Racial discrimination and the negative impact on African-American as depicted in the short film “JIM”

Abstract

Jim is a comedy short film in YouTube. This short film is produced by Chris Black. Jim short film talks about a young Black American boy named ‘Charles’, he experienced an implicit racism in his class. The main topic of this paper is the racism action towards the main character. The research problems of this paper are the levels of racism that experienced the Black American child and what is the negative impact of racism to Black American child that depicted by a differential opportunities that got by Charles. The theory that used in this paper is the theory levels of Racism by Camara Phyllis Jones. Camara Phyllis Jones defined racism as a structure of opportunity (education, housing, jobs, justice) also assigning value (worthy or unworthy, full of potential or full of menace) established on the social interpretation of race that made a disadvantage impact on the individual and communities victim, weaken the power of the all society by the waste of human source. For the methods that used is the descriptive qualitative methods. The goals of this paper are to know the levels of racism that experienced by the Black American child and to understand the negative impact of the racism. In this film Charles experienced a three levels of racism, specifically are the institutionalized, personally mediated, and internalized. The entire of the three levels of racism gives a negative impact to the Charles’s mental health and personality. On this paper the authors found that the racial discrimination that got by Charles made a several impact to Charles’s mental health and personality. It proves that a racial discrimination is giving a bad impact to the victim.