities in Spike Lee’s <it>When the Levees Broke</it>

In many of Spike Lee’s films, jazz is a medium of cultural transformation, enabling African-Americans and other ethnic and racial groups to understand the cultural legacies on which their collective identity depends, by reconciling them for better or worse to their common history as citizens of the United States. The recurrent theme in all of Lee’s films is the cultural consequences of excluding African-Americans from that history, especially given their enormous influence on it, and the losses and distortions that necessary follow from such exclusions. In When the Levees Broke (2006), his four-part television documentary about the destruction of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina, Lee transforms this theme into a powerful story of individual and collective cultural rebirth through jazz. In this essay, I want to offer some initial thoughts on how Lee connects this story with the dominant historical metaphors and mythical realities of nationhood in the United States, especially those that identify jazz with the themes of displacement, homelessness and homecoming.

Katrina’s city? New Orleans, race, myth, forced migration and return

Hurricane Katrina was responsible for the displacement of the entire city of New Orleans. This article will consider the forced migration of the city’s inhabitants, focusing specifically on poor African Americans. In the aftermath, families were separated and relocated all across the United States, controversially referred to as ‘refugees’. This problematically evokes Harold Cruse’s idea of ‘domestic colonies’ as it aligns black identity with the notion of foreignness. The imposed dislocation of black American families cannot be divorced from the historical context of slavery; the image of the migrant wading through the water evokes stories of fugitive slaves taking to the Mississippi River in an attempt to escape capture. The evacuation was in part due to an inherently racist infrastructure, primarily and irrefutably based on class. Yet, in spite of this, many citizens chose to return. The article will consider the homecoming experience in relation to the mythical status of the city and its rich cultu al heritage; how the ‘pull’ factors outweighed the political and socio- economic realities. Using the documentaries, When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (Lee, 2006), and Trouble the Water (Deal and Lessin, 2008) along with the HBO series Treme (2010–2011), this article will explore forced migration and intransigence, the image of the migrant, and the narrative of return in relation to African American identity, mythology, history, race and class.

When the Levees Broke : Inconvenient Truths and the Limits of National Identity

Today, the people living along the Gulf Coast continue their daily struggle to rebuild, revive, and renew in these United States of America (opening dedication of When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts) Introduction Spike Lee's epic documentary testifies to the inconvenient truths that enabled the social disaster so spectacularly showcased by Hurricane Katrina. Where Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth (2006) highlights the often willful blindness with which the catastrophic threat of climate change has been greeted, Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) points to a complicated web of social, political, and environmental blind spots that led to Katrina and its catastrophic aftermath. truths, which hovered just beneath national consciousness, constituted a disaster of racial and economic disenfranchisement that was exposed and further exacerbated by the levee breaches in August 2005. What apparently began as only a natural disaster soon revealed itself as something all-too-human, disproportionately striking those already existing on the edges of survival. Not only was it that the predominantly poor who were abandoned to the drowning city, but it is also this same group that has faced the most obstacles to returning and reclaiming their homes. Katrina dispelled the myth that disasters are social levelers, and vividly highlighted the role played by national governments in selecting the constituencies it chooses to protect. Lee's documentary thus raises inconvenient truths only about race and class in but also about the limits of national identity in an increasingly divided and unequal world. Climate change, which is one of the inconvenient truths at the heart of Lee's film, vividly attests to the arbitrariness of national borders and the protections that these borders may or may afford. The film points to these limits by featuring a frequent insistence on the part of many of its protagonists that the hurricane victims were not, and should be called, refugees. Yet there is a sense in which these voices protest too much, and the film leaves the viewer with the lingering sense that particularly America remains at the outer boundary of national identity. To borrow a phrase from Yvonne Haddad, who uses it to describe the dilemmas of America's Muslim and Arab populations in a post-9/11 environment, Lee's film fails to dispel the notion that African Americans, and perhaps especially those residing in Louisiana's Crescent City, are not quite American. These United States of America, referred to in the film's dedication, cited in the epigraph, and signaling a subtle yet powerful transformation of the definite article from single to plural, thus emerge in Lee's film as a deeply troubled site in which the relative protections of national citizenship remain elusive for all but a privileged few. The long history of African disenfranchisement--placing a large proportion on the rough end of both race and class prejudice--means that America's population plays a central role in illuminating the national drama of inclusion and exclusion. This essay explores these dynamics by following the conversations in When the Levees Broke that, almost in spite of themselves, pit the terms black and American against one another. What emerges, however, is far more complex than the articulation of a simple black/white binary. As has been much noted, poor whites share in the post-hurricane neglect experienced by predominantly people. Moreover, both Louisiana's French and Spanish pasts endow the state's race relations with a very different history from that of the rest of the United States. New Orleans, in particular, remains deeply marked both by European and West African culture. Louisiana's own persistent foreignness within the U. S. is underscored in the film on the part of one commentator who remarks that the state functions as a kind of colony of the federal government. …

