A skeptic’s view of Freedom Writers

Another narrative arises when a black sophomore switches from the honors class to Gruwell’s classroom. The jerky honors teacher, you see, asked her to share The Black Perspective on The Color Purple, and she hated the tokenization. The department head of the school argued with her, but she wasn’t willing to sacrifice her identity and her self-respect for sitting in an honors classroom. She transfers; life is sweet. It’s about the only real treatment of someone finding “proper” pride in her ethnic identity in the whole damned movie. And you realize that perhaps the others weren’t smart enough to articulate this pride through anything but violence. Civilize those kids, Gruwell!

So anyway: after being well fed, coddled, and spoiled with new resources to show that they matter, the class develops an infantile dependence on Gruwell as their deliverer (with the exception of this black female student who realizes that the class and Gruwell both need to move on). They grow together as a multicultural family, and outside problems all disappear.

Remember that loner Latino student who always appeared as if he would pull out a gun? Well, the truth is he’s homeless, and being in that classroom and sharing fancy dinners and doing the electric slide with his classmates made him feel like he had a home.

You think the black student is going to relapse into selling drugs because his brother gets 15 years to life in prison and the justice system ain’t fair? Psyche! He’s gonna be just fine. Just a slight bout of self-doubt that Gruwell cures with an expletive-sprinkled earthy invective for him to look out for himself and be honest about it. You’re crimpin’ her style, man. He cries a little and gets over it. As Emeril would say, “Bam!”

You think in the corresponding narrative the Latina gangbanger will stick with her own and condemn an innocent black kid of the murder of one of her Cambodian classmate’s friends? Not after the class works hard to raise money to bring Miep Geiss, the Polish-born secretary who hid the Franks during the Nazi occupation of The Netherlands. She tells them that they have to do things because they are right. And she points the finger at one of her own gang members, and the innocent black kid goes free. The only reason she’s not dead she is her father’s daughter, a father who we learned is sitting in jail for nothing but mysteriously pulls a lot of gang clout. She relocates to live with her aunt, but miraculously stays enrolled at Wilson High and asks Gruwell if she can stay at the school late to finish her homework. The end of the movie culminates in Gruwell saving the day. She and the class cling to each other through all four years of high school despite the objections of the school’s leadership, and Gruwell follows some of them to college, even.

And oh, the leadership objects. The department head’s rivalry with Gruwell gets ugly. Battle of the white female teachers! Young fresh-faced “with it” teacher versus older, experienced, battle-hardened institutional mistress! She spews venom at Gruwell’s capabilities. She spouts rhetoric about the impracticality of Gruwell’s tactics. Against the backdrop of her spitting image (and this woman’s eyes nearly popped out of her head while she fumed and raged), the cool white male principal and the uncompromising white honors teacher sit composed and say what’s not going to happen with Gruwell. They occasionally check the fiesty department head for her…emotion. Both of them dominate the meeting with the black director about whether Gruwell can follow them through junior and senior year. She only taught freshman and sophomore year. Honestly, this scene could have functioned without him sitting there; the department head was telling him what to do, anyway. Such blatant rudeness, and when they go over his head to a higher-up white female superintendent, she’s slightly more composed. That arrogant black man who let Gruwell get away with so much in the first place…we’ll show him. Except the superintendent sides with Gruwell and the arrogant black man. Their judgment is sound. Department head buggers off forever after.

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