“White Man’s Burden”
The movie we watched in class was called “White Man’s Burden.” According to some sociologists the white man’s burden is an unwanted burden that white men, who are in the upper part of society, must bring the minority classes up to their status. For example, if it were applied today white folks would have to help bring black folks up into a higher class. While this theory was used many years ago, it is still in consideration today.
This movie took a very unique approach. It separated two classes of people, whites and blacks. They were separated by, what I believe is the greatest degree of separation today, money. In the movie the only people in the upper class were black and the main family in the movie was white. In today’s society that is different, you would expect white people to have the money and black to be in the lower class. While that is not always the case, it is what is perceived in today’s society.
The movie portrayed life in the inner city as we are conditioned to see it. Everyone in the inner city was of the same race. Everyone was poor and life was rough. There was some violence in the inner city but it was on only between the two classes. Also everyone in the inner city didn’t speak proper English. The movie almost implied that it was these people fault that they were poor and that they were bad people. It did not show the fact that these people of the inner city could have been dealt a bad hand. This point is shown when John Travolta is evicted from his house. When this happens his mother in law comes over to get his wife and kids. While she is there she yells at him and asks him what kind of husband he is that he can’t keep a job and raise his own kids and support her daughter. The fact that maybe he was dealt a bad hand was over looked. John Travolta is still a good person.
There were stereotypes portrayed in the movie. One can be shown when John Travolta was beaten by some cops. He was beaten by cops because he “fit” a description of a criminal. The stereotype here is that all people who are of the lower class are criminals. John Travolta was not stopped and asked for identification, it was just assumed that since he was of a lower class that he the criminal they were looking for.
Growing up as an African-American you are always taught to be twice as good. Twice as good as the white people to receive the same treatment as them. I grew up hearing this same phrase constantly but never really understood exactly what it meant until I got old enough to actually see the kind of world we are living in. The author of the article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” Peggy Mclntosh, took as step into shoes of black America and found that white privilege not only exist, but many whites are blind to it. She gives a clear argument about how white privilege is harmful to our society and how we can work together to fix this.
Throughout the course of history, nations have invested time and manpower into the colonizing and modernizing of more rural governments. Imperialism has spread across the globe, from the British East India Company to France’s occupation of Northern Africa. After their founding in 1776, the United States of America largely stayed out of this trend until The Spanish-American War of 1898. Following the war, the annexation and colonization of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines ultimately set a precedent for a foreign policy of U.S. imperialism.
The main stereotype in this movie is that Asian men only care about their jobs and their careers and little else. That the Asian man will go through great sacrifice to get to the top of the business that they work for. From beginning to end, many white families are portrayed in the movie showing that the American people have family values. Yet absent through the whole course of the picture is any Asian man with his family. This signifies that the Asian group does not have time, nor wants to make time to have a family life because they are trying to succeed in business. The Asian boss in the film wanted the results to his li...
But the film actually made me recall a question that I always had: to what extent can we, as somewhere who are not involved in the events, criticize people, especially the wrongdoers, who did partake in the history? As people from the 21st century, we know that slavery is unjust and horrible because we were raised in a society where love and peace were honored. When I questioned myself what would I do if I were Edwin Epps, Marry Epps, or William Ford, I began to question myself how much can I criticize them people when the cruelty was norm, and all those people did really was to follow the norm. Although it would be righteous and courageous to stand up for the blacks, not everyone is all courageous and willing to challenge the society. The film reminded me to have my own judgment and not to blindly follow what everyone else consider to be the norm. This film also made me wonder: when it is many years from now, how much of the social norm today would be considered to be cruel and
A comment was made in a blog post early on in the year about whiteness in American that bugged me. It’s a topic that came up a few times throughout the semester in and outside of class. Granted, this topic is based on a single blog post but a collection of comment and statements that were made on specific blogs and during class sessions. This topic I fin extremely important mainly because I felt as though there was some confusion around the topic being white. Understandably if you’re white in America I think it’s easy to forget exactly how privileged you are. Nonetheless, it forced me to want to talk about white privilege in America, explain the meaning of “paradox of privilege”, and explain why it is possible to be privileged without feeling privileged. I also want to drive into where whiteness came from and why it’s still around today. Tim Wise’s (anti American racism activist) use of these words “we” and the implications; how/why he defines certain words for groups that are oppressed. I will incorporate Wise’s discussion on whiteness within the context of Frye’s cage metaphor. Describing why a macroscopic view is so essential to understanding the structure of oppression.
Before we get into the movie specifically, we should first talk about representation and how race is represented in the media in general. Representation is defined as the assigning of meaning through language and in culture. (CITE) Representation isn't reality, but rather a mere construction of reality and the meaning behind it. (CITE) Through representation we are able to shape how people are seen by others. Race is an aspect of people which is often represented in the media in different ways. Race itself is not a category of nature, but rather...
