It's far from a masterpiece and i think he might have taken it easy on me but here it is. We had to base our argument around a movie of our picking and i picked Crash.
The world is a harsh place. This is common knowledge to anyone that has tried to go out into it. During any minute of any day there is a crime being committed toward another living person. All over the world someone is being stereotyped or persecuted for their race whether it is the Aborigines in Australia, the refugees in Sudan and Chad, or even here in America where everything is ?different? now that we have a MIXED race man as our president. In the movie Crash, we follow an intricate tale of people living in Los Angeles. As we watch the characters interact with each other we realize that to each one of them (save the Locksmith and Chinaman) has something negative to say about someone of another race. This movie helps shed light on the facts that stereotypes are still alive in America and that if you choose to act upon said stereotypes you can cause a chain of events that are hard to reverse.
Anthony (Ludacris) begins his part in the film by talking about how unjust it was that he was racially discriminated against by a waitress. He then sees Jean Cabot (Sandra Bullock) clasp onto her husband Rick (Brendan Fraser.) He is then infuriated about how she did that when she seen two black men walking toward them. He rants about racism and how everybody only sees skin color then carjacks the hapless couple as the get into the car. This brings up a point. Stereotypes exist because the people being stereotyped tend to perpetuate them. For example when the Asian woman crashes into Detective Ria, or when Officer John Ryan acts like a dick they are pushing the stereotype further by implicating them. The fact that stereotypes exist is due to the fact that they are perpetuated to a certain degree.
Ever since 9/11 America has become very anti Muslim. In the movie Crash an Iranian man named Farhad and his daughter Dorri try to purchase a gun to prevent people from robbing their store again. While purchasing the gun Farhad speaks his native tongue which he is more fluent in. The man behind the counter voices his thoughts about how they blew up the towers and the stereotypical ignorant patriotic yarble. The white man behind the counter was playing to his racism (ignoring the fact that Farhad is Iranian and the Hijackers were Saudi Arabian,) and voices what a good portion of America thinks when it is faced with a middle eastern. This isn?t the only example of racism against Farhad. Towards the end of the movie his shop is broken into and vandals spray paint ?Towel head? on his walls along with things like ?Go back to?? This happens to many Middle Eastern shop owners across America and it even spews over to people of Indian descent. Here in Saint Joseph I have seen a man spit on the new Mosque that is being built because ?They need to get out of our country after what they did.? Also in New York when a group of Muslims tried to convert a building into a Mosque blocks (and in New York a block is much longer than in Midwestern America) the entire country was in an uproar about how that?s too close and that?s the wrong place to do have a mosque. Farhad Middle Eastern face an ignorant public that assumes if you speak Arabic you are automatically a terrorist.
Black in America. There are classes on it, internet videos of it, books and movies all about it. But nothing comes close to actually being experiencing it. This movie doesn?t quite show many interactions between black and white but the scenes in which these two races do come across each other are very important. In the movie there is a scene in which Cameron (Terrence Howard) is directing a scene in a show and he says that everything was perfect and they were done but another person comes up and says that the way one of the black characters spoke wasn?t in character. In other words the character?s English was too good and he needed to sound blacker. In Black America you can only speak 3 languages without being called ?too smart and those are Ebonics, Jive and Smack. Cameron speaks perfect English and enunciates every word but according to his wife Christine ?The closest you ever came to being black Cameron, was watching ?The Cosby Show!?? Another scene is when Rick is talking to his advisor and exclaims in exasperation, ?Why do they have to be black?? He is acknowledging the fact that it is a stereotype and that if he says anything the repercussions could affect him negatively. It shows that the characters are quite aware of the stereotypes but do not wish to put them in the back of their heads. Many things have changed since the days of Jim Crow but the thoughts aren?t gone just hidden from view.
This movie is not only about how stereotypes persist but how you can reverse your actions if you try hard enough and if you act at the right moment. In the movie Dillon?s character comes upon an overturned SUV with a passenger still inside. He runs onto the scene and looks into the smashed window. It?s Christine, the woman he sexually assaulted the previous night. She screams and says she doesn?t want HIS help but he persists and finally rescues her. He redeemed himself somewhat for his actions by acting in a selfless manner and realizes that she?s a person just like him. Also Anthony goes back to where he ran over a ?Chinaman,? and literally drops him off at a hospital. He then takes the van to a stolen car warehouse and tries to sell it only to discover that there are Asian immigrants hiding in the back of the van. He is presented with a choice; either sell the van and the immigrants or keep them. He chooses the latter and frees them all in Chinatown and gives one of them 40 dollars for some ?chop suey.? He realized his mistake by leaving the man dying in the street and went back and paid his dues and helped out the people the Chinaman was trying to help.
Not all the resolutions are happy though. Late in the film Peter is separated from Anthony and tries to make his way back home. He is picked up by Tom Hansen, who just had a run in with Cameron. The car ride goes smoothly for a while until they both start to bicker. Tom disbelieves Peter when he says he enjoys hockey and Peter laughs to himself about something he thought of. Tom gets edgy and tells Peter to get out. Peter reaches into his pocket and Tom shoots him, assuming Peter was pulling out a gun. Peter is dumped on the side of the road to be found by his brother Graham. Peter is the victim of racial profiling. If Tom had just for a second believed him when he said he enjoyed hockey then maybe the car ride would have ended differently. It seems to symbolize the quick disbelief that many people have towards anything not stereotypical. Tom quickly shot down what was different in a quite literal way. He rejected it and only saw the preset stereotype of a black man with a gun.
Racism is pure fear and being afraid of a person?s skin color is pure ignorance. Stereotypes exist all throughout the world, whether it?s Speedy Gonzales, The Stupid Fat American, or The Subservient Asian woman and the only way we can destroy these outdated views of each other is by thinking before you utter racial slurs. The movie Crash helped demonstrate that racism and stereotypes still persist throughout America by showing stereotypical characters and the way each interacts to the other.
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