Crash

Today we started watching the movie Crash. The movie was written and directed by Paul Haggis in 2004. The film is highlighting racial contrasts in today’s Los Angeles. Today we watched the first half hour of the movie. During that time there were two situations where the same white woman expressed her prejudices against blacks/colored people.

The first scenario was when she walked down a street with her husband in the evening. She noticed two black men walking towards them and she immediately expressed her fear by tightly holding on to her husband. This offended the two young men and consequently they stole her and her husband´s car. In this scenario, her prejudice turned out to be correct, they were actually criminals. They did have guns. Even though i think that they might not have stolen her car if she hadn´t provoked them. This is however not always the case. Often prejudices are very wrong.

That same night she hired a man to change their locks, she was scared after the car robbery. But when she noticed that the man changing the locks was a black man, she loudly complained to her husband and demanded that they should change locks again the next day. This time her prejudices were completely wrong. The young man who changed the locks went home to his daughter, and showed us what to me seemed like a masterclass in parenting. He turned out to be a great, caring father, not a gang member like the judging woman had expected. 

I think what we can learn from this is that we should be careful with our prejudices. If we do have any, which I think many of us do, we should keep them to ourselves. Many times, people will get hurt. We can even provoke people to live up to our prejudices.