Race In Relation To Movies

For this entry, I chose to do the movie “Crash”. The movie is centered around race relations in everyday life. The movie begins with one storyline about a prominent white district attorney of Los Angeles being car-jacked by two disenfranchised black males. Another story focuses on a latino locksmith and a Persian shop owner who has his store vandalized, and blames the locksmith for not fixing it correctly. Another angle focuses on a white police officer, who through his years on the force has attributed racism against blacks to his personality due to his view of the things he has been a part of while on the job. In the movie you see stereotypical roles on races, such as the white district attorney, the car-jacking black males, the thug-looking latino with a low paying job, and the middle-eastern shop owner. The movie does an incredible job in pointing out the stereotypes races have of other races, and showing how even though people may feel their race is just different from others, everyone’s lives can intertwine in some way, no matter what their differences.

There is one part in this movie that really stands out to me in relation to the article we just read, “When the Melting Pot Boils Over”, by Roger Waldinger. In it, he says “Groups move up from the bottom by specializing in and dominating a certain branch of economic life; that specialization goes unchallenged as long as the newest arrivals are content to work in the bottom-based jobs for which they were initially recruited”. The white police officer I mentioned before has a father who is very sick. He goes to see an HMO counselor who happens to be black. She won’t let his father get coverage outside of his plan, and in response to this he tells her about how he can’t help but think about the 5 or 6 white people that didn’t get her job due to equal opportunity employment; and how his father employed black men at a time when no one else would, but lost his job when contracts were given