When I was a kid I saw Indiana Jones many times. However I never noticed the intense racial undertones until now. How someone in the 1980s could produce a movie that biased I do not know. Orientalism makes me think of the Jim Crow segregation acts of the early 20th century. Black people were just beginning to get out from under white control. They were working, living in middle class neighborhoods. Eventually race riots broke out. The Whites worried about Blacks becoming socially and economically equal with them and developed the Jim Crow laws. This kind of racism always develops out of fear. Fear of a race and their customs that are different. Or fear of a race, considered inferior, becoming equal with another. I also thought about the Japanese intrenment camps of WWII. Becuase the Americans were so worried about Japanese power and so afriad of what could happen, they developed an irrational fear and hatred for all Japanese. Indiana Jones portrays native Indians as barbaric. The food they eat, the way they eat, their surroundings and the way they act are all absurd. In the 1930s there were defintely people who lived in villages in the poor parts of India, however there were also cities and buildings just like in America. It is ridiculous for the producers of the movie to portray Indian people as they did. Said points to media as a starting ground for racism. Society certainly takes much of what the media produces and runs with it. The media outrageously depicts people sometimes and society oftentimes develops that same belief about those people. Many times ignorance is the beginning of racism or in this case orientalism. If a person is naive about a culture or race they will be more suseptible to believing the negative things they see or hear about the culture or race. Orientalism makes me think about chinese food in America. It is so far from what the Chinese people really eat, but yet that is what Americans think they really do eat. Interesting.