Textual Analysis about Stereotype In Crash I think this movie is the best movie to demonstrate stereotype. In this movie, everyone is stereotyped and everyone stereotypes others. This movie portrayed people of different races and present how people from different cultures stereotype others. The first concept that I want to illustrate is “out group homogeneity”. “Out group homogeneity” means that people tend to see outgroups less diverse than themselves whereas they view themselves as unique and individual. Outgroup members are viewed as highly similar.
The ingroup members tend to attribute that the outgroup members have the same characteristics and personalities. The outgroup homogeneity effect was observed in wide and diverse groups, which contains national, religious, political and age groups. For example, the black guy who robbed the car hit an Asian man and he called him “Chinaman”. Is Chinese the representation of Asian? In this movie, anytime he saw Asian, he called them “Chinaman”. However in the following story, I know that the Asian man is actually Korean.
This example indicates that people tend to think that all the Asians are the same and usually they are recognized as Chinese. The black guy sees Asians less diverse than his group. The second concept is “illusory correlation principle”. Hamilton and Gifford (1976) indicate that when a negative behavior was performed by a group member, even though this behavior is just performed by one person of that group, the outgroup members still make a connection with the whole group. A single instance of unusual behavior by a member of a group is sufficient to shape an association between group and behavior.
There is a very good example about that. After two black guys robbed the white woman, she thought that all of the black people were dangerous. She couldn’t trust the black guy who helped her fix her lock because she thought that he might break into her house and hurt her. After the bad thing happend, she thought everyone in the black group was bad. The third concept is “stereotype threat”. The study done by Steele and Aronson (1995) shows that some members of stereotyped groups actually start to believe the stereotype.
This phenomenon was called “stereotype threat”. “Stereotype threat” occurs when we sense that some aspect of ourselves seems to match the stereotype, making it appear valid. In this movie, when the two black guys walk on the street and talk about stereotype, one said that the waitress had the stereotype that black people don’t tip. However, when his partner asks if he tipped, he said “no”. Even though he knows what the stereotype is, he still does the same thing. The forth concept is “self fulfilling prophecies”. Self fulfilling prophecies” means that a dominant group may set obstacles to another group, making it hard for members from a stereotyped group to perform differently from their stereotype (Schaefer). For example, members from a stereotyped group might find it difficult to get a high salary or promotion, which enhance their stereotype about being low-paid and having low positions in their jobs (Neuliep, 2009). For instance, when the television director shooting a story about a black character, his fellow said “have you noticed he’s talking a lot less black lately? And his co-worker required him to reshoot it. They had a chance to change people’s stereotype about their group, but the dominant group want to maintain those stereotypes. They think that black people should speak as stereotypically “black”. If they do not, they assume they are wrong. That makes it more difficult for black people to change their stereotypes. Stereotyping is applying an attribute to a group of people and it is automatic. Almost everyone in this movie stereotypes others.
The white woman stereotypes that “the guy with the shaved head, the pants around his ass, the prison tattoo” is a gang member. The black guy thinks that all Asian looking people are “Chinaman”. However, to be prejudice means that a person does not like a group of people based on personal or social ideals. It is more about “do not like some group”. In the movie, when the Iranian father wanted to buy the gun, the shop man showed that he doesn’t like him very much. I think there are two prejudices. Firstly, after 9/11, a lot of people have strong prejudice about people from the Middle East.
As a person from the Middle East, people have prejudice towards him. Secondly, the shop man has prejudice about people who can’t speak English well. After the father left the store, the shop man used a better tone with his daughter because he knew that she was born in the US. There are a lot of scenes about ethnocentrism and racism. Ethnocentrism and racism are different. Ethnocentrism is the tendency to believe that one’s ethnic or cultural group is centrally important, and that all other groups are measured in relation to one’s own.
In the beginning of the movie, when the white woman hit the Asian woman’s car, she said, “How shocked I am to be hit by an Asian driver! ” She thinks that she is right because she as strong ethnocentrism that her ethnic group is better than the Asian group so she must be right and the Asian woman is wrong. Racism is the belief that race is a primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race. In this movie, the calling of “Chinaman” is a strong example of racism. It is as similar to saying Negro.
Also, when LAPD Officer John Ryan speaks with an HMO administrator about his father’s medical ailment, he made racist comments that “I can’t look at you without thinking about the five or six more qualified white men who didn’t get your job. ” This movie not only told a story about stereotype and racism but also about human nature and how we treat people from different culture and how we deal with intercultural communication. People from different ethnic groups have different languages and cultures and that’s why intercultural communication is so important.
Seeing people from different cultures fairly is one of the most important things in intercultural communication. Reference Hamilton, D. L. , ; Gifford, R. K. (1976). “Illusory Correlation in Interpersonal Perception: A Cognitive Basis of Stereotypic Judgments,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 12, 392-407 Steele, C. M. , ; Aronson, J. (1995). “Stereotype Threat and the Intellectual Persormance of African Americans,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 797-811 Schaefer, Racial and Ethnic Groups Neuliep, J. W. (2009). Intercultural Communication, a context approach (4th ed. , pp. 163-171). Los Angeles: SAGE.
