Portrayal Of The Issue Of Racism In Movies And Articles

Racism has always been an issue in the world. Today, I will connect racism with four different films, powerpoints, and articles. I will talk about four films which are Jim & Jane Crow, White Like Me, Chinese Exclusion Act, and The Abolitionist Part 1. The four powerpoints that I will speak about are chapter 2, chapter 3, chapter 4, and chapter 5 powerpoints. The four articles that I will discuss are Racial Hierarchy and the Global Black Experience of Racism, Racial Identity and Racial Treatment of Mexican Americans, Racism in India: Equality Constitutionalism and Lego-Institutional Response, and Who’s at the Bottom.

As we all know it, racism was a big issue in the past. We thought that we solved the issue of racism, but we haven’t. We tried our best to stop segregation, but we all know that people will be racist no matter what. In America, we tend to treat minorities worst. Whites believe that they’re supreme because of a concept that’s called white privilege. White privilege is the term that’s used when whites get treated better in a certain situation. In the film Jim & Jane Crow, we learned that there was this term that was called Jim Crow (The Strange Demise of Jim Crow). Jim Crow is a word that’s used for a black man. Jim Crow laws are based on white privilege as a result of the reconstruction area. During this time frame, many white people were scared of blacks taking away their job. They gave blacks no rights, and segregated blacks and whites. White people had better school, bathrooms, and were allowed to stay out late. Around the city, there were signs that prevented blacks from being out late. For example, Rosa Parks was this African American lady who was on the bus and she sat in the front. A white man wanted her seat, and the bus driver made her sit in the back. She refused, and the police eventually arrested her. If it was a white person, there would be no problem.

Fortunately, the law was declared unconstitutional by the fourteenth amendment. In the film of White Like Me, I learned that there are more black people in prison compared to the past and I believe that there’s a certain stereotype that lies within them (White Like Me, 2016). As I talked earlier, I discussed how there was segregation between blacks and whites. Now, we learned that it’s hard to change the way people think. Even though segregation stopped, we can’t change peoples mind. A lot of people know that minorities are treated the worst, but there’s nothing that we can do. We can try to voice out, but we’ve been trying to do that for years. There are just stereotypes of certain races which makes it inevitable because no matter what we do, there will always be people who think negatively. In the film Chinese Exclusion Act, I learned that this act started on May 6, 1882. The main purpose of the act was to stop the immigration of the Chinese laborers (Becoming American: The Chinese Experience, 2003).

Еhis was because the whites were scared of the Chinese taking over America and stealing their jobs. As we can tell, there was racism because of the whites accusing the Chinese. As a result, the act was created and the leaders of Huiguan created the Chinese Six Companies. They all spoke different dialects of Chinese and were from different regions, but they teamed up together to be called Chinese. The Chinese Exclusion Act ended in 1943. The Abolitionist Part 1, is a film that is about the leaders who made a change during this time era to stop slavery (The Abolitionists: Part 1, 2013). I learned that slaves did everything that the white masters told them to do. We can tell that white people have had the most power in America even in the past because everyone thought of them as highly. As I go back in the film, the slaves were mad and outraged of the way that they were treated. On August 1831, a group of white slaves went to a farmhouse, then killed many white people. They couldn’t take it anymore, and they knew that they couldn’t voice out their opinion because, at the time, their voices didn’t matter. Blacks were considered the bottom of society and were not treated as human. They were treated as objects where the white masters can play with.

I really enjoyed reading Chapter 2 because I like learning the idea of white privilege because it’s something that most of us know (Recognizing Race and Ethnicity: Power, Privilege, and Inequality, 2014). White privilege is a certain name where you get benefits for being a light skin person. In the crime class, I took last quarter, I learned that a white man with a criminal record has a better chance of obtaining a job than a black man with no record. This shows that white people are seen as better. This really made me mad because all society cares about is race and they don’t look at the qualities of a person. There are situations where black people would get pulled over and given a fine while white people get away with it because of their skin tone. In Chapter 3 powerpoint, there was this term that made a huge impression on me (Recognizing Race and Ethnicity: Power, Privilege, and Inequality, 2014). It’s called a call-out culture. A lot of people these days are racism if we call them out when they can know about what they did wrong and they might be ashamed of their actions. Calling out is a good thing if you’re doing it for a certain purpose. If you’re using it to defend someone, people being racism, or people bullying one another than you’re doing a good thing. If you’re doing it to publicly humiliate them for no reason, then it’s not meant for being used.

