An award-winning filmmaker, Paul Haggis produced a Hollywood film Crash (2004) to provoke people into thinking again about themselves who believe that they don’t see color or claim to be not racist. The film is placed in Los Angeles where lies many different types of racial groups. It shows many different racial groups that represent how microaggression in a day to day basis affects and hurts people. The purpose of this movie by Haggis was to argue and bring into light that microaggression exists in everyday life because everyone is racist towards another group of races and how it causes negative results to each other even today.

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In his film, a scene begins with two black males. Anthony and Peter. They are just exiting out from a spaghetti restaurant with Anthony complaining about how they had to wait longer for a plate of spaghetti because of the fact that they were black and how he was never offered to have coffee when the waitress was refilling white customers cups of coffee. Anthony also commented on a lady that was walking past by who wrapped her arm around her husband because it was cold outside, but he thought the reason behind it was because ‘black people’ were walking past her and she was afraid. This scene supports Haggis’s idea of all people being victims of cognitive racism and how it affects people of color.

This scene explained above has represented the double consciousness of black people.

 

The double consciousness is an idea by W. E. B. Du Bois, a sociologist and one of the co-founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Double consciousness could be explained as the word itself; it is two consciousness that has formed over time from microaggression and something colored people carry wherever they go. One of the consciousness is the consciousness that all people carry but the second one would be the consciousness of the colored people worrying about the perceptions that others might have over them. The thought of themselves being discriminated against because of their race makes them more aware of their actions. Depending on their surroundings, they think about what others would think of them if they made a certain gesture. People with double consciousness try to act more natural and general because they don’t want to fit into the stereotypes of what their labels are.

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The second scene in the movie that supports the idea of the negative things that microaggression does to people of color is when Anthony complains about riding the bus. Anthony rejected riding the bus because of the big windows on the side. He thought the huge windows on the side of the buses were made to humiliate and degrade people of color who were ‘reduced’ to ride the bus. It represented how Anthony has developed delusions about what they were being presented as a part of society and how other people would look at him. He thought that people were purposefully making actions to offend people of color.

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The conclusion of the scenes that I’ve chosen adds more weight to the results of discrimination and racism. Anthony is a victim of double consciousness, having to think of what others would be thinking about him at all times. At a restaurant, walking down a street, or even riding a bus he is always thinking about what people of different racial groups would be thinking of him. I see Haggis’s point of Anthony in this movie because Anthony represents someone who has been affected by racism around him and thinks that he’s only the victim when he also is looking at others by race and making conclusions of why others make the actions they make.

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I personally relate to the character of Anthony because I work at Pikes Place Market in Seattle downtown which is a tourist area. There are people coming from around the world to visit the first Starbucks or for the Seahawks game. While working, I’ve had many customers think that I wasn’t able to speak English because of my facial features of Asian. The customers were speaking slower, word by word and scanning my facial expression to see if I was following them. I’ve also had a few customers that came back to comment on how my English had no accent and where I was from. Being born in Colorado, moving to South Korea, moving to Washington, moving to Texas, and moving back to Washington, I was never really aware of how my physical features could give people the idea of me being someone who was not fluent in English.

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After the third time being commented on my English pronunciation and being corrected when I said that I was from Colorado was not true and how I was Korean, I also started developing the double consciousness. I could recognize myself trying to make it obvious that I could speak English and emphasize the fact that I was not lost nor a tourist but someone that actually knew my way around. I am also guilty of carrying credit class textbooks in my arms to not be mistaken as an international student. I was becoming more aware of what other people surrounding me would think of me and the ways I needed to act to not look like a tourist.

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Racism is everywhere and it exists in everyone. Even when people deny that they are, they look at other people and categorize them into general groups and relate them to the stereotypes or labels. These actions could happen with active conscious or subconscious, but they all have effects on people. The way that I started developing a double consciousness or the character Anthony carrying double consciousness with him all the time only deepens within the microaggressions in our daily lives.