Carrie Fink
3/6/13
Professor Wilson
Anthropology in Crash The movie Crash had a lot of different ethnocentrism in it. Many of the people in the movie were judging people on their beliefs instead of trying to understand them on their own level. Most of the people already had a perceived stenotype of how the other people act or were based on their skin color, race, or ethnicity. In the very beginning of the movie when the rich white couple walked past the two black guys standing out in the street. The one of the black guys standing on the street noticed that as soon as she walked past she put her jacket on. She didn’t say a word to either one of them she just walked by and made a gesture in a silent way. It is like article “Nice Girls Don’t Talk to Rastas”, she didn’t say a word to them because she thought that there was some border between them and that someone of her status shouldn’t talk to them because they were not up to her level (Spradley page 33). During the first screen of the movie when the woman and her father were trying to buy a gun from the store and he started talking to his daughter in his own native language and the store clerk started getting upset and told him to get out because he wasn’t talking the way Americans do. He told him that he wouldn’t sell a gun to anyone who didn’t know how to speak English which made the guy mad because he did know how to speak English and then he went on to tell the clerk how he was an American too just like him. They then started arguing and security came and brought him out the store. The whole idea was based on ethnocentrism which is the belief that are beliefs are right and true whereas others are wrong or misguided (Robbins page8). The store clerk wouldn’t give the guy a chance because he believed that the guy was wrong while he was right. He simply thought that his beliefs were right over the other guys and he was not willing to accept the fact that the guy was an American just like he was. Everyone in the movie based their attitude toward a person based on how they looked, talked, or where they came from. They all had this preconceived notion that they were bad people, or didn’t act right, or where all up to no good. Nobody gave anyone a chance to show them how they really were they all just had this doubt about them and they didn’t let anything change their mind about it. Everyone hated everyone else and that’s the way it stayed thought the movie. There were two black men in power in the movie. One was a detective and
