Fruitvale Station Analysis

In the film Fruitvale station which a 2013 film, depicts the last few hours of a young African American male by the name of Oscar Grant. The films show Oscar as a loving father and a respectful person to his family. On the day of Oscar’s death he is shown helping numerous people in the community by helping a woman figure out a recipe to helping a woman go to the restroom during the New year’s Eve festivities in his town. The film represents Oscar as someone who isn’t the norm, he unlike most African American fathers spends time with his girlfriend and his daughter. Oscar is almost represented as being a magical Negro in some instances in the film such as when he get a woman a recipe for a dish she is trying to make and when he helps the woman get into the bathroom.
However the main focus of this essay is to focus on the scene where Oscar has a run in with the police. He is riding on the train with some friends when he gets into a fight with someone from his past. The fight ensues when the train operator stops the train due to a fight and tells the participants to get off the train. The station police arrive and pull most of Oscar’s friends off the train. In the scene that follows after an officer gets back on the train and asks if anyone else was part of the fight. Oscar who is …show more content…
During the filming of the movie many things in the country were going on. This is post Trayvon Martin and early Michael Brown cases. So the tensions between officers and the African American community were very high. The film also shows the institutionalized racism plays a part in African American lives such as when the officer pulls Oscar grant off the train simply because he was black and must have thought that African Americans all know each other and that Oscar was linked to the fight somehow, even though he was linked to the fight the officers didn’t know how he was linked and assumed that he was due to skin