Race and Crash Essay

The writer of Crash shows racism, prejudice, discrimination, and attitudes of different ethnic groups in the movie. Crash shows societies racial-discrimination through schemas on how stereotypes and the primary effect influence the characters, and their processes of social perception. Paul Haggis showed the hatred and racial-discrimination portrayed by individuals based on their ethnicity. Every ethnic group has certain stereotypes known about them; these stereotypes influence others views about them. In Crash, individuals who are white, African American, Latino, Iranian, Asian, and Mexican crash together. Each character was linked to all the others through an event. The setting is in Los Angles where many races collide together in a series of nonviolent and violent encounters. Crash begins by showing the lives of the main characters and the psychological issues they go through each day, because of the prejudice based on the stereotypes that prevent each individual from seeing the other person for who he or she is, consequently showing the terrible expanding of the self-fulfilling insights. Many of the characters have been through some king of experience, which led to the way they are. Perception in my definition is a person’s ultimate view of the world. The movie Crash touches on the ideal of perception in America. It also deals with racist relations that some people don’t realize. Crash forces you to look at what we think we know about these issues and forces you to look at them from a point of view that may not have previously considered. The movie gives me the perspective that life isn’t about different races coming together and trying to live in one world but life is all about perception. When I was watching the movie Crash, I realize that some of the views that they portrayed, I hear them and sometimes see them every day. Everyday people judge others on how they look and how they speak. People don’t realize how much others judge people and how we build relationships. Some of the views that were in Crash happen in life around the world. For example at the end of the movie when the police officer was driving the African American and they got into an argument. He then tries to pull out a figurine of a saint to show a young police officer, the officer mistakes the gesture for Peter pulling out a gun and shoots him. Our perception is usually shaped by culture. If a person gets robbed by a Latino person, they most likely will be scared of that race. Or they will probably think that all Latinos are robbers. If you meet an African American male or female, and they talk in Ebonics or slang, some people might categorize him or her as a thug and a criminal.