Week 17- Crash

This past week in sociology, we watched the movie, Crash. The storyline showed multiple different characters that were of different races and all of their stories ended up being connected to one another. They were connected by one binding force- race. As Sal said, the main character was just the idea of race and the movie depicted how racial discrimination and the concept of explicit race plays a role in our everyday lives, whether we like to think so or not. Explicit race/racism, which is the belief that ones own race is superior to others, and discrimination, which is acting upon ones own perceived notion of that particular race. In the movie, there were many examples of explicit racism, such as when the guy went into the health-insurance office and was upset over his plan and claimed that he could "find six more qualified white men" to replace an African-American woman's job. Sandra Bullock's character also was prejudiced towards the Mexican locksmith, believing that he would give the key to one of his "homies", and she then kicked him out of the house. This movie was basically the epitome of the existence of race and the toll that it takes in our society.

This movie brought up many interesting ideas that we have discussed in class. The issue of race as a social construct was a prevalent issue in the movie. Race of the characters was simply just assumes by others- there was no biological evidence that the one guy was black and the one girl was Chinese. Another idea I did not initially see was the concept of sociological imagination. This movie emphasized that we are all connected in some way and that we all play a small part in the bigger picture. By enforcing the idea of race and something that separates us, the characters in the movie thus did not nothing to try to help the end of racism, and were therefore sociologically unaware. This movie made me realize that as much as we like to think it doesn't, race does indeed play a huge role in our entire society and that we are affected by race, even if we are not racist ourself.