Their Words, Our Story: Freedom Writers as Scenario of Pedagogical Reform

The story of Freedom Writers (LaGravenese 2007) is a familiar one: A sincere teacher, Erin Gruell (Hilary Swank), chooses a modest career in education over a more lucrative one in the “real” world. Declining law school, Gruell has selected Wilson High School for its “exciting” voluntary integration program and is quickly assigned four sections of freshman English. She initially faces resistance and chaos, yet she takes on two extra jobs in order to pay for and inspire the students through books, field trips, and fancy dinners. The students – a mix of African-Americans, Asians, Latinos, and one scared white teen – slowly warm to her and each other, funneling their anger onto the page in the form of journals that Gruell provides. Hence the inspiration for the title: these students become “Freedom Writers,” metaphorical descendants of the Civil Rights Freedom Riders who worked for racial harmony in the 1960s. Eventually, Gruell battles the school board to stay with the class of freshman throughout their high school career; as a result, nearly all of the students go on to college. Gruell and the Freedom Writers published their collected writings (The Freedom Writers Diary: How a Teacher and 150 Teens Used Writing to Change Themselves and the World) in 1999, which served to inspire the screenplay and Swank’s involvement with the picture.

This paper considers the ways in which Freedom Writers presents and performs race, difference, and the scenario of “pedagogical reform.” To do so, I engage Julia Kristeva’s theories of the abject and Richard Dyer’s work on whiteness, highlighting the insidious manner in which Hollywood subtly and not-so-subtly constructs race as a problem to be solved, a color to be blanched, and an evil to be eradicated. While Freedom Writers differs from much Hollywood film in its assertion that writing – as opposed to action – may indeed bring us a step closer to racial harmony, much of the lesson of tolerance that it preaches is undermined by the specificity of the scenario. Through its “discovery” of the Other, “treatment” of racialized characteristics, and eventual reform and assimilation, Freedom Writers encourages its audience to conceive of difference, poverty, and race in similar terms: as problems solved only through strong white leadership.

Performance scholar Diana Taylor gives us a paradigm to discuss the idea of the performative scenario, along with the notion of the archive and repertoire that inform it. If the weaving of baskets, preparation of tortillas, performance of dances, recounting of tales, and marriage ceremonies are all examples of the repertoire, then the basket museum exhibit, a cookbook, a dance photo, a history book, and a wedding video represent their archived correspondents. While the repertoire is dynamic, adaptive, and immediate, the archive remains static – frozen, decontextualized, and distanced. In Taylor’s words, the repertoire – society’s “embodied practice/knowledge” – is “selected, classified, and presented for analysis” as it finds its place in the archive.¹ The archivist compulsion is understandable, as a static item is far simpler to theorize and comprehend. However, archived materials are also easier to fetishize, re-appropriate, and revise. Such is the function of film in our current cultural moment: it catches performance (whether a protest, a play, a child’s first step) and inserts it into the archive of our memories, both societal and personal.

But who decides what will enter into the archive? Whose memory, exactly, is being recorded? What prompts an image, event, or performance to merit transference? Progress, victory, birth, but also failure, anxiety, distress, fear – moments that require reckoning. Taylor asserts that such moments are most often processed and understood through the use of a scenario – a term she defines as “an act of transfer, a paradigm that is formulaic, portable, repeatable, and often banal because it leaves out complexity, reduces conflict to its stock elements, and encourages fantasies of participation.”² The scenario of discovery, for example, provides a means of “reckoning” with otherness. In Taylor’ words,

[its] banality hides its instrumentality and transitivity: the scenario transports ‘us’ (as expedition leaders or newspaper readers) from here to an exotic ‘there,’ transfers...