First Paragraph

Does the movie ‘Freedom Writers (2007)’ represent typical stereotypes of people from ethnical backgrounds?

“In Long Beach, it all comes down to what you look like, it’s all about colour.”[1]

The Blaxploitation genre came forward in the early 1970’s where the movie ‘Shaft (1971)’[2] was the first movie belonging to this genre. This genre is specifically targeted at Black people of where the films within it tend to take place in an urbanised setting referred to as ‘the ghetto’. Blaxploitation films contain many negative stereotypes of black people, of which certain characters are portrayed in being associated with drugs, gun crime, and violence. Similarly, Freedom Writers also contains elements of this specific genre.

Set in the ghetto, Freedom Writers brings to us a true life story of a teacher so devoted to her students and the happenings of their classroom. One thing in common, helping the ,film fall within the Blaxploitation genre, is how these youths were all segregated into their own separate tribes of Strauss’s Binary opposition theory of Black vs. Cambodians, where only Blacks associated with Blacks and Cambodians associated with Cambodians etc. “Racism is like a poor kid who grew up needing someone to hurt.”[3] This quote implies that racism is something which affects someone in such a way, that the outcome would be to hurt someone. Perhaps this is the reason, why the action of the youths in this film was due to all the segregation between them. The categorisation of these students was the root cause of fights that would outbreak in the classroom, playground and even on the streets, of where children as young as 15 where using guns and involved in murder rather than being at home within the late hours of falling darkness.
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[1] ‘Freedom Writers’ (2007)
[2] ‘Shaft’ (1971)
[3] ROSE (1989) cited in SHOHAT, E. and STAM, R. 1994: ‘Unthinking Eurocentrism: multiculturalism and the media’ pg.21, London: Routledge