Is This World Really Full of Hate?

Anthony tells Tony,

‘Man, look around you man. You couldn't find a whiter, safer or better lit part of this city right now. But yet this white woman sees two black guys who look like UCLA students strolling down the sidewalk, and her reaction is blind fear? I mean, look at us, dawg. Are we dressed like gangbangers? Huh? No. Do we look threatening? No. Fact. If anybody should be scared around here, it's us! We’re the only two black faces surrounded by a sea of over-caffeinated white people patrolled by the trigger-happy L.A.P.D. So you tell me. Why aren't we scared?’ (Haggis).

The two black men then steal a car from Los Angeles’s District Attorney and his wife. What I failed to include was what occurred before the quote. The District Attorney’s wife, upon seeing the two, turned herself to her husband in a protective manner.

The above is an excerpt from Paul Haggis’s 2004 Academy Award winning movie Crash.

Now imagine you knew what the wife did before you knew anything about what Anthony was about to say or do. Would you consider her racist? Or would you say she had every right to act the way she did? Remember though, Anthony didn’t do or say anything yet.

Most people would have said she was being racist, but after seeing the robbery, they would change their minds. Although her instincts were right, at the end of it all, she was being racist;

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period, no argument. Maybe she wasn’t trying to be racist though and she was just acting on “instinct” sub consciously, but what about the other characters? Take this quote by Ria after she gets into an accident with an Asian lady, “See I stop when I see long line of cars stopped in front of me. Maybe if you see over steering wheel you blake too” (Haggis). By making jokes about her height and the way she speaks the English language (blake instead of brake) she is definitely being racist. But, the definition we hold in our minds of what is racism and what isn’t, is too stern.

The etymology of the word racism originated in the time when Abe Lincoln was the president; when slavery was occurring in the US. Wikipedia states that “Merriam-Webster cites its origins in 1860s France as racisme”(Wikipedia). Racisme though was different from the “‘theories of race’”(Wikipedia) one hundred years prior. Shown by Pierre-Andrй Taguieff, racist was first defined as “‘the name given to the German national-socialists, designating, rather than the sole Nazi Party (NSDAP), the whole of the vцlkisch movement’” (Wikipedia) in the French Larousse Dictionary in 1932. As time continued forward after 1932, radical groups such as the KKK, the Nazi party, and currently Hezbollah, paved the path to the current day meaning of racism, “hatred or intolerance of another race or other races” (dictionary.com).

When living in a world as diverse as ours, with people preaching superiority over other races, it is easy to see why almost anything would be considered racist. Take the new season of the reality TV show “Survivor.” This seasons series divides the groups up by race. Race is such a touchy subject that “GM, Coca-Cola, Campbell Soup, Johnson & Johnson and Febreze ended their advertising on the series” (Stein). And Joel Stein puts it best, “‘Survivor: Cook Islands’ isn't trivializing race -- it's just not avoiding it like the rest of us. If there really were a group of

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people stranded on a deserted island, this is exactly how things would go down. Just like in jail” (Stein).

Due to the fact that Stein’s writing is a very scornful in a sense, the metaphor of jail somewhat goes with the ridicule of his article. And, although the article is funny, it is all truth; that is the irony in all of this. Making statements like Stein though isn’t racist, it’s the ignorant statements that are made which would be classified as racist. In fact, the reason that racism and racist exist is because of ignorance and a lack of respect for other cultures.

Take the Far East for example. People living in East Asia all have similar physical characteristics but each comes from a culture that is on the other side of the spectrum from another culture living 500 miles