Hugo Schwyzer

I’m planning to pull myself together in the next two hours and make it to school.  One nice thing about being home sick — I get to watch the Wigan-Manchester United match live on Fox Sports World; Wigan is up a goal and I’m very pleased.  They’ve become my new darlings in the Premiership.

But I can keep one eye on the soccer and one on the blog, all the while pumping in the broth and the tea.  I just downloaded Dolly Parton’s "Travelin’ Thru" (which missed out on the Academy Award for best song); it’s free right now (today only) on Itunes.

I’d like to follow up, briefly, on my remarks below in response to "Crash" winning the best picture Oscar.   As much as I enjoyed certain aspects of the well-acted, well-written film, I felt it presented a distorted vision of the Los Angeles I know. 

I am a bit of an oddity — raised on the Central Coast and in the Bay Area, I’m passionately attached to Los Angeles.  Though I think often about retiring to the little town on the coast where I was raised, I’m very happy living in this metropolis.   I’ve been blessed to do a lot of traveling, and I enjoy seeing new places, but I’m rarely happier than when I look out the window as a long international flight drops back into L.A. at night, and I see the sparkling lights of my home sprawling as far as the eye can see.  I feel fundamentally at home here, and not merely in certain neighborhoods.

Los Angeles is a city of freeways, as everyone knows.  In the early 1990s when I was in grad school, some friends and I made a commitment to spend our weekends traveling the county only using surface streets.  We drove from Westwood to Watts to Winnetka, Lincoln Heights to Larchmont to Lawndale, Venice to Vernon to Van Nuys, Santa Monica to San Marino to San Pedro — all without hitting a freeway.  And we didn’t just drive; part of playing the "surface street game" meant going to restaurants and cafes and shops in all the neighborhoods we visited.  We were a multi-racial group ourselves; my first wife (to whom I was married at the time) was half-Chinese, half-Filipino.  With her and my other friends, I learned to eat lumpia and menudo; challah and carnitas and catfish; I ate grits and injera and came to love it all.

Our trips were daytime trips, mind you.  We didn’t take foolish risks, but at the same time, we tried our best not to let prejudices and fears hold us back from new experiences.  For example, I got my hair buzzed in an African-American barbershop on Crenshaw Boulevard; some folks ignored me, others engaged me in friendly banter.  I didn’t feel like I was "slumming" (a derogatory term often applied to middle-class whites who venture into the ‘hoods); I felt like I was trying — humbly and respectfully — to learn, to taste, to know something new and different.

And yes, I had a car accident — the central subtext of "Crash".  I had bought my first car not long after I moved to Los Angeles, a used 1983 Honda Accord.  One bright summer day in 1989, I was transitioning from the 101 to the southbound 110 when a big rig rear-ended a little Nissan a few cars in front of me.  We all slammed on our brakes, but my Honda didn’t stop until I’d rear-ended the Mercedes sedan in front of me.  Ours were the only four vehicles involved; no one was hurt.  Though it was more than sixteen years ago, I remember the other drivers vividly: the big rig was driven by a black man; the Nissan he hit was driven by a Latina; the Mercedes was driven by an elderly Chinese couple who spoke limited English.  We all exchanged insurance information on the side of the road, and as we did so, I began to cry.  I know it was childish, but I was so upset I had done so much damage to my "new" car (the Mercedes I hit had only a scratch, while my Honda was, if not totalled, much more heavily damaged).  The Chinese man patted my arm and assured me it would be okay, while his wife smiled at me wanly.  The CHP officer — Latino — saw that my license still listed "Carmel" as my home address, and by way of comfort, told me he’d grown up in the Salinas area and couldn’t wait to move home to our native Monterey County.

No one yelled.  No one got upset. (Well, I did, but those were tears of self-pity, not rage).  There were no racial epithets, either.  And it never occurred to me that there was anything odd about the civility of our experience that hot morning on the Harbor Freeway.  I’ve had two fender-benders since (one my fault, one not); both involved drivers of other ethnic groups.   And in neither of those instances were harsh words exchanged about our respective backgrounds!

I am quite confident that my experience has not been all that unusual.  (This is not to deny the reality of racism, a reality to which I confess I am often blind.  I know damned well that I can play the "surface street game" with relative impunity because I am white.  I can drive up and down South 167th street more easily than a black man can drive up and down Charleville Avenue in Beverly Hills.  One of us is a heck of lot more likely to be pulled over than the other!)  There are millions of folks in this county in interracial relationships like mine, who have successfully (if not effortlessly) blended our families and our kitchens and our workplaces and our bedrooms.  And in reference to the film’s opening conceit, we sure as hell don’t need to crash into each other just to feel some human contact!  But when we do crash — by accident, thanks — most of us manage to resolve the problem without resorting to ugly caricatures.

I won’t say I’ve been "everywhere", but I’ve done a fair amount of travelin’ in my day, across this state, the country, and the globe.  And with the possible exception of Cape Town, I can’t think of a place I’ve been to where racial harmony amidst tremendous diversity is so evident as it is in my beloved adopted home of greater Los Angeles.  When I think of how "Crash" may have only reinforced the stereotypes of L.A. that outsiders have, I’m angry and grieved.

I’m also mildly grieved by a late Man U goal that has robbed Wigan.  I think I’m ready to teach my night class!