Why so Anti-White and Anti-Male?

Are you kiding me this movie was a joke no matter what year it was made in.

No, I saw it in the theatre in 1995 and thought it was overdone then.

Well i watched this movie when it originally came out I agree with the originql poster. It is a racist movie against whites. And that was my frame for thinking way back in 1995. Now as it goes for the fat black guy and the juicer. If all that white guy does is pump iron and never actually gets in a one on one fight the fat guy can easily win if he fights more. Pupmin iron dosn't make you a fighter. To sum up I've always hated this movie . Also this movie is nothing like Crash/ Crash was a very intelligent movie well thought out from both sides of the equation. Not just he narrow mindeness of John Singleton.

What do you mean back then most cops were white? This was made in 1995 not 1955.

Yes, but he was such a supplicating, weak douche bag. Which is the only acceptable kind of white males these days I suppose...

I'm always confused why so many people struggle to grasp polemic art. John Singleton is not presenting "Higher Learning" as a piece of "truth." He's simply advancing a particular, subjective point of view in order to advance a greater theme.

It's much like kabuki theater where heavy makeup, outrageous clothing and heavily-stylized dance movements are done to illustrate a particular point or story line. Everything is highly dramatized and over-the-top in order to keep the audience entertained and to present a theme.

Anyone over the age of about eleven shouldn't have to be told this, but:

- All white guys from Idaho are not skinheads;
- Women don't immediately become lesbians after one bad sexual experience;
- Frat boys, despite their many flaws, are capable of drinking beer without raping women;
- Black men are capable of interacting with people of another race without thinking that the other person is a racist;
- College professors often hold office hours without smoking a pipe or wearing a coat with padded elbows;

And on..and on...and on.

Singleton is presenting each character as a completely exaggerated character as a shortcut. He doesn't have ten hours to flesh out each character's backstory with motivations and personal histories. The MINUTE you hear Malik calling his professor an Uncle Tom or calling out Michael Rappaport or complaining about institutional racism (even if it's not there), you KNOW who that character is. The minute you see Rappaport's character fail to summon the courage to confront his racist ideology or to at least speak his mind, you KNOW who he is. And the minute you see Buffy and Jennifer Connely staring into one another's eyes, you know who they are and what they're thinking.

Singleton is taking necessary shortcuts in order to advance a larger theme. He's not saying, "This is who white people are and this is who black people are." He's taking something that's often extremely subtle and unspoken and putting arrows and highlighters and closed-captioning and bullet points and asterisks by it so we can talk about it.

It's actually much larger than racism. It's an inability for people to deal with those are unlike themselves. College is the place where (typically) kids come together and are forced to confront people who have different religious beliefs, come from different backgrounds, countries of birth, income levels, varying intelligence levels and often have radically different ideas. While that aspect of college life scares the HELL out of a lot of people, it's a life lesson that a lot of people need to come to grips with. It's part of growing up and dealing with a world that's often hostile to your own needs.

You can scream about how unfair it is that someone gets into college because of their race or their athletic abilities. How will that help you, however, when you apply for a job and have to to compete with people that have an inside advantage (for any number of reasons)?

You can scream about how unfair it is that someone holds up a sign that basically suggests men should be castrated. Yeah, and there are a lot of people in the world who are openly hostile to your very existence. How are you going to deal with them?

Is "Higher Learning" realistic? Not really. No movie is. Are the themes relevant? Absolutely. How you react to the larger theme is up to you.

Very true, so very true.

a) yes
b) WTF???

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That's true, DA8653. There were pretty significant parts in this film as well. Like the white man who becomes a skinhead(Nazi). His suicide was compared to how Hitler died. I thought about that, too.

Still I didn't think the producers and writers were trying to make this realistic either. It's just many problems that America has come face to face on (Racism, Feminism, Nazi, and Homosexuality) in one college.

If you don't believe homosexuality is in this movie, watch this movie through every minute, especially during the ceremony at the end of the movie.

I know that race was the focus of this movie but holy *beep* it seems like every movie on IMDB has a topic by some offended white guy who completely goes off topic and starts talking about *beep* that nobody cares about.

I think you're only looking at this from a one perspective. Although I don't consider this movie nearly as good as Boyz N The Hood, I still enjoy watching it and I don't only see the whites in the movie as bad and here's why.


Omar Epps character was incredibly self loathing and self pitying. For most of the movie if not the entire movie, he walks around with a huge chip on his shoulder. He's the type of guy that pulls the race card any time someone goes against him (hence the relationship between him and the professor when the professor gives him a bad grade). Most of the movie he walks around with so much anger instead of dealing with life with a calm head.

Ice Cube's character was a more annoying version of him. He reminded me of the type of douchebag who felt he was wiser than everyone else without really knowing what he was talking about. And honestly, him and Busta Rhymes' character were a bunch of douche rockets.

I also think it's unfair to put Kirsten and Taryn on your list. If anything Kirsten is one of the most sympathetic characters. And why is being sexually confused considered a bad thing to you? I feel like that's something most young people go through and there's nothing wrong with that. And I didn't see her as stupid but maybe extremely introverted but that's just me.

And as far as Taryn, she's the reason Kirsten comes to terms with her rape. Also you can't convert a person to be gay.