Symbolic Interactionist Perspective Media Analysis
SOC/100 Introduction to Sociology
06/07/2012
Mrs. Christina Oberste

Symbolic Interactionist Perspective Media Analysis In today’s society, all human beings have their very own distinctive, customizable features such as body composition, hair length, attire, and style. At the same token, they all have genetic-based features such as color, height, facial features, and gender. While these features are quite commonly used to identify all human beings, they also give way to categorizing, mislabeling, and stereotyping another individual. Categorizing society by means of race, social class, and gender, is very common in today’s society; almost too common as it may seem. In this paper, the Academy Award-winning picture “Crash,” will be used to display some of the social injustices in today’s society. Crash, Oscar-winner for best picture, best original screenplay, and best editing at the 2005 Academy Awards, was co-written, produced, and directed by Paul Higgins in 2004. Crash was inspired by a real-life event in which Higgins’ Porsche was hi-jacked outside a video store in Los Angeles California. Crash touches up on a lot of different topics such as stereotyping, racism, classism, sexism, and exposure to different forms of racial discrimination such as racial stereotyping and racial profiling all from the non-verbal, symbolic perspective of an outsider. The first scene of the movie takes the viewers on-scene of a motor vehicle accident in which a two detective are involved in a collision with a civilian. The civilian is of Oriental decent and of medium to lower class, judging by the older model vehicle that she was driving. The civilian woman seemed very angry and disheartened by the situation as it seemed that the detective is abusing her authoritative power in law enforcement to justify her involvement in the