In a galaxy far, far away⦠racism exist
By Domenico Misceo
Final: Multiculturalism
March 14th 2012
Wodziak
` The movie I chose to relate to our multiculturalism class was Star Wars; while this may seem trivial I will show how a seemingly innocent movie contains prevalent racial themes. Although most of the racial themes throughout the movies are abstracted notions that underlie characters and scenes, they exist and can been seen in every one of the Star Wars films. However, there is one movie within the saga, The Phantom Menace, which contains vast amounts of stereotypes and relates to the discussions from all three readings - Bad Boys, Racial Domination, and Speaking Treason Fluently. While this choice of movie may seem silly, the fact of the matter is that race and inequality encompasses all of our lives every day and underlines, while influencing, many aspects of our lives. The point of me choosing this movie is to show how blatantly unaware we are of its (race) existence throughout society by showing how it is overwhelming prevalent in a classic movie.
Yet, before I go on, this paper is not intended to present George Lucas as a racist. In reality its purpose is to show the opposite, how we are ingrained with notions about races that are intertwined in the fabric of our society that continue to "reproduce social inequality" (Ferguson, p.50).
Before beginning to analyze the film, it is important to set the context by defining the concept of race and describing the movie plot. First, in defining what race is we look at it from a few different perspectives to construct a meaningful understanding. So what is race? Biologically race is "a population of interbreeding species that develops distinct characteristics differing from other populations of the same species, especially...