Race And Terror Sparknotes

The documentary “Race and Terror”, by VICE news documents the events that happened during the Charlottesville rallies, and the protestors’ views on the results of the protest. Throughout the film, Vice news portrayed obedience, violence, and authority shown by white nationalist, alt-righters, and neo-nazis in order to explore human identities. The documentary relates to the first two units that we have learned in our psychology course, more specifically prejudice, empathy gap, morality, and cognitive dissonance.
Throughout the documentary, authority is seen differently from both sides. The white nationalist believed they were the authority, they had brought their own militia with their loaded assault rifles, camouflage, combat boots and helmets and the protesters showed that their authority was the police. The white nationalist authority was being violent, and since people want conformity, they start acting like the rest of the group. This can also be seen as obedience because they followed their
authority. The protestors authority was the police, their obedience wouldn’t be as strong since they are not directly from the same group. Overall the authority influenced violence and obedience from both sides of the documentary.
There are many preconceived notions shown through the documentary that affect the way they way they see each other.
Firstly for the white nationalist side, the preconceived notion they had towards the protestors was “this city is run by jewish communist and criminal n******,”. These notions came from stereotypes, and prejudice from a very young age taught by the environment they grew up in. Dogmatism was used a lot during Christopher Cantwell’s arguments, when he explains the car going through the crowd he completely ignores the reporter’s comments on other people’s opinion. Morality was demonstrated by the counter protesters, after the car went through the crowd of protestors. The Unite the Right protesters showed evidence that they had an empathy gap towards the protesters who got hurt during the rallies, by saying it was a win for them because the other protestors got hurt and one died. They also said that they were ready to attack if something were to
happen. The documentary has changed my view on violence, because before all these rallies happened I didn't realize that they thought and possesed violence. The fact they are able to this without having any empathy scares me, and makes me wonder what they will do to get their way. This shocked me in the way they think, I didn’t think all these people thought this evil. The way they talked about other people, made it seem like they had done something personally to them that could never forgive. In total the documentary changed my view on this group dramatically, knowing that they think like this and are willing to act in extreme ways to prove a point. Overall our knowledge on our psychology helps guide us to a society that we should be headed as a society. I think personally we need to be able to organize forums to be able to get both views out there in a non violent manner.