Race/Crash

This week in sociology we discussed race. Race is an extremly complex idea that we have created in order to label people. To go along with our lessons, we watched the movie Crash. In this movie, there are several main characters, some white, some black, some asian, some mexican, and some persian. All of these characters are intertwined in some way. The main idea of the film is that people tend to be rascist wheather it is consious or subconsious. In the movie, some people were openly rascist and admitted to feeling this way, while others tried and tried to not be racist but still without even knowing it had a slight predjudice towards certain groups. While watching this movie I both enjoyed it and also started to think. Thinking made me remember a time where this idea of subconcious racism can take place. In eigth grade I played lacrosse on a Barrington travel team. There were very few Jewish people who lived in Barrington and my friend and I happened to be the only Jews on the time. Now, at the time nobody knew that we were Jewish and one day at practice when we were just joking around and what not one of our team mates made a coment out loud, semi joking but mostly serious. He said somthing along the lines of, "my grandfather was a Nazi." He continued with this statement by saying other derogitory statements towards Jews until I stopped him by saying that I was Jewish. This kid stopped talking right away and thats probably a good thing for him considering I was twice his size and had already lost most of my temper. This story does not relate exactly to race, maybe more religion, but it follows the same guidelines and ideas and it shows how easy it is to be a racist without even realizing you that you are indeed one. Hopefully this kid learned his lesson becuase the next year when I was a freshman, we (stevenson) played against Barrington and a good amount of our team was Jewish so after I explained to everyone about "nazi kid," everyone was looking to land a big check on him.