Analyzing Tracy Turnblad's Hairspray

The film has several ethnicities within a small area along a time line of one day. The film has many, informative methods in which it describe the various diversity issues of all the characters within the movie. For example, Sal’s pizzeria which is owned by an Italian American has pictures of famous Italian Americans on the wall and plays Italian music. One character named Buggin Out is always upset. Bugging out hates the fact that there are no black people pictures on the wall especially since the pizzeria is in a black neighborhood. His perspective represents the people in the African American community that always protest, but usually don’t work to improve the community. The

Citizens throughout American history have often presented the “home of the free” and the “land of the brave” as the perfect nation, filled with perfect families, and more extreme examples of how impeccable the nation truly is. No time presented the United States of America in a more splendid light than the 1950’s. The 1950’s are remembered as a decade of prosperity but as with every time period, multiple historical issues marred this time. The United States encountered political, diplomatic, and social issues throughout this decade (Hewitt and Lawson, 832). Hairspray, the 1988 film by John Waters, was set in the 1950’s and reveals depths of racism and stereotypes during this period, while presenting smaller examples of the issues of sexism, religion, and inequality.

When I saw Hairspray the Musical there were three things that I noticed that were important in making the theatrical performance. Those three things were the acting, production, and how the actors made us, the audience, feel. Each of these things contribute greatly to any performance. I feel that this production of Hairspray hit each of these notes very well.

Regarding the labeling theory, the theory holds that behaviors are deviant only when society labels them as deviant. As such, conforming members of society, who interpret certain behaviors as deviant and then attach this label to individuals, determine the distinction between deviance and non‐deviance. Influential people within society—politicians, judges, police officers, medical doctors, and so forth—typically impose the most significant labels. Labeled individuals may include drug addicts, alcoholics, criminals, delinquents, prostitutes, and sex offenders, to mention a few. The relation to the movie is that, the stakeholders used to, or maybe still label the people of color have higher tendency to do criminal activities compared to Caucasians, and that’s what the media portrayed back then, thus the case of mass incarceration of people of color, seemed not to be a big deal for the States in which the majority of individuals who resides here are the whites. Compton and other majority black areas that considered dangerous might arise because of this labeling

I saw racism in the movie for example when the cops target a Suv because they saw a colored couple, but when a white coupled pass by they don’t stop them or anything. The cop takes advantage of the colored girl because the cops are white and know they

According to Henslin, racism is “prejudice and discrimination on the basis of race.” Racism is woven throughout the documentary of Lafeyette and Pharoah’s lives at the Horner Homes. All of the African Americans living in inner-city Chicago are looked down upon by the whites every day. The whites pay no attention to the existence of the lives of these people. The gangs run the streets of the inner-city

“ Some of these early productions have racial themes which reorganize the world in such a way that black heritage is rewarded over white paternity; they are schematic renunciations of the prevailing order of things in white American society where, historically, the discovery of black blood meant sudden reversal of fortune, social exclusion, or banishment.” (Gaines, P.3) Within the movie the amount of mistruths about African Americans was sad. Within the movie you notice that the blacks were always or seem to be yelling, acting uncivilized and doing

Did the film reveal any form of RACISM or STEREOTYPING from any perspective? Please elaborate with details/examples (14.28 Possible Points). 100 word minimum between the two

The degree of connection between all of the characters in the movie is so coincidental and interrelated to emphasize the point that we do not always know what is going on with everyone else we may encounter. It also accentuates the fact that racism is not one particular race against another. It also shows that we never know someone’s situation and what is happening in their life to make them act the way that they do if

What I also found to be quite interesting and perhaps a weakness of the film, was the sense of performative racism that four of the main white characters utilize and how the makers of the film appeal to such a phenomenon through symbolisms as well. In the movie, there seems to be two main kinds of racism the characters exhibit, one of them being blatant racism and another being subtle racism through microaggressions. For example, Katherine experiences blatantly racist and misogynistic behavior from her coworkers, especially from Paul Stafford, the lead engineer (making groupthink much easier) and Ruth, the only other woman working in the office. On the other hand, Al Harrison and John Glenn appeal to the subtler sides of racism and performative white pity, Glenn going out of his way to shake the hands of the computers as the film attempted to paint a positive, “not-all-whites” picture of inclusion, acceptance and tolerance, a kind of racism that almost all of the white people in the film come to, by its end. Examples of this can be seen in scenes like the one in which Al Harrison smashes down the “coloreds” and “whites” restroom signs as if implying that doing so will abolish all racial inequalities with a couple of blows of blunt force. One could infer it seems, that paired with the groundbreaking stories of these three women, white people being decent human

I the article Race the Power of an Illusion, Dalton Conley says, “the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s really marks both an opportunity and a new danger in terms of racial relations in America. On the one hand, the Civil Rights era officially ended inequality of opportunity. It officially ended de jure legal inequality, so it was no longer legal for employers, for landlords, or for any public institution or accommodations to discriminate based on race. At the same time, those civil rights triumphs did nothing to address the underlying economic and social inequalities that had already been in place because of hundreds of years of inequality.” (Conley pp 1). What goes on in the American ghetto is not as glamorous as Hollywood makes it out to be now, this film does a great job at depicting what life in the ghetto for black teens is really like. The ghettos in America are full of broken culture that is left behind from centuries of oppression by the white man. Most teens like those in the movie never make it out of their neighborhoods alive. Thousands of kids die every years from gang on gang violence, damaging all chances of them escaping the ghetto and making something of themselves. Death, gangs, and drugs is the more common way that young people are left with to deal with a life of poverty and survival that seems to have no escape.

The reason many people in America today, as well as in the movie are racist is because this is how they were brought up, by the labels they were taught to live by. Past generations were exposed to segregation between ethnic groups, which has greatly carried on to how people look at others today. Up until 1967 it was prohibited for blacks to marry white people in 38 states

This movie continues to show all different types of racism. In one scene, two black men were walking down the street complaining of how everyone is so racist. The district attorney, Rick Cabot (Brendan Fraser), and his wife, Jean Cabot (Sandra Bullock), were walking down the street. She was holding his arm and started to hold him closer because she was cold. The two black men saw her and assumed that she was scared as they walked by them. Later on, the two black men steel a SUV at gun point. The passengers of the SUV just happen to

were still segregated. The characters do not get along with the majority of the white population,

The majority of the racism involved in the movie is towards the negro population. They are perceived as thugs, thieves and