Race Theory In Mean Girls

The Critical Race Theory states “people have intersecting identities.” Two of those identities are gender and race. In Marilyn Frye’s article “Oppression” she said, “the experience of oppressed people is that the living of one’s life is confined and shaped by forces and barriers which are not accidental or occasional” (Frye). Through looking at various resources, we will discuss how the identities of race and gender have led to people living their lives under a blanket of oppression and how these identities interact with society.
The movie Mean Girls is just one resource used to discuss gender. In the movie, Cady says “calling somebody else fat won’t make you any skinnier. Calling someone stupid doesn’t make you any smarter” (Mean Girls). Mean …show more content…
Lee Daniels’ The Butler is one such example of the way people have acted towards and viewed people of color in America. In essence, this film is trying to make sense of America’s racial history. In the movie, there is an African-American man who grew up as a sharecropper’s son and ended up as a butler for the White House. While he focuses more on a passive reaction to the treatment he receives, his son focuses more on actively resisting the way he is treated, through participating in the Civil Rights Movement. Each man in the story shows a different side of the history of African-American’s in the United States. There is a theory called Oppositional Culture Theory that states that when people are oppressed they turn to their culture to gain strength. In doing so, they will often turn to kinship networks, civil rights movements, and creating cultural or artistic expressions. This movie further exemplifies this theory through how it portrays how the son in the movie turned towards the Civil Rights Movement in order to fight back against his oppressors. Throughout history, the oppressors of people of color have used outright racism but they have also used prejudice to create a system of disadvantages that is based on race. As James Loewen says in his article, “Gone With the Wind: The Invisibility of Racism in American History Books,” “race is the sharpest and deepest division in American life”(Loewen). And so, racism and prejudice affects people within every societal institution-the media, the courts, and the schools. One reason that people of color faced experiences like those shown in The Butler is the fact that there is the belief that there should be a disparity between races because one group or race is considered to be “better” than others. This belief is more commonly referred to as white privilege. Loewen states that the concept of white privilege was built on the “idea that it is appropriate, even “natural,” for whites to be on top,