Crash

One of my all time favorite movies we watched in Sociology this week was called Crash. What I really liked about this movie, aside from the funny scenes, was that it had a lesson. It touched on explicit and implicit racism. Instead the movie following one character throughout the whole film this movie followed several characters and how they act in society. The movie followed: two white male cops, two married couples (white couple and black couple), a Persian family, a Hispanic family, a black detective and his brother who gets into trouble and his mom addicted to drugs and his female partner and Ludacris who steals cars throughout the movie. 

In the movie you can see how a persons race can affect how they act towards another person. 

Some examples are: 

-In the beginning of the movie when the two white male cops pull over the black married couple because they thought that they were doing something wrong just because of the color of their skin.

-When the Persian dad walks into his store and sees that it has been trashed he automatically assumes it was the Hispanic guy who came in the day before to fix his lock. He assumes the worse that the Hispanic guy gave the key away to one of his "homies" so they could go back and trash his store. 

-When the white male cop picked up the detective's brother, who is friends with Ludacris in the movie and they both go around stealing cars, and they are having a conversation and the cop was shocked to hear that he liked playing hockey. The cop only picked him up because he was trying not to judge him by his race but deep down he still had his doubts because of the way he was dressed and how torn his clothes were so when he started reaching for his pocket the cop thought he might be pulling out a gun and immediately shot him. Implicitly the cop was judging him based on his race and because of it he killed an innocent man. 

-The black married couple having an argument over who is blacker

-Ludacris at the end of the movie releasing the chinamen chained in the back of the van instead of selling them 

-the white male cop calling a black lady about his father's troubles and when the cop got upset he started saying how upset he was that there were probably three other white men before her that could have done her job better

All these examples just show how implicit and explicit racism existed throughout the movie. Society makes us have judgments about people based on their skin color, which makes us think if they are good or bad based on those judgments.