Freedom Writers

I think this movie is a perfect example of the CRT tenet stating that every individual has an unique story to tell. Every student in that class, including the teacher, had different backgrounds and life exeriences that shaped the way they thought about the world. While Mrs. Gruwell grew up with a more privileged childhood and had an inspirational father, most of her students faced childhoods surrounded by domestic violence and a lack of strong parental figures. Sindy experienced life in a Cambodian refuge camp and a majority of the other students had spent time in a juvenile detention center. The journals that Mrs. Gruwell gave them to write in recorded each person's individual stories of the struggles that each of them had to face on a daily basis.

The classroom was divided into walled communities at the start of their freshmen year. Each ethnicity seperated into their own groups; the Cambodians sat together, the Latinos sat together, the African Americans sat together, and the one Caucasian student sat by himself. They even moved their chairs to physically turn away from the rest of the class and focus on their own groups. This reminded me of the discussion we had in class about how the different enthic communities living in big cities would also seperate themselves into Chinatowns, Little Japan, Little Italy, etc. Eventually the culture within the classroom became more like a melting pot because the students were becoming friends with one another and even mixing up where they sat. I didn't see their individual cultures melting together, but at the end of freshmen year they respected one another and no longer thought life would be better if the other ethnicities were not there.