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Recommended: Social class and race
In the blockbuster movie The Blind Side, director John Lee Hancock brings to light an emotionally charged and compelling story that describes how a young African American teenager perseveres through the trials, tribulations and hardships that surround his childhood. The themes of class, poverty, and also the love and nurturing of family encapsulate the film mainly through the relationship that Mrs. Tuohy and Michael Oher build during the entirety of the movie. This analysis will bring together these themes with sociological ideas seen throughout the course. Michael Oher is a “lost” teen from Memphis who is extremely soft spoken despite his enormous physical stature. The term “gentle giant” could not be more accurate in his case. Throughout …show more content…
Ever since he was born he has been at an extremely low poverty level because of his surroundings, coupled with being raised by a single mom who tried her best but ultimately failed her children. The story behind the numbers video: “Which families are in poverty?” in our coursework highlights the issue of poverty among single parent families, which is applicable to The Blind Side. It is pretty noticeable throughout the entire movie that Michael’s economic position is extremely poor. After basketball games he walks around the bleachers to collect the fans’ leftover popcorn so that he can have something to eat at night for dinner. Also, in order to wash his clothes he must wait until somebody at the coin laundry building comes in to pay for a wash so that he can sneak his clothes in there too. Michael’s poverty has an extremely damaging effect on all other aspects of his life because of how difficult everyday life situations are for him. It also affects his level of education since that is not a priority in his family of …show more content…
This movie has a lot of credibility in my eyes because it is based of a true story. The course material that we have is accurately depicted in the film because it shows real life examples that are often seen in lower income families. By showing how Michael Oher came from a broken household that was constantly berated with negative influence, The Blind Side shows how important class, poverty, and the nurturing love of a family is for somebody’s
Being bold is crucial when exemplifying heroism. Leigh Anne Tuohy steps out of her comfort zone multiple times in the movie The Blind Side to positively affect Michael Oher. Michael Oher is a homeless African American teenager who grew up in the projects around Memphis, TN. Micheal comes from a drug centered and broken family, which lead him to be controlled by Family Services. SJ Tuohy, the son of Leigh Anne, formed the first relationship with Micheal when they bonded over their grade school habits. One
Media such as movies, video games and television, in general, are all created to support some form of social context. This helps with generating popularity because people are able to relate to the form of media. In Greg Smith’s book What Media Classes Really Want to Discuss, he describes 6 different representational strategies that justifies people’s way of thinking. The trope that I will be amplifying is the white savior tactic. In addition, I will connect this strategy to the movie The Blind Side. There are clear examples throughout the film where racism and low-income cultures exist in which the white family is there to help. The Tuohy family from the movie “The Blind Side” serves as the white savior for the progression of Michael
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 Blind Side is a heartwarming and compelling story of the NFL player Michael Oher, who is adopted into a family that is a significantly higher social class than he. The story is a true account of a boy that went from rags to riches and depicts eloquently the social stratification in the United States.
The movie The Blind Side is about a homeless young man named Michael Oher, who was from one the worst
In this paper will be talking about the three sociological perspectives as it pertains to the fraternities and sororities in today’s world. I have chosen this topic because it can be easily understood in all three perspectives.
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...
Although it is ostensibly a story about a black man, Michael Oher, no one could claim the movie is about the character of Michael. That would be a difficult story for Hollywood to tell, while the story of white people doing charity by helping the so very destitute uneducated black people is an easy story to tell. As the Dallas Observer puts it, "Blind Side the movie peddles the most insidious kind of racism, one in which whiteys are virtuous saviors, coming to the rescue of blacks who become superfluous in narratives that are supposed to be about them." Michael is never a fully realized character. Many of his actions make little sense, and we never see things through his perspective or understand his emotions. Throughout, he's treated as a child, not just an under-educated teen. His white tutor tries to scare him off from going to Tennessee by telling him a ghost story. He doesn't understand football until Leigh Anne explains it in dumbed-down metaphors. Really? Is this what Michael Oher is like? Sandra Bullock won an Oscar for mirroring Leigh Anne Tuohy drawl for drawl, but did anyone even try to represent Michael Oher believably? In addition to this infantalized portrayal of what should be the main character, we're treated to a revealing look at the white vision of blackness. We get scenes of Michael's crack addict mother, of gang-bangers drinking 40s, of newspaper headlines of kids killed in
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
...help. The Blindside had similar characteristics of white privilege, the Sandra Bullock character appeared to be headstrong, passionate, capable, and effective while Michael Oher was perceived as emotionally stunted, and unable of helping himself. The White Savior syndrome as we have seen has the tendency to render people of colour lacking the capacity to seek change, and erasing their historical agency (Cammarota, 2011). Any progress or success is from the aid of a white individual, which suggests that escaping poverty, or ignorance, is thanks to the intelligence of the White Savior. Freire calls this “false Generosity” (1998) a white person may provide help to a person of colour yet help comes in the form of saving, the emphasis on saving instead of transforming fails to acknowledge the oppressive structure and in turn maintains white supremacy. (Cammarota, 2011).
the point of view of Michael. We, as the audience, are being told the story through Michael’s
The Blind Side is a film that follows the life of Michael Oher, an underprivileged high school football player that is supported by an upper class family, the Tuohys, and taken into their home. They provide him with shelter and a bed that he says he has never had. As the Tuohys are driving down the street one night, they see Michael walking alone in the cold. Mrs. Tuohy tells her husband to stop the car and she lets Michael inside. The couple discusses later that night about whether it was a good idea or not to allow Michael into their home. They ultimately decide that they are doing what is best for him and they can sacrifice a little bit of their life to help Michael. They support him in school, on the football field, and when he is
In the film The Blind Side (2009), the society is depicted into very classist categories. There is a clear distinction between the rich and the poor, as it can be seen when comparing Michael to MJ and Collins. Looking distinctly at their education, a difference in quality based on their class is very clear. When Coach Cotton discusses Michael’s transition into the elite school he states, “he’s a brave kid for wanting to come here, for wanting a quality education, an education denied to him by the poor quality of school he attended” (2009). Right from the beginning of the film, this sets the tone of the difference between the upper and lower class and establishes the way the society is categorized. Through
The strong and weak points in The Blind Side are when Michael over comes obstacles over and over without to much thought or effort. The Strong point is The Blind Side is the strong independent and motivated foster family and how they support Big Mike and push him to be better and more intelligent than he ever was. The Blind side does have a strong off put in the way the information is put in sequence and is illustrated, and also the way the body of The Blind Side is interpreted. The front cover is very suiting and is very well thought of for the way it is told. The author set a goal to touch others and teach others how something little can affect so many people. But also to tell the story of a young black teenager and the hardships he went through to make it in life. The author did accomplish his goal because he did touch other peoples hearts and opened many minds, and helped Big Mike move on from his past and accepting and forgiving his biological
Throughout ‘the blind side’ some of Michael’s strengths are he is very caring when it came to his new family. He had the gift to forget his terrible childhood of being taken away from his mother numerous times because of alcohol and drug abuse. Self defence wend SJ and himself were in the car crash and he put his arm across to stop the air bag from seriously hurting SJ because he was too young to sit in the front seat.