Rhetorics of Displacement: Constructing Identities in Forced Relocations

Forced displacement has often involved the use of rhetoric, both by government institutions and by people who struggle not only to survive displacement, but also to resist it. The author analyzes such discourses through three case studies: Spike Lee’s film When the Levees Broke, Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What, and a documentaryshe helped produce on families displaced by eminent domain when the Shenandoah National Park was created.

The Routing and Re-Routing of Difficult Knowledge: Social Studies Teachers Encounter When the Levees Broke

The author explores the articulations of six social studies student/teachers after a viewing of When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts. The film, a documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina on the people in and around New Orleans, constitutes an encounter with what Deborah Britzman (1998) calls “difficult knowledge”—representations of social/historical trauma in pedagogical situations. Drawing on ideas from psychoanalytic theory, the author elaborates on the ways that this difficult knowledge (i.e., the viewing of injustice, suffering, and death) gets “routed” and “re-routed” through the participants' discussions about the film. The author's overall objective, then, is to explore the rich complexity of the ways that social and historical traumas are felt, experienced, understood and then made pedagogical. Because a great deal of social studies curriculum is, in fact, constituted by difficult knowledge (e.g., studying wars, famines, genocides, injustices, slavery), it is important to consider the ways that understandings, and lessons, are made from such interactions.

Specters and Images: When the Levees Broke – A Requiem in Four Acts

ABSTRACTSpike Lee's When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) is examined as a witnessing on the national scale of the trauma felt by those who experienced flooding in the aftermath of Katrina. The premise is that national acknowledgment of the wound, and this mourning, can only happen as the silence following trauma is drawn into public discourse. Spike Lee does this with a variety of interlocking filmic techniques including archival footage, interviews, vistas of devastation and commentary through music. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Reframing Katrina: The Color of Disaster in Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke

Spike Lee's four-hour HBO documentary film When the Levees Broke about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath uses the tragic events around the storm as an occasion to consider the continued significance of race and class in the inequitable distribution of environmental hazards in the United States, while at the same time celebrating traditional New Orleans culture. Lee's film gives voice to those who were directly affected by the Katrina disaster and reminds us that for historical and socio-political reasons African-American and other minority perspectives on issues of sustainability are necessarily different from those of mainstream environmentalists. Through its powerful presentation of these alternative perspectives and needs, When the Levees Broke raises awareness for the fact that any concept for a “sustainable” New Orleans that does not address the enormous class and race-based inequities within the city will be unjust and thus fundamentally flawed.

Using “When the Levees Broke/Teaching the Levees” to Teach Middle School Students About Empathy and Social Justice

This action research study reports on an important unit of study having evidence of success. The paper discusses how students in a social studies classroom setting may be encouraged to develop and display empathy for individuals who are impacted by hurricane disasters. It uses aspects of the documentary “When the Levees Broke” in collaboration with the “Teaching the Levees Module” and several technology based classroom resources. The findings indicate that as students contextualized the impact of Hurricane Katrina and similar natural disasters on human populations they begin to develop and display empathy. The students who were involved in this investigation also were able to apply principles of social justice which facilitated reflective thinking as they used hindsight to analyze and discuss the context of this natural disaster

Moving testimonies and the geography of suffering: Perils and fantasies of belonging after Katrina

This essay explores the use of situated testimony in documentary films and videos about belonging, displacement, and return while calling for a ‘spatial turn’ in trauma studies. Through an analysis of selected works about Hurricane Katrina (Spike Lee's When the Levees Broke, Tia Lessin and Carl Deal's Trouble the Water, and the activist video New Orleans for Sale! by Brandan Odums, Nik Richard, and the group 2-cent), this paper extrapolates from Cathy Caruth's insights about psychoanalytic ‘belatedness’ and critical human geography's anti-essentializing conceptions of place to expose the concomitant materiality and unassimilability of traumatic space. The essay questions assumptions about home and right of return, ultimately advocating what architect Eyal Weizman has called a new mode of ‘practising space’ in the service of social justice.

