Gran Torino

This week’s discussion focused on race and ethnicity. The one film that I thought of that shows a decent amount of racism and prejudices is Gran Torino. The movie is about a Korean War veteran who really does not have a liking towards anyone. He is very angry and racial slurs are part of his everyday vocabulary. There is an Asian family that lives next door and he calls them derogatory terms for Asians all the time and throughout the movie he calls people racist terms and says things that are offensive to people of different races or ethnicities.  People ignore him for the most part. I feel like this character in the movie is from such a different generation that he does not realize what he is saying is hurtful to these people and could ultimately get him in trouble. People try and use frames to justify the fact he says things, like saying he is old and that’s all he knows; but in reality people are aware of what is going on around them and choose to say the things they do because that is how they feel. In this movie Walt, the main character could be an example of using cultural racism to belittle his Asian neighbors or even possibly minimization because he does not see the big problem with him calling all of these different people racist names.