The Representation of Many Social Aspects in Many Diverse Ways

The Representation of Many Social Aspects in Many Diverse Ways

{draw:frame} {draw:rect} American History X… This is a movie that represents many sociological aspects in many diverse ways. Since day one of the semester in sociology, I realized that, everything that I have learned in the class is applied in the movie in an indirect way. The main topic in American History X is obviously racism, but there is also deviance, cultural indifferences, different beliefs and discriminations as well as prejudice, ethnicity, conformity, normative and cognitive dimensions, conformity, conflict theory, functionalism, interactionalism, mechanical solidarity, achieved and ascribed status, civil inattention, sanctions, machismo and maybe even more sociological concepts which I am still not aware of till now. The movie starts with a black and white memory of when, big brother Derek rushes out to kill three black guys trying to steal the car that his passed father gave him. Killing only two of them and leaving one alive that ran away. This is where the hate crime occurs. Derek seems to stereotype the black and any different skin color other than white, which was a seed planted in his mind at a younger age by his father. After Derek committed the crime, he was sentenced to 3 years in prison, and this is where the sanctions appears. He has to pay the price for breaking the law and by doing so he is sanctioned to prison and that is considered a formal sanction. Little brother Danny was a witness to Derek’s law braking by committing a crime and was in one way or another influenced by him and was following the same footsteps, and somehow this is where cognitive dimension gets is, its Derek’s way of thinking and how he processes his knowledge of complex ideas and beliefs. As Danny keeps attending school, and is still affected by his older brother, Derek; he believes that everyone sees his older brother in him and try’s to impress everyone even those that do not approve of those ways. He finds it hard to be accepted by one of his school...

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