A skeptic’s view of Freedom Writers

by guest contributor Sylvia, originally published at The Anti-Essentialist Conundrum

At first, I absolutely refused to see Freedom Writers. It looked like yet another feel good white-teacher-saves-colored-students with-much-rejoicing in-the-land-of-Nod movie. I mean, the narrative is another twist of the American Dream: ignore the circumstances around you and focus on yourself, and you’ll poise yourself for success and improvement. Rampant individualism abounds. You see people you once characterized as your people doing The Wrong Thing, and you set off to do The Right Thing without those people. And movies like Freedom Writers tell you in veiled ways that that’s okay, and the world cuts off when you leave it outside the fences of your school. The real world of deserting husbands, gang violence, and homelessness wipes clean away. As usual, my analysis is spoiler ridden because I just don’t give a damn. :-p

Teacher Erin Gruwell (Hillary Swank) is a first time teacher assigned to freshman English with a group of students from four distinct backgrounds: black, Cambodian, Latino, and white. (Well…there’s only one white kid, and he feels courageous for being around people of color once Gruwell unites them all in their humanity, but not before when anti-white sentiment emerges in the classroom.) Everyone in the class has some affiliation to gangs and gang violence. Each group sequestered itself from the other groups, and they ridiculed each other and fought in the courtyards. The (white) department head of the school informs us and Gruwell early that after voluntary integration at Wilson High, 75% of the students who made Wilson an A-list school have departed, and all that’s left are classrooms full of kids with whom she doesn’t trust the school’s ample resources. She also stubbornly adheres to the idea that they have no desire to learn. The (white) honors teacher reveals his own bigotry when Gruwell asks him to help her acquire resources for her students. She goes over their heads to the (black) director, who gives her the go-ahead on many of her projects after witnessing her ambition. You go girl!

So what does Gruwell do? First, she conveniently finds a way to grab the students’ attention that killing people because of the color of their skin is, like, so wrong. A Latino student draws a caricature of one of the black students: profile, bulging eyes, huge lips…a common racist caricature. The black student, initially the class clown, sits utterly humiliated and crying. Gruwell takes the picture, and she asks the class if they knew that Jewish people faced extreme, dehumanizing caricatures before being systematically exterminated? She asked each group that if the others did not exist, would they feel better off? And of course, the class readily said, “Yeah yeah yeah!”

Her “in” was the German-run Holocaust. But before she heavily relied on teaching the Holocaust, she bought the class a young adult book about gang life. The class buttered up a little before she got into hardcore teaching of Holocaust history. Then the class burst in sympathy, indignation, and worked on turning their lives around before creating Little Holocausts of their own. Gruwell reminded them that participating in gang violence wouldn’t garner them any worldwide recognition like Anne Frank; they’d only become statistics. So why not become positive statistics?

But, you remember, the department head didn’t grant Gruwell any books, so she worked two jobs to pay for her own resources. Full of new teacher idealism, Gruwell takes her students to a museum of tolerance, fancy restaurants, and she arranges for Holocaust survivors to share their stories of survival. The movie specifically addresses the Jewish angle of the Holocaust. The class instantly gained perspective. Never mind that the Holocaust was institutionalized violence, and the many instances of institutionalized violence and oppression that each of those groups represented in those classes face in America. You get the air that Gruwell may have feared an oppression pissing match amongst her already divided students. Dialogues about internalized racist perceptions and reactive violence would be too “white woman preachin’ to the little people of color about themselves.” Or maybe their own problems and familiarity with gang violence, domestic violence, poverty, and broken homes weren’t relevant beyond her awareness of them through their diaries because she needed them, as her first class, to learn English from her.

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