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Discrimination in the world today essay
Comparative study of religion
Discrimination in the world today essay
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Today’s society is brimming with discrimination, violence and prejudice between races and cultures. The critically acclaimed drama, Gran Torino does an exceptional job in tackling these issues head on. Clint Eastwood as Walt Kowalski, is angered by the ongoing cultural changes throughout his neighbourhood. However, as Walt develops a strong relationship with a Hmong family, he recognizes the importance of acceptance in society, while overall enhancing his character development. Through Clint Eastwood’s film, the viewer is able to trace Walt’s character development in order to learn valuable lessons and create a new perspective on appreciating differences as this class embarks on the study of world religions.
In the beginning of the film, Walt is an old-fashioned elderly man who is very disconnected from his family. He is also a bitter, racist, blunt and refuses to adjust to the new immigrant-dominated
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In today’s society some people are still judged for their race, colour, gender etc. In spite of this, it is important for people to form relationships that surpass cultural indifference. This is proof in Thao and Walt’s relationship in Gran Torino . It is important for individuals to look past their own prejudices and realize we are all a part of the one race, the human race. In addition, Walt sacrificed his life for the safety of Thao and Sue. This Christ-like action teaches people about love and sacrifice. Likewise, it is important for people to put others before themselves. Furthermore, this movie discusses the detrimental impacts of war. Walt’s prejudice was blinded by the painful memories of war. In everyday life, many people experience hardship and grief which can alter their opinion on world cultures. In order to get over this prejudice, individuals must face their hardships head-on, just as Walt was able to. These lessons can, and should be carried out in daily
This film tries to show that these young people are under influents of American movies and culture. They don’t really obey their parents, because they’re blaming their parents for anything that happened during the world wars. But at the same time the movie doesn’t try to blame everything on them. It wants to show that with pushing the young kid too far, nothing is going to get fix.
The first social issue portrayed through the film is racial inequality. The audience witnesses the inequality in the film when justice is not properly served to the police officer who executed Oscar Grant. As shown through the film, the ind...
The film observes and analyzes the origins and consequences of more than one-hundred years of bigotry upon the ex-slaved society in the U.S. Even though so many years have passed since the end of slavery, emancipation, reconstruction and the civil rights movement, some of the choice terms prejudiced still engraved in the U.S society. When I see such images on the movie screen, it is still hard, even f...
For this assignment, I decided to watch “Crash”, a movie set in the streets of Los Angeles California and that shows the lives of various individuals with different cultural backgrounds. The movie starts with the scene of a car crash between an Asian woman and a couple of detectives near the sight of a murder, as the African American detective Graham Waters walks around the scene he stops because he saw something that shocked him, and from there a flashback begins. The first relevant scene shows, Anthony and Peter, two African Americans individuals walking down the street talking about racial discrimination. As they talk a couple passes by them and the two decide to steal their car. This causes a chain of events affecting the lives of many
Although there were many concepts that were present within the movie, I choose to focus on two that I thought to be most important. The first is the realistic conflict theory. Our textbook defines this as, “the view that prejudice...
The White Savior Complex is a damaging subconscious underlay of the Hollywood system, and more broadly all of western society. It is used to further separate the notions of “us” and “other” by creating a firm separation fueled by self-righteousness, and a sense of entitlement. Hollywood attempts to address race relations, but fails because of this trope. Kingsle, from the article “Does My Hero Look White In This?” described that both racism and colonialism are acknowledged, but not without reassuring that not only were white people against the system of racist power dynamics, but also were actively fighting against it in leadership roles (2013). In the remainder of my essay I will be commenting on many modern films and their use on this trope, and why subscribing to this filmmaking strategy is problematic.
As a fan of cinema, I was excited to do this project on what I had remembered as a touching portrait of racism in our modern society. Writer/Director Paul Haggis deliberately depicts his characters in Crash within the context of many typical ethnic stereotypes that exist in our world today -- a "gangbanger" Latino with a shaved head and tattoos, an upper-class white woman who is discomforted by the sight of two young Black kids, and so on -- and causes them to rethink their own prejudices during their "crash moment" when they realize the racism that exists within themselves. This movie does provoke a dialogue on race that, according to author and journalist Jeff Chang, "has been anathema to Hollywood after 9/11. " During the first viewing of this movie, the emotionally charged themes of prejudice and racism are easy to get caught up in. (125) Privilege is inclined to white males through every facet of our everyday lives that inconspicuously creates racism through classism.
