This research illustrates the strategy of a teacher for overcoming the race discrimination of America as reflected in the film Freedom Writer. This film was based on the true story of a teacher named Erin Gruwell who taught in the multicultural students in Long Beach in 1994. The purposes of this research are to find out the description of the racial discrimination in America and to analyze the strategies of the teacher to overcome the racial discrimination in America as seen in the film Freedom Writer.
This study used a qualitative method supported by a library research. The Freedom Writer film was the object of the research as the primary data. The secondary data were from articles, books, journals and on-line data. After the data were collected, this research took some steps. Watching the film several times and reading the scripts by making some notes were the first step in this research. Then the data were classified based on the problem formulation along with the social background of racial discrimination in the American society. The main character’s monologues and dialogues in the film were analyzed by qualitative approach supported by analyzing the theory of racial discrimination in the form of statements.
The result of the study shows that this film Freedom Writer described the condition of some multi-ethnics students who were full of racial discrimination in the class and outside class. They tried finding out the struggles for fighting against the condition of violence and injustice happened by some different ethnics of the students. They were proud of their own identities without giving empathy toward other ethnics. The second result finds that the teacher named Brown found a strategy on how to teach multicultural class. Role-playing, exposure to different language and culture, knowledge of students’ background and cooperative learning were some strategies to overcome the problem of racism and to support the students to be the good guys in a society.
Key words: Racism, racial discrimination, Freedom Writer.