Crash

This week in sociology, we watched a movie called "Crash." This movie was about many individuals that dealt with racial issues. We learned two new concepts, and they are implicit racism and explicit racism. Implicit racism is when a person is racist but they don't know that they are. It deals with a more subconscious part of the person. Explicit racism is when a person is just full out racist and they are aware of it. During this movie, there were many examples of people who were implicitly and explicitly racist. Form example, Sandra bullock's character was explicitly racist. She told her husband that she wanted another person to come in and fix their lock because she feared that the Mexican man fixing it would break into her house. The only reason she feared him was because he was Mexican and he had tattoos. Furthermore, an example of a character in the movie, "crash," who was implicitly racist was Tom, who was the blonde police officer. Tom was implicitly racist because he wasn't aware that he was because he claimed that he didn't have anything against black people. In fact, he even seemed in many scenes that he wasn't racist. However, at the end of the movie, he ended up shooting Peter, who was black, and it was a result of a racial stereotype that society had shaped us into believing. Since Peter was black, people automatically assume that when he was reaching into his pocket, in Tom's car, he was reaching for a gun. However, after Tom shot Peter, we realized that Peter was only reaching for a little statue that was identical to Tom's statue in his car.