The Sea and the Land: Biopower and Visuality from Slavery to Katrina

This essay proposes that biopower needs to be understood as a relation between discourses of ‘life’ and the ‘natural’, engendered in the Atlantic world by slavery and its assemblages of life. Absolutism legislated the sea as a zone of both monarchical power and free circulation, a regime placed into crisis by the abolition of slavery. I interpret this crisis in terms of a secularised form of the Kongo cosmogram that defines the spaces of the living and the dead as being linked and divided by the sea. Immersion, and its crises of seeing and subjectivity, is the suspension of circulation that leaves the subject in the sea between regimes of power. In this essay, I examine two such immersive crises, first by means of the intersection between John Ruskin’s criticism and Joseph Turner’s marine painting; then and its present moment of ‘intensification’ via Spike Lee’s film‐document of Hurricane Katrina, When the Levees Broke (2006). Finally, I examine how the current crisis of neoliberal circulation has become interactive with the climate crisis in a set of exchanges between ‘real’ and ‘metaphorical’ floods, whether of water or debt.

Desert Bayou (2006) (review)

Reviewed by: Desert Bayou (2006) Patrick D. Jones Desert Bayou (2006). Directed and Produced by Alex LeMay. Distributed by Cinema Libre Studio www.cinemalibrestudio.com. 71 minutes For many, Spike Lee’s powerful opus, When the Levees Broke, has become the definitive documentary statement on the Hurricane Katrina disaster. But, as masterful as the film is, it does not tell the whole story. Whereas Lee crafted an epic tragedy, in Desert Bayou, director Alex LeMay has opted to make a smaller, more intimate film that traces the journey of 600 Katrina evacuees as they adjust to a new life in Utah. It is the stark cultural contrast at the center of this social experiment that animates the film: Utah is overwhelmingly white, evacuees are almost all black; the environment in New Orleans is swampy, in Salt Lake it is desert; Utah is dominated by the Mormon Church, most evacuees are southern Baptist; New Orleans is liberal, Salt Lake is conservative. Given these realities, what was it like for 600 African American evacuees to resettle in Utah and what does their story reveal about race, class, religion and region in the United States? The film offers few easy answers. Desert Bayou begins with a shiny metallic airplane, set against a bleach blue sky, landing in the Utah desert. Inside, 600 desperate New Orleans residents are relieved to have escaped the horror of broken levees and flooded lives. On the ground, hundreds of local people have been watching events unfold live on cable television. They are filling care packages and donating to the national emergency relief effort. The governor and mayor of Salt Lake City enthusiastically welcome the evacuees to their “new home.” The initial rush of hospitality gives many a sense of hope and optimism. National media reports painted a rosy early picture of the social experiment underway in Utah. But, it was much more complicated than that; race and class and religion in America always are. The evacuees had, in fact, been hurried onto an airplane by FEMA bound for an unknown locale; their desperation gave them little choice in the matter. In Utah, evacuees were not welcomed into the homes of local people or placed in available Salt Lake housing. Rather, they were shuttled to cramped quarters on a largely abandoned military base 45 miles from the city. Officials at Camp Williams, in conjunction with the mayor, conducted extensive criminal background checks on each evacuee and imposed a strict curfew at the base. Many asked whether authorities would have treated white evacuees similarly. Two incidents brought simmering tensions to a head. Early on, the Utah Attorney General stated publicly – and erroneously-that several dozen evacuees were convicted murderers. Not surprisingly, the media jumped on these claims, resulting in a surge of white racial anxiety. The second incident occurred when a local Mormon-owned radio station cancelled Rabbi Shmuley Boteach’s program after the New Jersey-based talk show host announced a meeting between evacuees who wished to permanently settle in Utah and Salt Lake families who pledged to help them find new homes in their communities. Some praised Boteach’s effort to bring the communities together and create dialogue, but many local whites balked at the prospect of having new low income black neighbors. Military leaders and city officials condemned Boteach’s event as a threat to social order. Despite numerous obstacles, roughly 100 of the evacuees found enough hope in Utah to stay. The final and most poignant section of the film follows the struggles of Curtis and Clifford as they attempt to navigate this transition. Both men seek to make something good from the bad: get an education, mend strained marriages, overcome drug addition, criminal records and the desperation of poverty. They speak of wiping the slate clean and getting a new chance at old dreams. Yet, several months later, we [End Page 67] see that it was not so easy. After the initial burst of charity, both men are largely on their own and more acutely aware of the tension attached to being black in lily-white surroundings. They complain about the weather and the difficulty making new friends. Both suffer from symptoms of post-traumatic...

