Most people just want to live on

“This world is full of people, all kinds of people. And everybody wanna live on.” – The Masqueraders, 1975

Chances are, you’ve never heard of the song or the singing group referenced above. Both are pretty obscure.

But I dig up the refrain from “Everybody Wanna Live On” because I’ve always thought it an especially insightful summation of the conundrums of race, culture and creed. Indeed, the Masqueraders tell more truth in 15 words than some people do in 15,000. Because when you get right down to it, when you strip away the guilt, indignation and recrimination that invariably attend any discussion of cross-cultural enmity, aren’t you left with the simple fact that most of us – black and white, gay and straight, Muslim and Jew – are just trying to get through the day?

The new movie “Crash” understands this. I guess that’s why I found it compelling.

For those who don’t know, “Crash” is an ensemble film starring a handful of Hollywood’s more recognizable stars: Don Cheadle, Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Larenz Tate, Matt Dillon and the rapper Chris “Ludacris” Bridges among them. It tells a series of interlocking stories, all proceeding from conflicts carrying a subtext of culture and/or race.

Two young black men carjack a white couple. A Persian shopkeeper who speaks little English clashes with a Hispanic locksmith. A hateful white cop assaults a black woman while her husband can only watch.

Criminal black men, English-deficient foreigners, racist cops … you’ve seen those types before, haven’t you? Of course. That’s the point. Seldom has any film subverted stereotype so intelligently. “Crash” knows what you expect – what you have been conditioned to expect from other movies and just from living life itself – and it uses that expectation against you. It shows you nobility burning inside the meanest soul. Penury hiding within the most generous heart. Saintliness and sin sharing a single skin.

In “Crash,” nothing is as it seems on first glance. Its people surprise you in ways large and small. You find that you never know who you’re dealing with until you’ve spent some time with them.

It’s a valuable lesson. One hopes people take it with them when they leave the multiplex.

Because in a real sense, that’s what racism, religious bigotry and homophobia are: expectation. People thinking they know before they actually do. People responding to the you they have prejudged instead of to the you that presents itself before them. Responding, in other words, to what they believe brown skin signifies instead of responding to the human being with brown skin who stands before them asking for a job or a home loan or justice.

And if you’re the person with brown skin, or pink skin, or an Arab name, or a same-sex lover, the frustration is that you can never get some people to see beyond what they expect, never get them to see you as you are. Indeed, never quite get them to see you at all.

The point is not simply, as some critics have said, that we’re all capable of bigotry. It is, rather, that we are, all of us, so absorbed by our own pain that we often fail to comprehend the pain of our fellow travelers, even when we are the ones who have inflicted it.

You watch the movie and you wonder how much of the acrimony it depicts could have been avoided if the people had simply found a way to talk to one another, found a way to make themselves seen and heard. You wonder if the whole torturous history of how human beings hate one another’s tribes could really devolve to something as simple, as stupid, as a failure to understand that everybody feels, everybody hurts.

That’s a foolishly optimistic question, but I don’t know if that makes it a bad one.

Yes, the hows and whys of human prejudice are thorny and byzantine. Yet, at heart of that complexity lives a truth as simple as a song.

There are all kinds of people in the world. And everybody wanna live on.