Racism Reaction Paper: Reacting To Racism In Three Films

Reacting to racism in three films
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Reacting to racism in three films
Racism is defined as a form of discrimination against an individual because the individual is of a different race. This is based on a conviction that the individual’s race is inferior. The individuals that perceive their race as superior do this because the position of their race in society is a dominant one. This position gives them power to take advantage of their dominance and exercise their biases. To properly define racism, we have to recognize the dominant position of one race, the power to take advantage of the said dominance and their perceived prejudices against other races. In this paper, I will review three films that have racism as a theme.
Valentine Road is a documentary film that focuses on events surrounding the killing of an eighth-grade student, Larry King, by his classmate in Oxnard, California in 2008 (Cunningham, 2013). The reasons for his death at the hands of his classmate was because of his crossdressing and sexual orientation. The documentary looks at the stories of both the deceased and his killer and tries to understand their viewpoints on what led to the fatal shooting. It does this through interviewing people in their lives to see the kind of lives they led. It also studies the reactions of those people like their fellow students, teachers and family members after the shooting. Who Killed Vincent Chin? is also another documentary film focusing on the story behind a horrific hate crime (Choy & Tajima-Pena, 1987). This film recounts the murder of a Chinese automotive engineer called Vincent Chin by an assembly line worker in 1982. The assembly line worker mistook Vincent for a Japanese and killed him with a baseball bat because he blamed him for the threat posed by competition of Japanese car manufacturers. The third film to be reviewed and compared is Fruitvale Station. This film is a biography of Oscar Grant III (Coogler, 2013). He was a resident of Bay Area who was shot dead by police at Fruitvale BART station at 22 years of age. This film looks at his last day alive on 31st December 2008.
In comparison and contrast, all three films are similar in a number of ways and also different in other ways. For starters, they all tell t...