Race And Terror Sparknotes

The documentary “Race and Terror”, by VICE news documents the events that happened during the Charlottesville rallies, and the protestors’ views on the results of the protest. Throughout the film, Vice news portrayed obedience, violence, and authority shown by white nationalist, alt-righters, and neo-nazis in order to explore human identities. The documentary relates to the first two units that we have learned in our psychology course, more specifically prejudice, empathy gap, morality, and cognitive dissonance.
Throughout the documentary, authority is seen differently from both sides. The white nationalist believed they were the authority, they had brought their own militia with their loaded assault rifles, camouflage, combat boots and helmets and the protesters showed that their authority was the police. The white nationalist authority was being violent, and since people want conformity, they start acting like the rest of the group. This can also be seen as obedience because they followed their
Firstly for the white nationalist side, the preconceived notion they had towards the protestors was “this city is run by jewish communist and criminal n******,”. These notions came from stereotypes, and prejudice from a very young age taught by the environment they grew up in. Dogmatism was used a lot during Christopher Cantwell’s arguments, when he explains the car going through the crowd he completely ignores the reporter’s comments on other people’s opinion. Morality was demonstrated by the counter protesters, after the car went through the crowd of protestors. The Unite the Right protesters showed evidence that they had an empathy gap towards the protesters who got hurt during the rallies, by saying it was a win for them because the other protestors got hurt and one died. They also said that they were ready to attack if something were to