EAIF

Crash and Birth of a Nation:
Two Propaganda Films Compared

by Kevin Beary

That Crash won out over Brokeback Mountain for the Academy Award for Best Film took many by surprise. But what is even more surprising is that the director of Crash and everyone else in Hollywood seem to think that with his film, director Paul Haggis was making some kind of anti-racism statement.

Yet it is hardly conducive to either racial or civic harmony to depict a white policeman molesting a black woman. In his digital violation scene, Haggis is intentionally demonizing whites in general and white policemen in particular.

Hollywood Villain

For those who haven’t yet had the opportunity to enjoy the film, the scene in question begins with two white policeman pulling over a well-to-do black couple. The man is conciliatory, the woman aggressive. In response to her aggressive behavior, one of the white policemen forces her to turn around and pushes her up against her car. He then reaches under her dress and while she grimaces, moves his hand upward until she starts and gasps.

If the viewer should have any doubt about what the policeman actually did to the woman, it is made quite clear to us in a following scene, in which the woman upbraids her husband for standing by and permitting the policeman to “finger f***” her, as she puts it.

In a propaganda film, one of the simplest yet most effective ways of stigmatizing the enemy is to show a member of the enemy group sexually assaulting a woman of the victimized group. The molestation scene in Crash is reminiscent of a scene in D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, a film in which the South is represented as oppressed by carpetbaggers, scallywags, and newly-freed blacks. The movie has been denounced as racist since its premier in 1915 and into modern times.

In Birth of a Nation, a white woman is pursued by a freed black who has become a captain in the Union army. The black surprises the girl in the woods while she is fetching water from a spring, tells her that he’s a captain now and that he wants to marry. She flees, but he pursues her, yelling to her that he won’t hurt her. She reaches a precipice, from which she threatens to jump if he does not desist, but he continues his pursuit. Finally, she does jump to her death.

At no time at all during this scene is it made clear that the black intends to assault the white women. Indeed, there is no physical molestation of any kind, only an accosting action on his part which the white woman interprets as threatening. So even though the death title reads, “For she who had learned the stern lesson of honor we should not grieve that she found sweeter the opal gates of death,” the fact remains that she was not molested and that a possible reading of the scene is that she misinterpreted the black’s intentions.

In any case, at the time the film premiered, the scene was certainly found unequivocal. In an article in the New York Evening Post in 1915, famed social worker Jane Addams denounces the film’s “revolting” scene “of the pursuit of one white girl,” which she says “rouse[s] feeling against the negro.” Addams decries the film as an attempt to make the Negro appear “grotesque and primitive and contemptible,” and she nourishes the hope “that such a film can be suppressed. As an appeal to race prejudice, it is full of danger.”

That same year, Mary Childs Nerney, Secretary of the NAACP, wrote a letter of protest against the film, in which she called attention to one of its “objectionable” scenes, “which show[s] a white girl committing suicide to escape from a Negro pursuer,” a scene which Nerney had hoped would be cut. “The harm [the film] is doing the colored people cannot be estimated,” Nerney lamented.

It must be stressed that at no point in the pursuit scene in Birth of a Nation is there any depicture of actual physical assault; in Crash, on the other hand, the violation of a black woman by a white man is depicted quite graphically. This makes Crash, as regards the use of sexual propaganda calculated to inflame racial animosity, much more effective than Birth of a Nation.

Director and story writer Paul Haggis is, rather surprisingly, co-founder of a group called Artists for Peace and Justice, and a member of the Advisory Board of The Center for the Advancement of Non-Violence. How Haggis can think he is promoting peace and non-violence by exciting hatred towards whites is something that doubtless only he can explain.

Hollywood Hero

The objection will be made: But Haggis is, after all, white. Why would he make a film that would encourage hatred against his parents, his siblings, his wife and children, his friends, his very self? I daresay Haggis’ understanding of his anti-white propaganda film is somewhat fuzzy: he has said that his film “isn’t about ‘the bad white people’ or anything like that… It’s a story about strangers, and how we affect strangers... Racism was just a way to demark strangers.”

I suppose one could say that Birth of a Nation isn’t about bad black people, that the film is actually a story about strangers—people belonging to various groups that misunderstand and fear one other—and that Griffith’s portrayal of blacks was just the director’s way of demarking strangers.

But whatever Haggis’ own interpretation of his film may be, he seems to see whites as threatening the security of a non-white America, given that the whites in the film--in which everyone is supposedly equally racist--come off much worse than do blacks, Hispanics, and immigrants. And there is surely in Hollywood a desire to inculcate in blacks feelings of fear and hatred of whites, to keep racial tensions in America at a constant boiling point—and Haggis doesn’t scruple to gratify that desire.

Why this desire exists is something that can be explained only by Paul Haggis and by those members of the Academy who awarded the industry’s highest honor to a film in which the moral universe is turned upside down, a film in which the best people are two armed black carjackers, while the worst people are two white policemen.

And so borrowing an expression from the director’s script, we may ask Mr. Haggis and the members of the Academy: Why are you making insult at us?