The United States of America is anything but united. People from all corners of the globe immigrate here for the opportunities and freedoms that come with American citizenship.
However cultural differences are causing the citizens of the United States to lock horns and focus on what separates them instead of the similar qualities that united them like the country’s name suggests. A film from 2004 and an essay from 2012 touch on the topic of how ethnic and cultural minorities face major problems in America today. “Crash” is a film that takes its viewers into the everyday lives of Californians who come from various cultural backgrounds. It is through this film that viewers see how racism, prejudice, and discrimination play a part in our day to
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The essay “From Rez Life: An Indian 's Journey Through Reservation Life” is different from the film “Crash” because it focuses on the encouraging what unites a culture rather than playing a game of “spot the differences” between different cultural groups. One of the ways
Native American culture will be preserved is through teaching the next generation the languages that are relevant to their respective tribes. This statement from “The Rez Life” explains the importance of maintaining the practice of speaking native languages in modern day America:
For language activists, the language is the key to everything else— identity, life and lifestyle, home and homeland. Most language activists are also traditional Indians, but very modern traditional Indians, as likely to attend a ceremony as they are to have smartphones on which they record language material and Indian ceremonial music they are trying to learn. This new traditionalism is not a turning back of the clock, but a response to it; modernism (and modern, global capitalism) is a great obliterator
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It connects the past, the present, and the future speakers together even if old cultural traditions fade away over time. In the film “Crash” viewers are introduced to a kind of shock value that is borderline infuriating, but the most shocking part about the movie is how true to real life it is. "Crash" was written in a way that the blatant racism shown in the movie immediately makes the viewers think
"Wow, that was completely uncalled for!" and have the viewer become outraged at the situation, because that is what we should feel towards racism in our society: outrage, disgust, shock.
Unlike in the essay about preserving Native American culture, “Crash” focuses on how cultural differences among many cultures divide a nation. An example of cultural differences in the movie is when a Latino locksmith tries to communicate with a Persian store owner, who does not know English very well, that he cannot fix the store’s faulty door. Due to the language barrier between them, the store owner did not fully understand what needed to be done to fix the door, and his store ended up being broken into and vandalized. The store owner did not understand
The film observes and analyzes the origins and consequences of more than one-hundred years of bigotry upon the ex-slaved society in the U.S. Even though so many years have passed since the end of slavery, emancipation, reconstruction and the civil rights movement, some of the choice terms prejudiced still engraved in the U.S society. When I see such images on the movie screen, it is still hard, even f...
small convince store on the road, in which the owners would not let him in until
Another similarity in their themes of race and critical race theory happen to be which perspectives they include. Crash is a story that involves many different races and has the plot revolve ev...
To conclude, “The Offensive Movie Cliché That Won’t Die” by Matt Zoller Seitz, and “Race Relations Light Years from the Earth” by Mitu Sengupta, both identify and elaborate on the racism and stereotypical views throughout the stories by using nonfiction elements --authors purpose and main idea --to effectively support and explain how theme was distributed.
The movie Crash educates the viewers on the effects of racism, and the negativity it places in our society. The interpersonal communication that was played out throughout the movie, made me more conscientiously aware, of how I interact with different ethnicities, so as not to offend
This demonstrates to us that no matter how much your legal or moral laws are violated, what matters is how you as an individual react to the situation, justly or unjustly. This movie is centered around the notion that if you are a person of ethnic background, that alone is reason for others to forsake your rights, although in the long run justice will prevail
During the semester, race is a big part of the lectures. In class, we talk about how race is distinguishing physical characteristics used to place people in different racial categories (Jensen). The biggest concern with race is racial inequality. Racial inequality is the inadequate or unfair treatment of minorities in areas like income, education, employment, health, the criminal justice system, and media. The article written by Rebecca Keegan from the Los Angeles Times newspaper discusses the inequality of race in media specifically movies. This article relates to the unfairness in films because minorities are poorly portrayed in the majority of films. More often than not, minorities are the “bad guys” in films. They are caught up in criminal activity and live in poorer neighborhoods than the majority. The article gives numerous statistics proving and exploiting that there is indeed racial inequality depicted in films. Also the Keegan touches on how minorities are underrepresented in films in the way that they usually do not have as many speaking lines compared to the white actor/actress.
To conclude, “The Offensive Movie Cliché That Won’t Die” by Matt Zoller Seitz, and “Race Relations Light Years from the Earth” by Mitu Sengupta, both identify and elaborate on the racism and stereotypical views throughout the stories by using nonfiction elements --authors purpose and main idea --to effectively support and explain how theme was distributed.
Although America treats the nationalistic diversity as something of great value, in all honesty, America could care less. People go out of their way, to encase themselves into groups of others that closely resemble themselves. We have circles inside of circles, making it so that a particular action in one community can result in completely different reactions in the community that neighbors the first.The choices that we make to feel comfortable may lead to something on the other side of the spectrum, in the case of diversity. David Brooks, author of “People Like Us,” believes that it is of human nature to be drawn closer to people that share many similarities with us, making us a “relatively homogenous nation.” I must agree with Brooks, in the sense that thought America claim to be a nation of diversity, people do tend to stick with the people to whom they feel comfortable with, the people they they can call one of their own.
The United States, created by blending or melting many cultures together into one common man, known as an American. Modern communication and transportation accelerate mass migrations from one continent . . . to the United States (Schlesinger 21). Ethnic and racial diversity was bound to happen in the American society. As immigration began to explode, . . . a cult of ethnicity erupted both between non-Anglo whites and among nonwhite minorities. (22).
The United States has been, and is, a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities. As
... being a story of an actual person in society who has gone through these adversities, makes the claims provided in the film reliable and trustworthy.
Tension between the African Americans and Caucasians have been present in America since slavery. In the movie Crash (2004), race and culture are major themes that can be seen in the lives of the characters in the film. One character in particular, Cameron, a prestigious color vision director, displays the friction between two cultures. He belongs to the educated, upper class of the Los Angeles area. He is also an African American, yet he seems to have no ties with that class. He has a light-skinned wife, attends award shows, and it appears that his acquaintances are predominately white. When he and his wife, Christine, get pulled over by a racist cop, he experiences emotions of powerlessness and helplessness that he never knew he would experience due to his upbringing and place in society. Cameron goes through a radical transformation where he comes to grips with his background and how he fits into these two clashing cultures.
This quote refers to the diversity in Los Angeles and how people put up personal barriers and are hesitant to trust others. Crash is a movie that really gets people to look at their own prejudices and to the roots of their morality by showing the hidden racism and prejudices that are very present in our society and even in ourselves today.
“We fight each other for territory; we kill each other over race, pride, and respect. We fight for what is ours. They think they’re winning by jumping me now, but soon they’re all going down, war has been declared.” Abuse, Pain, Violence, Racism and Hate fill the streets of Long Beach, California. Asians, Blacks, Whites and Hispanics filled Wilson High School; these students from different ethnic backgrounds faced gang problems from day to night. This movie contains five messages: people shouldn’t be judgmental because being open-minded allows people to know others, having compassion for a person can help people change their views in life, being a racist can only create hate, having the power of the human will/goodness to benefit humanity will cause a person to succeed at any cost and becoming educated helps bring out the intelligence of people.