I was underwhelmed by Crash.

Crash was supposed to be Best Picture material, but after finally watching it tonight, I wasn't that impressed.

If real racism were that obvious and exaggerated, I don't think there'd be any debate. But for the most part it isn't. It's subtle, complicated, even accidental (cf. Sean Eldon).
People get shunned for being un-PC without having any malintent.
We become afraid to talk about discrimination for fear of being called discriminators.
And yet the real instiutionalized inequities persist.

We don't need traumatic events to give us perspective, we need to stop labeling people and start respecting them. It's been said so many times it sounds cliche, but it really is the only way. A permanent campaign of censorship compounded with correlation-theory (i.e. political correctness and affirmative-action) doesn't solve anything at all! If anything it just makes already muddy waters so dirty it becomes almost hopeless to clean them.

I have male friends and female friends, gay friends and straight friends, Black friends and White friends, Asian friends and Hispanic friends. In each of these categories there are also people I don't like, people I don't trust. These judgments I base upon nothing more and nothing less than their treatment of me. And furthermore you need neither like nor trust to respect, and I like to think I respect just about everyone.

If we all did that, where would the debate be? Who would need Crash?

I really think Good Night and Good Luck got it better (though the movie as a whole was slow), or rather realized that Shakespeare's Cassius got it better:
"The fault [...] lies not in our stars, but in our selves."