Racial Impact and Oppression: Insights from Crash

Crash focused on race and the effects it had on the lives of people living in the Los Angeles area. The movie showed how everyone was effected by race weather they there racist themselves or a victim of racism; many times they were linked. Despite what many people thing, or would like to believe, the world has not changed as much as we would like to think. Marilyn Fryes essay Oppression said that “The experiences of oppressed people are that the living of ones life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional and hence avoidable.” (Rohenberg CITE) Throughout Crash you see examples of this over and over again. Racism and oppression are still a major issue in the world and unfortunately a lot of the time

Many of the characters in the movie had a stigma about another character/race. For example, Jean assumed that Daniel was in a gang due to his tattoos and baggy clothes. This showed how perception and race can lead people to the wrong conclusion about how people really are. When looking observing Daniel, it does look a little like what people would think a gang member would look like, but in reality Daniel is just a father who just works as a locksmith to support his family and trying to give them the best life they could have. The main cause of the racism and hate toward white people in the black community would have to be the oppression and injustice that the black race went through years ago, and many are still fighting today. Unfortunately, due to the stigmas many white people have the same negative feelings towards other races as well. There were many other subtle forms of race and discrimination in the movie as well. When Daniel could finish fixing Farhads door he thought it was due to Daniel trying to cheat him out of fixing it, but in reality it was out of Daniels control. Farhad felt that he had to protect himself from racist acts to protect himself from harm due to his background. Or how Anthony wont steal from another black man because that it wrong but has no problem stealing from a white man.

The dualistic cultural tendency to condemn hate crimes while ignoring these crimes' social and historical imbrications indicates that the ideological pattern termed "new racism" has come to characterize, not only racial thinking, but also other forms of identity-based difference and even mainstream efforts to combat bigotry. The result being that the bigotry manifest in hate crimes is unequivocally defined as criminal, while the differences that initiated these crimes in the first place are rendered moot. Bigotry appears deviant, while the status of being in a minority group is viewed as either neutral or irrelevant. The myth of the color-blind society transmogrifies within these narratives into the myth of the post-difference society. ( LEWIS