Chapter 4, Harriet Tubman was brought up (Recognizing Race and Ethnicity: Power, Privilege, and Inequality, 2014). Harriet Tubman is a very important role in the Civil War, she was the first woman who led an expedition. She was in charge of leading over 700 slaves through the Combahee River Raid. She created the Underground railroad and had over 13 trips to free the slaves of their white masters. She had a very important role in society, and she risked her life-saving others because she wanted them to be free because they didn’t deserve to be treated so poorly. In Chapter 5 powerpoint, lynching is brought up (Recognizing Race and Ethnicity: Power, Privilege, and Inequality, 2014).

Over 2805 people have been lynched from the 1880s to 1930s in the southern states. Many of those who were lynched were African American. Lynching is known as cruel and inhuman because a lot of people were lost. Many of these people didn’t even commit a crime, but it was due to one small action that made a white person mad. For example, talking back to a white person or not cooperating with them. Therefore, this person was sentenced to death. There was this advocate that’s named Monroe Nathan Work. Monroe wanted to make c change therefore he became an advocator to tell people about the lives that were lost, what race was targeted, and how they were killed. Many of these people who were lynched were killed by a shot to their head or dragged by a car. The people who were lynched to death in the South happened within a group of people or known as a mob in the public. When these people were tortured to death, the white people didn’t feel guilty at all and it kind of shows that they were evil. In their defense, white people thought that lynching was a good thing because of their sadistic mind.

In Racial Hierarchy and the Global Black Experience of Racism article, I found out that black immigrants get worse economic than white people which doesn’t supreme me at all because since white people are treated better, they get better benefits (Racial Hierarchy and the Global Black Experience of Racism, 2017). This reminds me of how men and women are in society. We all know that men get paid better than women because society believes that men are above women. Women are considered weaker than men. In the article, I learned that in every two days, a black person is either searched, stopped, or shot by the police. This is because the police are suspicious of them because of their skin color.

Sometimes a black person reaches for something and the police think that the black person is going to bring out a gun. This is pure racism and discrimination, but we can’t do anything about it. In Racial Identity and Racial Treatment of Mexican Americans, Mexican Americans were considered as one race and also as whites before (Racial Identity and Racial Treatment of Mexican Americans, 2012). They first came to America in the mid ninteenth century, but the Census never counted them in until 1930. A fact that I learned from the article is that being a Mexican college graduate gives you a higher chance to get discriminated than a person who never attended college. I think it’s because when Mexicans go to college, they see a lot of racist people and I learned that it’s a higher chance to get discriminated when they come in contact with a white person.

In India’s most popular city of New Delhi, we learned that over 67% of Indians don’t feel safe there and half of them receive some sort of discrimination. When people especially North East Indians come to New Delhi, they receive a lot of hate. This shocked me because there is racism between their races just because some of them come from different regions. Not only is there racism in India, but there is racism, in Australia, the UK, Canada, and the US. In Who’s at that Bottom By Song, African Americans have a different racial hierarchy and it comprises of segregation and capital punishment (Who’s at the Bottom About Racial Hierarchy, 2004). Going in depth, I do know that this is true because black people get treated the worst in society due to people being racist. There are a lot of unwrongful deaths due to racism and there is nothing we can do to prevent it from happening. Even though Latinos and African Americans don’t get good treatment, we learned that Latinos are more discriminated in school but they’re more financially stable then African Americans because of how Latinos get paid better.

If I’m going, to be honest, I wasn’t that surprised because I knew that white privilege existed and they’ll always be treated the best. I already learned that white people were always given better treatment and today they still are. Many people look up to whites, and many Asians want to make themselves white and whenever they turn dark, they hate it. We can never change the way society thinks, but I believe that we should accept each other because we’re all human in the end. Why should we judge one another based on our skin color, but what matters on is what we have on the inside. We shouldn’t spread hate, but we should spread love to one another because that’s what we need.