While watching movies, have you ever noticed that the villains in almost every single Hollywood film are of Middle Eastern or European descent? In a reoccurring theme of Hollywood, the villains in these films are almost always foreigners or people of color. This is a stereotype. On the other side of the spectrum, we often see that the heroes of these films are most often than not white males. This is another stereotype. Within the last few years, we’ve seen actors such as Will Smith, Morgan Freeman, and Zoe Saldana take the lead roles, so it can’t be said that there are no non-white heroes, but there certainly isn’t many. Hollywood action movies, moreover than other genres, are typically loaded with an abundance of stereotypes. The way these movies are composed and structured can tell us a great deal about the views held within the American psyche and who holds the social power. The harsh reality is that the media ultimately sets the tone for societal standards, moralities, and images of our culture. Many consumers of media have never encountered some of the minorities or people of color shown on screen, so they subsequently depend on the media and wholeheartedly believe that the degrading stereotypes represented on the big screen are based on fact and not fiction. Mary Beltran said it best when she stated in her “Fast and Bilingual: Fast & Furious and the Latinization of Racelessness” article, “ultimately, Fast & Furious mobilizes notions of race in contradictory ways. It reinforces Hollywood traditions of white centrism, reinforcing notions of white male master while also dramatizing the figurative borders crossed daily by culturally competent global youth – both Latino and non-Latino” (77). This paper will specifically look...
The issue of gender in Grain Torino portrays gender through the characters of Walt Kowalski as the male dominate figure and Theo as a feminine figure. This symbolizes the attributes that Theo is a form of representation that is a class of a fixed female figure rather than a powerful dominant male. This draws on the ideologies of Walt‘s white American culture versus Theo’s Hmong culture. This is clearly exposed in the sequence when Walt finally enters into Theo’s home, where there are numerous people form the Hmong society are feasting. As Walt travels through the house he is exposed to the lack...
Gran Torino is a suspense film directed by Clint Eastwood, which portrays the relationship between a 78-year-old Koran war veteran and his neighbors who are from Laos. The main character, Walt is a racist who still has memories from the horrors of war and has a dislike for anyone, including his own family. After his young neighbor Thao is coerced by his cousin’s gang into stealing Walt’s prized Gran Torino, a unusual relationship forms between the pair. Walt starts to respect Thao and his culture while fulfilling a fatherly role that Thao is lacking. Eventually, Walt has to confront the gang knowing that the confrontation will end in his death. Apart from the stereotypical, get off my lawn quote, this film depicts the relationship of family concerning the care for older adults, the struggle with despair and meaning later in life, and the morality of a good death. This paper will address each of these themes.
Clint Eastwood’s film “Gran Torino” traces the end of the life of Walt Kowalski. He has recently gone through a lot – the death of his beloved wife, his distant relationship with his son, his emotional scars from the Korean War and his bad health. All these things stop him from living a proper life. He doesn’t care about himself much – he smokes even though he is sick, he doesn’t eat a lot, he refuses to confess even though that was his wife’s last wish. However, all this changes when he meets the Hmong Family that lives next door. At the beginning he detests them because of their similarity to the Koreans, but later, as he gets to know them, they become the family that he was never able to have. The story traces the psychological changes in Walt’s character due to his unusual bond with the Hmong family, which changes are one of the main strengths of the film.
This movie portrays a wealth of cultural diversity where resistance, prejudice, and stereotype are depicted in the main character; Walt. As Walt’s world changes, his neighborhood is also changing. His wife passes away, his relationship with his children is distant, and the memory of his years at war has destroyed his capability to enjoy life. Unexpectedly, he builds a bond with children of Hmong culture. He is faced with destructive prejudice that consumes his neighborhoods gang
Machuco, Antonio. "Violence and Truth in Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino." Anthropoetics. 16.2 (2011): n. page. Web. 23 Feb. 2012.
When Walt gets sick and has to go back to the doctor's office, he finds out there is a new doctor he has to see. It is a woman, she is wealthy, educated, and not American which are all things Walt does not prefer. Throughout the film viewers are able to distinguish the different structures of class and the issues that arise with
“We fight each other for territory; we kill each other over race, pride, and respect. We fight for what is ours. They think they’re winning by jumping me now, but soon they’re all going down, war has been declared.” Abuse, Pain, Violence, Racism and Hate fill the streets of Long Beach, California. Asians, Blacks, Whites and Hispanics filled Wilson High School; these students from different ethnic backgrounds faced gang problems from day to night. This movie contains five messages: people shouldn’t be judgmental because being open-minded allows people to know others, having compassion for a person can help people change their views in life, being a racist can only create hate, having the power of the human will/goodness to benefit humanity will cause a person to succeed at any cost and becoming educated helps bring out the intelligence of people.