How Stereotypes and Prejudice Can Harm Others

Amina Osman

 

How Stereotypes and Prejudice Can Harm Others

    Have you ever wondered why the world is full of hatreds and ignorant people?  Why it doesn’t take us a minute to discriminate between people by the color of their skin or their ethnicity. In our daily life, every human being will come across of “Stereotypes” and prejudice others in life. The movie Finding Forrester is about character Jamal Wallace is 16 year old, mature black high school student boy.  He was raise by single mom. He portraits in the movie that he loves to play basketball with his friends.  He had a passionate in Writing.  He got offer into higher level Mailer-Callow rich school in New York due to his academics scores.  Jamal Wallace is really smart kid, who wants more out of life than other kids in his poor neighborhood.  The theme of this movie finding Forrester is Stereotyping. Author Milk Rich is tying to get across   how people making quick snap judgment about others based on  their color of skin or their background information. is hurtful and mean.  Without giving second change we would miss a great way of getting to know someone. 

            Jamal experiences with a lot of stereotyping in the movie of Finding Forrester.  The first scene where Jamal came across with hurtful snap judgments was by the owner of the BMW car automatically assumes that Jamal was going to steal or damage his” precious BMW car”, because Jamal was black person. The white guy didn’t think that Jamal couldn’t possibly know anything about expensive BMW cars, because he is black a teenager from Bronx.

        One of my Favorite scenes of quick, snap judgment or stereotyping was when Jamal came across the conflict between him and Mr. Crawford the English teacher. In this movie Finding Forrester Jamal and Mr. Crawford had their big differences throughout the movie. There are a lot of issues that Mr. Crawford had against Jamal based on Jamal’s race, and his intelligent of being great writer.  The heat in the classroom   Mr. Crawford was asking one of the students a question, and Jamal jumped in the conversation. Jamal was trying to help him out, so he told the boy to say his name, which was the answer to his question. Mr. Crawford was very angry. Mr. Crawford then tried to preach to Jamal by quoted some sayings. Mr. Crawford never got a chance to finish his sentence, because Jamal would finish them. Mr. Crawford then got mad. He then ordered Jamal to leave the class because he was embarrassed.

 

        The last heat /conflict between Jamal and Mr. Crawford was when Mr. Crawford found out that Jamal had used William Forrester topic to his essay. Mr. Crawford accused Jamal plagiarism then told Jamal that he had to write an apology letter and read it in front of the class. He also told him that if could just admit that if William Forrester gave him permission to use his title, then he might be excusing him. Jamal refuse to disclose his friend William tell them that he knew William, he also refuse to write the letter and read it aloud. Jamal told William about the two options he had and asked for his advice. William on the other hand thinks Jamal should write an apology letter, which Jamal refused. Jamal suggested to William to come to the school and to tell the school board that is not guilty of plagiarism before the school board exiles him from the prep school.

Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity

Martin Luther King, Jr.