Theodice, Prejudice And Stereotypes In Save The Last Dance

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Save the Last Dance is a 2001 American romance that highlights the struggles of bias, prejudice, stereotypes and influence of cultures across race and ethnicities, that affects relationships and self-concept. Although the movie is a romance, this analysis will focus on multiple socio-psychological concepts. Three of these concepts are: paired distinctiveness, similar attraction, and informational influence are further explained through this film and applied in this paper.
This film focuses on a white female by the name of Sara entering southside Chicago after the death of her mother to live with her musician father. Sara steps into black culture. Completely unfamiliar to her surroundings as the seemingly only white person in her new high school, she befriends a black girl named Chenille and falls for her brother, Derek. Chenille guides Sara in how to assimilate into her culture with her looks and language. Derek teaches Sara how to dance hip-hop and incorporate it into Ballet a bridge to them falling in love.
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Paired distinctiveness is when two events stand out even more because the co-exist. To explain the paired distinctiveness stereotyping also needs to be explained. A Stereotype is a predisposed idea placed on a minority group that, in most cases, affects an individual negatively and are not always true. A stereotyped person or group means that “they” have certain characteristics that “we”believe belong to their identified group. “They” is used to identify the outgroup and in this case black people and “we” as the ingroup, white people. Stereotypes are a way of categorizing people. This concept is explained in Social Psychology as a way of “thinking about a person not as an individual, but as a member of a group, and projecting what (you think) you know about the group onto your expectations about that person” (Page

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