Social Issues In The Movie Crash

In the film, “Crash”, the audience follows the separate but interwoven paths of multiple racially and socially diverse groups of people. Throughout the film, each of the characters exhibit the influence of their environment and how easily change can be triggered in a person depending on what situations life throws at them. In everyday life, everyone is faced with challenges and the way that a person handles those challenges truly defines them as a person.
In any society, humans tend to react to certain situations in an ignorant way because of the fallacies that society feeds them. Due to society's negative connotation of black men, Jean Cabot, Sandra Bullock’s character, moves closer to her husband and clutches his arm when she sees two black men about to pass her on the street. Her automatic reaction was to believe that they were going to harm her …show more content…
Several of the characters experience racism in the film. For instance, Christine and Cameron Thayer, Thadie Newton’s and Terrance Howard’s characters, are treated poorly because of their skin color by Officer Ryan. During the same encounter, Officer Ryan sexually harasses Christine Thayer and the two other men, Cameron and Officer Hanson, say nothing to stop what is happening to her. Det. Graham Waters, Don Cheadle’s character, is also blatantly ignorant towards Ria, Jennifer Esposito’s character, by classifying her as the wrong ethnicity and then not caring at all when she corrected him. Jean Cabot is also outwardly ignorant multiple times throughout the film. As mentioned previously, she reacted negatively whilst passing two black men when she was on the street with her husband. She was also racist when she assumed that Daniel, Michael Pena’s character, was going to make copies of her keys and distribute them to his “amigos” to rob her because of his ethnicity and outer appearance of tattoos, making her assume he was a gang