Crash and Privilege, Power, and Difference Essay

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Matthew Miller Paper #1: Privilege, Power, and Difference* and *Crash The Movie Crashis set in Los Angeles and begins when several people are involved in a multi-car accident. From there the movie skips to the day before where we see the lives of several of the characters who were involved in the crash and the racial problems they encounter that day. The moviebegins by showing an Islamic man and his daughter going into a gun shop to by a gun. When the Islamic man speaks in a different language to his daughter the store clerk says to him “Hey Osama, plan your Jihad on your own time.” An argument ensues and the daughter ends up staying in the store and buying the gun, and instead of bullets she accidentally buys blanks asammo, however …show more content…
She says she hates it because anytime she is serving a table of black people this stereotypegoes through her head and she hates thinking that but it’s true. I seriously doubt she is a person who would ever give them poor service because of the stereotype but I am sure that in some cases that happens. I think sometimes stereotypes are reinforced because of people’s preconceived thoughts. I am sure there are cases where a table of black people may receive poor service because the server assumes the table will tip poorly and then because the table receives poor service they probably do tip poorly, and the stereotype is reinforced. I thought the movie Crash and the book Privilege, Power, and Differencewere similar in many ways, but also very different in some ways as well. I think both the book and the movie take racial issues to extremes. I think they both do this to raise awareness of the important issues. In the book Johnson states “People can’t help fearing the unfamiliar—including people of other races” (2006, p. 4), Johnson goes on to say this isn’t necessarily true, but I think the movie tries to highlight this aspect of the problem. In the movie when the politician and his wife are walking down the street, the wife gets closer to her husband when the young black men approach because she is afraid of them. She is a person that has probably not dealt with very