IDENTITY AND DIFFERENCE (FILMS)

Identity and Difference (films)

Identity and Difference (films)

The paper shows how post-structuralism reflect the problem of racial identity in modern cinematic perspectives. The intent to reflect a white hegemonic society may be unconscious on the part of the filmmakers, but surely, they do not accurately portend a multi-faceted truth in relation to the history they use in film production and direction. Through an analysis of racial identity through history and the historical perspectives that reshape these identities through film, the basis of race becomes erroneously vague.

Sociological insights have helped me to understand the nature of prejudicial attitudes, but also that getting rid of prejudicial attitudes, hard as that has been and continues to be, will not eliminate patterns of racial inequalities that have accumulated over hundreds of years. Our paradoxical beginning as a “democratic” republic that institutionalized white supremacy haunts us today, as it has every generation of Americans, including the country's first forebears. We sense that those early social, political, economic, and cultural choices—that some of the forebears argued were unacceptable trade-offs—live on somehow in the present, but our ethos as a young and dynamic society that sees itself as always improving, moving forward, and growing, makes us reticent to gauge more deeply the continuing price of earlier mistakes. While we are generally aware that some groups enjoyed a newfound freedom and opportunity on these shores while other groups found un-freedom and blocked opportunity, we typically don't know any group's experiences as well as our own group's (which we might not know well either), and we know very little about the full spectrum of difficulties that faced (and face) the most vulnerable groups. In our best moments as a society, we express a common and undifferentiated language of pride and admiration for every vulnerable group's ingenuity, hard labor, and tenacity in overcoming the specific set of obstacles they faced in the Uunited States. (Arthur Asa 2005 Pp. 13)

What we seem to lack is a common language of anguish for the vulnerabilities that remain, vulnerabilities that are racially concentrated and that could be addressed as earlier groups' vulnerabilities were addressed. historically the most problematic forms of social integration or blending have been racial. For example, socially created racial categories like black and white (as well as even more arbitrary human colors of “yellow” for asian and “red” for indigenous americans), despite the lack of a scientifically biological basis, were seen as fixed. The hierarchy of racism argued that just one drop of black blood would essentially contaminate an otherwise apparently “white” and allegedly also superior person. fact, marriages between arbitrarily defined white and nonwhite races were illegal in many states. following are a number of 19th-century illustrations that cast racial mixing, or miscegenation, as sinister and threatening to society. Although it might seem that we have come a long way since the days when miscegenation was illegal, both interracial dating and interracial marriage continue to evoke hostility and, in too many cases, violence as ...