Choosing A Clip From The Fresh Prince Of Bel-Air

Throughout the semester we have coved countless theories and concepts on human communication. Each chapter covered a specific type of communication which came along with its own set of theories and concepts. For the final paper, we are to choose a clip from a movie, television show, cartoon, music video etc. With that clip, we must choose three of the concepts or theories we have covered throughout the semester and explain how they correlate to a specific scene. Choosing a clip was the hardest part of this paper because there so many that came to mind and along with it so many different of the theories and concepts that could be used on just one clip. However, I narrowed it down and finally choose a clip from the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. The

Intercultural communication is “interaction between people whose cultural perceptions and symbol systems differ enough to influence the communication event” (Baran Beauchamp 188). When communicating across cultural lines there can be obstacles that hinder our ability to make meaning. The obstacles that effected the effective intercultural communication in this clip was stereotyping. Stereotypes serve as filters, it is a mechanism we use to sort through all the information we receive to keep what we need and throw away what we do not. For instance, if you believe that Mexicans are hard workers and you have a white man and a Mexican applying for the same position each with the same credentials, you are more likely to choose the Mexican applicant because of your generalization. Most of us do not try to practice this type of stereotyping but we begin to form these type of filters as children, which makes it hard to just stop thinking in that way. Therefore, we see situations such as the scene on my clip. The police for whatever reason pulled over Will and his cousin. They complied with the officer but was still brought in for questioning. When asked where they live, they replied Bel-Air. This of course is one of the richest neighborhoods in LA so when the officers heard this they did believe that two young black men could ever reach such economic status to be able to afford to live in such a neighborhood. They did not believe this because African American or thought of as lower middle-class families on welfare. Obviously, this is not true as there are many successful and financially stable African American who can afford such luxuries. The police officers were not the only one’s stereotyping, as Will did the same. At the end of the scene Will made the generalization that all cops believed black people were poor and if they