Essay Example on Crash: Prejudice and Stereotyping's Impact on Relationships

The movie Crash, produced in 2004 is a film about various people who come from divergent socioeconomic status and they are engaged in conflicting stereotypes and prejudices. The movie focuses on prejudice and stereotyping and how these influence the interactions of people. The characters start to have changes in the way that they perceive things and also develop certain attitude towards each other. While some develop positive attitude towards other characters, others develop negative attitude.

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Some characters such as Ludacris who plays as Anthony look at everything from a racial perspective. Anthony feels this way because he has seen the pain that is being caused by racial prejudice (Haggis et al.). People of different races are usually mistreated by the people of the other race. Anthony is a black man and together with another black man, Peter, they are involved in a carjacking incident. One of the possible reasons that the two would resort to a life of crime is because this is the best strategy to revenge for the racial discrimination that they face. By engaging in crime, they feel that they are representing all the blacks.In the movie, Jean is a representative of stereotyping. At one instance, her car is stolen and this prompts her to change locks. While she is having her locks changed, she judges the locksmith by his appearance and considers him a gang due to the presence of tattoos on his body. She also sees some black men and starts to turn her diamond ring because she considers the black men as thieves who could steal her ring easily. Her stereotypical feelings are not justified as not all black people were as bad as she tried to portray them. As a matter of fact, she has a person of color at home who works with her husband.

The frisking of a woman by a male police officer is outrightly disgusting. Such kind of molestation is racial profiling taken too far. The husband was angry at the incident and this is evident from his facial expressions when he looks at the wife being frisked. If this happened to me, I would be willing to fight to the last breath. I would not withstand such kind of humiliation.

Racial profiling has led to people failing to communicate properly. When the locksmith tells the store owner to fix the door, the store owner does not understand and he resorts to insulting him (Haggis et al.). This kind of miscommunication can be handled by both parties being patient with each other and yearning to listen to each other before responding or making conclusions. What is at play here is the despise that people of different race treat others with. This affects the relationship of people to a great extent.

Bullets have been used as tools of oppression. However, it has reached a point that the blacks have become resistant to everything even the gun. In scene 6, the officer who molested a black lady gets involved in an accident and it is the lady that comes to his rescue. This turn of events might have changed the attitude of the officer towards black people.

In Scene 7, the white officer, Hansen, puts himself on the harm way to protect Cameron by saying that he knew him and that he was his friend. I think that he did this to prevent the other police officers from hurting him since he had not done anything wrong and he is also aware that even the whites are not innocent.

In the scene on the invisible cloak, the movie shows the danger of unresolved anger and lack of communication. In this instance, Farhad confronts Daniel and Daniel tries to calm him down as his daughter rushes towards him and tries to protect him with the "invisible cloak" (Haggis et al.). This instance shows that unresolved anger can lead to death as due to anger Farhad shoots although he does not inure anyone.

The scene in human trafficker shows that even the stereotype of the modal minority is harmful. This feeling creates feelings of disgust since no one in the population, irrespective of their social class should be mistreated for any reason.

Based on the movie, there are various lessons to learn about racial prejudice and stereotyping. People from one race have a way of viewing people from other races. For example, the whites would consider people of color as inferior and weak as shown in the movie. Despite these stereotypes, it is possible to ignore them. The way to do this is to focus on the character of an individual person and their abilities as opposed to viewing them as a group.

Personally, I do have the fear for the Muslims perhaps due to some of the terrorist groups such as Al-Qaeda which are associated with them. Despite this fear, I know that Islam is a peaceful religion and just because there is a group that deals with terrorism, we cannot classify all the Muslims in that category. From the movie, I feel like I am like the character Cameron who would muster the courage to stand before a gun. I am the kind of a person who would stand against any threat that seeks to affect my life or that of my family. Besides, like Cameron, I would not accept to be intimidated by anyone just because I belong to a different race.

Works Cited

Haggis et al. Crash. , 2004.