Giving more insights about how racist ideologies are born or even transmitted from one generation to another is probably the main mission of this movie. This is definitely a movie about racism which does not follow the traditional way Hollywood has of showing the victim’s side of the story. The audience of this movie will be attached, this time, to the racist’s point of view, thanks to the help various film elements and a literary design that are used to force the viewer to empathize and maybe even like the hero/bad guy of the story.
The first social issue portrayed through the film is racial inequality. The audience witnesses the inequality in the film when justice is not properly served to the police officer who executed Oscar Grant. As shown through the film, the ind...
This movie is a wonderful production starting from 1960 and ending in 1969 covering all the different things that occurred during this unbelievable decade. The movie takes place in many different areas starring two main families; a very suburban, white family who were excepting of blacks, and a very positive black family trying to push black rights in Mississippi. The movie portrayed many historical events while also including the families and how the two were intertwined. These families were very different, yet so much alike, they both portrayed what to me the whole ‘message’ of the movie was. Although everyone was so different they all faced such drastic decisions and issues that affected everyone in so many different ways. It wasn’t like one person’s pain was easier to handle than another is that’s like saying Vietnam was harder on those men than on the men that stood for black rights or vice versa, everyone faced these equally hard issues. So it seemed everyone was very emotionally involved. In fact our whole country was very involved in president elections and campaigns against the war, it seemed everyone really cared.
For example, the prosecutor managed to keep blacks off the jury. This just proved that there is no justice in the legal system of the United Sates and racism and discrimination is still prevalent. Another label in the movie when the white lawyer struggles with his own feelings about race during his preparations to stand up for this black man in an all-white jury. Racial prejudices is the main point made in the movie, when we want to believe we are not color blind based off this film proved that the characters in their prejudices determined their
I have always believed that all races have their good and bad. Their is never going to be the perfect race. This movie definitely set a powerful message that life is not perfect for any race and that even though people are from different cultures, they are all interconnected somehow. The filmmakers did a great job at showing us that individuals should not be based on first impressions such as skin color or the social status.
...ts was very distinguishable. This film captures this class distinction without subduing the atmosphere through the use of a variety of cinematic devices, “ A good film is not a bag of cinematic devices but the embodiment, through devices, of a vision, an underlying theme” (Barnett, 274). The audience can see this theme of the realities of the oppression, poverty and despair of this time period through the use of the things mentioned, but also through the character development that is driven by the character’s hopelessness. Each of the characters associated with the lower class is motivated by the conditions, which are viewed through the cinematic devices mentioned above: color, spherical lenses, long shots, and high angle shots.
The second is what was going on in America during the time of this films release. No more then fifty years after the Civil War, this film was made. African-Americans were nowhere near finding equality or having civil rights that they were said to have or presumed to have. Separate but equal was still the main mindset in America. Most of the South still hated African Americans, lynched them, and the KKK was strong. When you look at all these social contexts that were going on during the time of the films release, there is no way that this film was seen as racist in the majority of the population. Most of the South probably saw this mov...
This was especially evident when they were being pulled over by a racist white cop. She felt that he could have done more to defend their rights instead of accepting injustice. There is also a Persian store owner, who feels that he is getting the short end of the stick in American society because his store was robbed multiple times. Then the Hispanic locksmith encounters racial slurs and discrimination, although he just wanted to keep his family safe. The partnered detectives and lovers of different races, one is a Hispanic woman and the other is a black male, who are dealing with his drug addicted mother who feels that he does not care enough about taking care of his family. In this movie, discrimination and prejudice are the cause of all kinds of collisions. We easily prejudge people with stereotypes, and we are concerned with our pre-thoughts of what kind of person he/she should be, we forget to actually get to know them. It is human nature to have some type of prejudices in one way or another; we fear the unknown. There are stereotypes that black people are angry or tend to be violent; white people feel they are the dominant race and discriminate against all; Asians are thought to be poor or ignorant, and people with higher economic statuses are distinguished to the working class
In the “White Man’s Burden”, Rudyard Kipling claims that it is the duty or burden of the white men to civilize the non-whites, to educate them and to religiously lift them (lecture notes, 2/8). Kipling is specifically talking about the colonized non-whites (lecture notes, 2/8). The idea that the newly colonized non-whites were lacking and needing help from a greater society was common among American whites at this time (lecture notes, 2/8). Rudyard uses the whites’ public feelings towards the issue and writes “The White Man’s Burden” in an attempt to move the whites to help the non-whites because he thinks it is a very beneficial movement for the U.S.