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Crashing Into Rasism

Crash is a 2004 movie, with an all-star cast including Sandra Bullock, Brendan Fraser, Matt Dillon, and Ryan Phillippe, about people of different ethnic groups and social classes living in Los Angeles. The movie shows how Americans handle racism on a day-to-day basis through interactions with one-another, then through more interactions how they learn about the truth of different races.
The movie was very good and makes a strong impact on the people watching. It makes several good points about how Americans view other races of people because they are not the same as us. For instance, the Los Angeles County District Attorney, Rick Cabot, and his wife, Jean, were walking down a street. At the same time two black men were walking the opposite direction. At the sight of the two men, Jean gets closer to her husband and takes his arm, then, noticing this, one black man says to the other something about her action and how it is typical for a white, affluent woman to do such a thing because she thinks the men are going to do something to her. Her feelings are right, however, as the black men mug the Cabot’s and steal their vehicle. Instances like this happen in “real-life”. It is hard to forget that on the evening news the police where looking for a black man in relation of a carjacking or a murder. You hear these things and it reinforces the stereotype that all black men are bad and if you run into on the street you better take cover. Jean’s reaction here did not really surprise me because many stereotypes have a little bit of truth behind them. According to the US Bureau of Statistics African-Americans commit 1,500 more murders every year than white people. However, Jean’s reaction kind of embarrassed me as a white American. She makes it look like all white people should be scared of people of different races. On this note, Jean is a stereotype as an affluent white woman who gets scarred by a black man in an area normally trafficked by white people who...