Cultural Issues In The Movie Crash

1016 Words3 Pages

For this assignment, I decided to watch “Crash”, a movie set in the streets of Los Angeles California and that shows the lives of various individuals with different cultural backgrounds. The movie starts with the scene of a car crash between an Asian woman and a couple of detectives near the sight of a murder, as the African American detective Graham Waters walks around the scene he stops because he saw something that shocked him, and from there a flashback begins. The first relevant scene shows, Anthony and Peter, two African Americans individuals walking down the street talking about racial discrimination. As they talk a couple passes by them and the two decide to steal their car. This causes a chain of events affecting the lives of many …show more content…

Even though the woman racially discriminated him only based on the way he looked, he did not argue, was still polite and finished his job without saying a word. This is a trait of Hispanic and Latino American populations, Ritter and Graham wrote that “Hispanics tend to avoid conflict and criticism and prefer smooth relations based on politeness and respect” (Ritter & Graham, 2017, p. 152). To this point, I noticed something else again from the same individual. When he had the discussion with Farhad, a Persian store owner that hired him to fix a lock on a broken door, the audience could see that he did not want to argue and just wanted to leave, that is why he left without asking for the money. This episode of the movie was closely related to the characteristic about Hispanic and Latino American population that I mentioned previously. On the other hand, the movie contradicts this because in the first scene the Hispanic woman looked like she was looking for a discussion with the person that crashed into her. An additional characteristic that I noticed that the woman did not have in relation with her culture was the eye contact with the policeman, at the very beginning of the movie. Ritter and Graham describe that “Hispanics… may avoid direct eye contact with the authority figures” (Ritter & Graham, 2017, …show more content…

I think it is incredible that the events that we see during the movie can happened in real life because they can ruin people lives, as we can see with the Persian store owner, the young policeman or the brother of the detective. This movie does an unbelievable job in describing how racism and racial stereotypes affect the lives of every individual. “Crash” show how different cultural backgrounds interact with each other and it also shows the effect that racial discrimination and racial stereotypes have on a person, the stress that it produces can make people do things that they never thought of doing or thought they could do. I was surprised of how good of a movie this was and how it depicted the characteristics and beliefs of so many different cultures, as we see all the cultural backgrounds that we studied in this

Open Document