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Higher Learning Essay

Decent Essays

The film Higher Learning is a call to action. It is a film that shows people as products of their environment. The film is set on a college campus, a place where most people learn about what they will do in their adult life to try to better the world or simply educate themselves in order to live a better life. However, life on the Columbus campus is not good; it is a battlefield between the races and sexes. I feel it is a bit exaggerated, but it allows people to see some of the issues that go on, on a college campus. The film focuses on three freshman (Malik, Kristen, & Remy) entering college. They enter a less than ideal new world that is filled with tension, anxiety and fear. Although the writer uses stereotypical characters, it …show more content…

Additionally, Cross, Parham and Helms (1991) cite the broad applicability of this model by alluding to the fact that several authors in different parts of the country were developing parallel models independently indicating that African American identity development was essentially the same across several regions of the United States. The main character, Malik, is a cocky African American track star that thinks everyone has it easier than him. He feels that the world owes him something, but almost everyone in it will work to hold him down. Epps has made a living portraying one type of athlete or another, but this is probably his best work because he creates a character that can be very accurate and likeable one minute, but totally juvenile and wildly frustrating the next. He struggles throughout the movie, but like the Fredrick Douglas quote used here says, "without struggle there is no progress." Malik really grows up a lot because the three main people around him are good influences. Malik Williams (Omar Epps) fits the traditional athlete type: cocky and arrogant. An urban black male on a partial track scholarship, Malik is at school to run, not learn. His attitude is that the world owes him, not the other way around. The reality that he can lose comes as an ego-bruising lesson. In one of his most memorable roles, Laurence Fishburne subtly and cleverly plays Professor Maurice Phipps. Phipps is a no b.s. man of great wisdom that treats everyone equally and

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