Crash Movie Review

Nicolas Mercadante

SOC 1000*01

Professor Kramer

April 28, 2017

The movie Crash is a movie full of prejudice against different racial issues in the world today. The opening scene involves a Latino woman and an Asian woman getting into a car accident. The first words that come out of the Asian woman’s mouth were,“ Mexican women don’t know how to drive”. This is the start to a movie full of examples of today’s racial notions. A problem in our society today is racism. In Sociology, there are views of hierarchy and chances of life. For example, a white male is found to get a job opening more likely then a black female. In the next scene of this movie, a Persian man and his daughter go into a gun shop to buy a gun. Farhad, the Persian man, is the owner of a convenience store and has recently been having issues with people stealing from his store. Not that he would actually shoot someone, it would just be used to threaten the thief and have them leave the store empty handed. As a White man is the store owner of the gun shop, he tells the “Muslim” man to get out of his store for his “kind” fly planes into his country and destroy buildings. This is a reference to September 11, 2001, when plane hijackers attacked the Twin Towers. Also, this is an example of stereotyping.

In the movie Crash, stereotyping takes up a huge part of the movie. The sociological perspective I’d like to talk about now is Race and Ethnicity, emphasizing on stereotyping, discrimination and prejudice. The common theme of the movie happens to be stereotyping. In one scene, a white couple was getting nervous walking down a street next to black men. As the couple passes the Black men, the wife of the White couple grasps her husband’s arm in fear and nervousness. This is an example of Thomas Theorem in Sociology. Thomas Theorem is basically a theorem that tells us if we believe situations to be real, they are real in their consequences. As a result, the black men get offended and act against the white couple because this is what they thought of them to be true. They weren’t thinking about stealing their car, but since the wife acted in such a way, they ended up doing it anyway. When the husband and wife get home, they immediately had the locks changed on all the doors in the house. When the wife sees that the locksmith is a Pilipino man with tattoos and his pants are sagged under is rear, she assumes he’s a gang member. She refers to the locksmith as a “gang-banger” and isn’t quiet about it. The wife screams at her husband to have him change the locks in the morning because the “gang-banger” changing the locks in the house is going to go to all his gang members and sell the house key. In fact, the locksmith happens to be a very nice man, with a daughter and gets very insulted by the way she was talking about him. Although she was frightened about having her car stolen from her and her husband, she should not stereotype every race that isn’t white like she is.