Mean Girls Race Analysis

After reading over the description of our film analysis paper, the movie "Mean Girls" that was produced in 2004, came into my mind because this movie contains several sociological themes. Although the film is over a decade old, most high school students seem to be able to relate to this film today since it shows us examples of sociological conflicts such as social conflict theory, social class, and sexuality.

Mean Girls is about a girl named Cady who joins an elite social group at her new school known as the Plastics. While socializing with the Plastics, Cady develops a new, mean girl, personality and ends up sabotaging the group’s leader, Regina, and becomes the new leader of the Plastics. Regina retaliates by spreading the burn book, a book the Plastics filled with insults and gossip about other students, around the school leading to a riot and Cady takes the blame. Cady realizes that her new personality is wrong and apologizes to the school, makes amends with her old friends, and forms a truce with Plastics who disband and become regular students (Mean Girls, 2004).

The movie Mean Girls shows examples of many social-psychological principals. Three of the major social-psychological principals depicted in Mean Girls are prejudice, discrimination, and conformity. According to Social Psychology and Human Nature textbook, written by Baumeister and Bushman, prejudice is a negative feeling toward an individual bases solely on his or her membership in a particular group. Discrimination is unequal treatment of different people based on the groups or categories to which they belong. Lastly, conformity is defined as getting along with the crowd.

The movie Mean Girls follows Cady Heron as she experiences high school for the first time in her life. As she is thrown into a new society, this film provides the opportunity to socially analyze high school. From figuring out her new culture and society that she is engrossed in to realizing how social status can both negatively and positively affect her values and beliefs, there are many concepts that Cady learns and is taught as she makes her way through her first year of public school.

The movie chosen for this sociological essay is a very popular movie called Mean Girls. This movie was released in 2004, directed by Hollywood star Mark Waters, and screen play written by actor/comedian Tina Fey. For those who have never seen or heard about this movie, it is about a 16 year old girl named Cady Heron who lived her normal every day life growing up in Africa where she was homeschooled. One day, her and her family moved to America where Cady was enrolled into a typical public high school. This is what changed her. On her first day of school she met her two friends Damian and Janice who are students that are typically alienated from other students around the school. On her next day is when she meets the most popular and well known

The first scene in the movie I thought was powerful was the scene where kids with HIV were forced to leave school due to the fear of the parents and the ignorance they had back then about not understanding how HIV were transmitted. Dwayne Maori a 12 year old hemophiliac infected with HIV from Tennessee was forced to quit school due to the fear of other parents and the ignorance that they had about AIDS. In this particular scene the parents were protesting outside the school with big poster boards, when Dwayne Maori left in the car there was a parent shouting out loud that he is trying to kill everyone but the parent is not going to let him kill her baby. Others were shot or got their houses burnt to the ground. I think that this scene is important and powerful because this scene tells us how one person’s word can lead to so many fears in the society (when president Reagan re-enforces that AIDS can spread by casual contact). This scene also showed us how scared people were about this new virus. At the same time, this scene tells us that HIV doesn’t only affect the person infected by it, it affects their families as well. This scene is effective because it allows us to learn that when these new

The movie Mean Girls is set in a high school setting. The movie starts with a new girl coming to the school as a first time public school student. Cady, the new student, is immediately accepted into a group of friends, but later invited to another. The first clique she joins pushes her to become friends with the second group. This subsequently led to a typical high school drama scene. The ways these high school students go about their normal life seem very alike to the “typical” high school. Even though the movie Mean Girls by Mark Waters, uses humor to portray some questionable realism, it effectively depicts characteristics of ordinary high school life and uses realistic characters.

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

In our world today, there are many different types of cultures. In America especially, there is so much diversity within culture that it's what makes America what it is today. What is culture you may ask? Culture is basically a human’s way of living life through values, beliefs, behavior, and material objects. In the well-known movie, Mean Girls, there are a lot of different types and aspects of culture throughout the movie. The movie Mean Girls is about a girl named Cady Heron who lived in Africa and was homeschooled for most of her life, has to attend a public high school called North Shore. She is clueless at first and after a while she makes friends with a group of popular girls known as the Plastics. She fits in quickly and tries to adapt through high school. There are different types of cultures and subcultures at North Shore such as the Plastics, the Jocks, the Nerds, the Cool African Americans, the Cool Asians, the Foreigners, and the Losers. Everyone at North Shore high wants to be like the Plastics so some of the girls like to copy everything the Plastics do such as the way they speak and dress. In addition to that all the students are desperate to fit in so in order for them to do that they have to value sex, drinking, partying, makeup, and other typical teenage stuff. Mean Girls did in fact have a lot of different types of cultural aspects to it and there are strong examples to prove this.

Commonly referred to as a classic by millennials, Mean Girls, directed by Mark Waters in 2004, allows an interesting critique of racism when viewed through a sociological lens. The story follows Cady Herron, a normal teenager- except for the fact that she grew up in Africa, homeschooled by her scientist parents- as she is forced to integrate into the public-school system in Illinois. Never having been in an institution like a public school, Cady quickly learns what not to do and who to hang out with. Through trial and error, Cady assimilates and becomes a ‘normal’ American teenager who is part of the ‘popular’ crowd, befriending “The Plastics”; Karen Smith, Gretchen Wieners, and their leader, Regina George. The story of Mean Girls is not as superficial as it seems. This film illustrates the perils of not only teenage life, but current life in America, and accurately depicts the struggles that minorities face. Looking at this movie through Functionalist theory, the racial aggressions present are part of a larger institution of the public school system; insinuating that the micro and macro-aggressions directed towards minorities are part of developing the future generation and teaching them to perpetuate racial inequality in America, allowing white people to remain the majority race and to reap the benefits that come with it. The complexity of the movie lies within an interesting discourse that examines the effects and functions behind the racist

The point in this is to call attention to the lack of diversity in entertainment, the inaccurate and stereotypical picture created in the minds of the majority race viewers, and that

Not only is race is shown, also sexual orientation. This wasn’t accidental, the directors want it to be this diverse, to show that race wasn’t the issue, no race got any preference when it came to decision time. But gender played a role during the decision making. I think that the directors, producers and writers wanted to showcase the rationalization of life and death, when the power is put in the ones hands.

Race does not play a large role in this movie, which tells you a lot about the community the movie is set in. None of the characters in the movie are people of color. This tells the audience that the movie is dealing with an all-white, poor, rural community. This allows the audience to fill in information regarding this community based on what is already known about such communities.

Even though the film was meant to funny, it did make me think about different cultural preduice and obstacles interacial relationships may face. Over all I enjoyed the film it poked fun at racial prejudice and brought some good topics to the table. However, I wish they would have take the opportunity to have gone deeper into racism and brought it out into the open for people to

The film was directed by Travis Knight, a cis white man, and all the main characters (Kubo, Monkey, Beetle, Moon King, The Sisters) were cis white actors and actresses. Although eager to showcase East Asian culture, the film ironically stifles the voices of the Asian community, overriding them visually, linguistically, and socially with choices made by white men. Thus, the film forbids Asian communities from representing their own culture, coating it with white interpretation, and demonstrating how, as Professor Hobbs stated in her February 15 lecture, “our [racial] identities are never our own--we never have complete control” because “white supremacy constitutes the ground on which we walk” (Jiménez