Preconditions of Disaster: Premonitions of Tragedy

John C. Mutter Preconditions of Disaster Premonitions of Tragedy DISASTERS ARE NOT EVENTS; THEY ARE PROCESSES. TRUE, NEWS MEDIA inevitably focuses our attentions on the disaster singularity because it makes such compelling coverage. In the era of reality TV it is about as good as it gets. Buildings are torn apart as we watch, people are seen in abject distress; there are miraculous escapes and heroic rescues and, as the cameras follow rescue workers into the rubble ofbuildings or search houses as flood waters recede, we m ight even see an actual corpse. The only thing to compare is w ar reporting. W atching disaster coverage live on television is som ething akin to necro-voyeurism. But like wars and other forms of deadly conflict, disasters are anything but the singulari­ ties portrayed in news coverage. They have long portentous rehears­ als and extended coda, little of which makes for entertainm ent like graphic scenes of destruction. In this essay I w ant to highlight the social conditions th at lead to disaster, drawing on global and local lessons from natural disasters and deadly conflicts. DISASTER AS PROCESS, DISASTER AS (M EDIA) EVENT Disaster coverage depends very m uch on who is affected and where they live or have lived. Almost regardless of death toll, disasters in rem ote parts of the world hold media attention for only a short time unless, like the Indian Ocean tsunam i in 2004 they affect tourist resorts. Then we can hear reports from returning survivors, people just like us, imagine ourselves there, and w onder if we too m ight have escaped, and had our own stories to tell. It was the tourists who had the video social research Vol 75 : No 3 : Fall 2008 691 cameras and provided the only images of the tsunam i’s frightening arrival, giving rise to the initial illusion th at the tsunam i had struck only tourist resorts. To be fair, coverage of the 2004 tsunam i was exten­ sive and lasted m any days to weeks after the event itself (depending on the news outlet) and continues from tim e to tim e even now w ith follow-up stories, especially on anniversary dates. No doubt this was because of the incom prehensible enorm ity of the event—alm ost an entire hem isphere—and because it was so utterly unique and phenom ­ enal in almost everyone’s experience. (No one in coastal Sri Lanka had any memory of a previous tsunami). In general, though disasters are far m ore devastating in hum an term s for the people w ho are not like us and live in rem ote countries (and do not have camcorders), they receive far less media attention than those nearby, especially those that directly im pact the United States, even if the num ber of fatalities is small, as they usually are. As Gibbon noted, “Our sympathy is cold to the relation of distant misery.” The tragedy of a natural disaster is rehearsed over decades, w ith the cathartic event itself putting on garish display just how defenseless and susceptible some people are to harm. Live television coverage has, at least, given a hum an face to disasters, so we no longer merely hear estimates of property losses from insurance company spokesmen and see newspaper pictures of collapsed buildings; we also witness in a near firsthand way the plight of those caught up in the shock and chaos of disaster events and the efforts of those who try to respond. Images of disasters are at first shocking, then uncom fortably revealing. It m ust surely have struck m ost of us th at survivors of Hurricane Katrina, so graphically docum ented in news coverage and later in Spike Lee’s docu­ m entary When the Levees Broke, did not fit exactly w ith the m edia’s typi­ cal portrayal of a slice of Americana, and th at things had gone badly wrong for those people. Katrina was the first m ajor natural catastrophe in the United States in w hich the plight of so m any victims was recoded so relentlessly, in such close-up detail and so accessibly...

Documenting Tragedy and Resilience

Spike Lee's documentary, When the Levees Broke, provides an informative, enduring, and alternative presentation surrounding the human and man-made debacle associated with Hurricane Katrina. Levees centers the voices of survivors and others involved in the weeks during and after the hurricane, historicizes residents' understandings and reactions, and grounds the entire film in powerful images and footage captured by countless people during the protracted moment. As an enduring document that exists outside of the contemporary television-driven news cycle, Levees provides critical groundwork for community conversation. Likewise, and with thoughtful preparation work, Levees offers a tremendous opportunity for culturally and contextually resonant and relevant classroom teaching.

Crash Course: Race, Class, and Context

“Crash”’s most disturbing lesson seems to be that everybody—even a mean, sadistic cop—has a good side and reasons for his or her racist acts, for which they can be forgiven. This emphasis is a failure to analyze the heterogeneity of experiences among members of various races and ethnicities. Nevertheless, the film is worth teaching, especially if a class compares it with a film such as Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. Lee’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans is a model for reconstructing with students a history and system of beliefs and practices, so that they deepen their analysis of any cultural phenomenon, artifact, or event.