Critical Analysis of Media - Star Trek and Crash

Although the United States has gone through a history of events to overturn and mitigate the issue of racial discrimination, it still exists in today’s society. Throughout television shows and movies, there has been an evolution of the portrayal of minorities. Films such as Star Trek and Crash are now using different strategies and styles to represent racial normativity and stereotypes. Star Trek emphasizes on the ideological theme of normativity and future ideal by eliminating differences between people whereas Crash focuses on individualism and contemporary reality by concentrating on stereotypes. Both films utilize narrative and characters to help represent their themes.

In Star Trek, Roddenberry used “the assumption of race and cultural normativity to portray a future that has overcome 20th century racism” (Allen Kwan). In order to achieve this vision of collective integration, minorities such as African Americans and Asians were portrayed as characters that did not face issues of racism. In the film, everyone assimilated to the norm and strived to be free and treated equally. Unlike Crash, Star Trek did not focus on the differences of each character. An example of Roddenberry’s humanist-liberal ideal was where Uhura, an African-American woman, was shown as a strong individual who was successful, intelligent, and professional. Furthermore, each individual such as Spock, who was half human, was given equal opportunities despite his or her origin. Roddenberry chose the narrative to be set in the future rather than the present because of his ideal of the nonexistence or acknowledgment of racism by then.

Contrasting from Star Trek, Crash represented the contemporary reality of the interaction between people and the barriers that relationships face. As Susan Giroux and Henry Giroux analyzed, Crash showed that a color-blind society does not exist. Crash took all the stereotypes of minorities such as African-Americans, Asians,