Culture and Underlying Sociological Assumptions

Another sociological term demonstrated in Crash is the theory of micro-aggression. Microaggressions would be defined as "Microaggressions are subtle insults (verbal, nonverbal, and/or visual) directed toward people of color, often automatically or unconsciously." While the individual effects of these particular instances may be small, the cumulative effects can be devastating. In Crash, I believe the character that most exemplifies this is the film director. Examples of these subtle insults would be things such as people telling him that he just isn't really black to them or the comments about language on the set of the movie. He advises him to tell the black character to make his language "more black." These are subtle but insults nonetheless. These kinds of comments, combined with the powerlessness he feels when his wife is sexually assaulted lead to the blow-up where he almost gets himself killed. He has endured these subtle forms of racism his whole life, and he reaches a breaking point where he just isn't going to take it

The last concept that is displayed in Crash is the sociological concept of ethnocentrism. This means that we judge other cultures by the standards of our own. Not only that, but we also believe that our own culture is superior to everyone else's. Graham and his Latina girlfriend fight and he pokes fun at her culture by calling her Mexican even though she isn't. Asian Americans speech patterns are made fun of, like the term "blaking" for braking. These characters don't celebrate or even accept the characteristics of other cultures. They only mock them, assuming the superiority of their own culture. They fail to try to understand one another through ethnocentrism. Officer Ryan makes fun of the name Shaniqua, a more common name of African American culture.

All in all, Crash is a movie full of sociological concepts. Many more could be analyzed in this paper, but the focus was on only these three. Crash is a movie that makes us both laugh