Racism in the T.V. Show Lost Essay

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WRIT1301
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Final Paper Assignment
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ROUGH DRAFT

In television, and almost every other medium the media uses today, there’s a fine line between promoting and properly integrating diversity, and exploiting it. In this paper, I will be critically analyzing the hit television show, Lost, and how in leans more towards exploitation because of its incorporation of token characters from different races and genders, which hurts more than helps our society, particularly American society, in its goal of expelling racism and sexism. The racial and gender stereotypes displayed in the hit television …show more content…
The Lost cast does have a wide range of people and cultures, but not as many as you would expect. In the graph below you can see the racial statistic of the main cast on the show.

Figure 1. Race Statistic in Cast of T.V. Show Lost

As you can see, two-thirds of the cast is white. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are all American though, which they aren’t. There are two cast members from Britain and one from Australia, but even after considering country of origin, the percentage of white Americans on the show is disproportionate to what it should be if the show was trying to make the statistics realistic. This next graph shows the new percentages with ones country of origin is taken into account.

Figure 2. Continent of Origin Statistics in the Cast of T.V. Show Lost

In the chapter “What’s Your Flava?” in the book Interrogating Postfeminism, Sarah Bamet-Weiser explores the issue of race in terms of how it is displayed in the media, particularly to children and young adults. She gives an example of a new doll being sold to children called Flava’s. They racially eclectic, but unfortunately they go about promoting diversity in the wrong fashion. Instead of solely displaying just different racial groups, they play up the culture behind each one of them. Below is a picture of these dolls, in which you can clearly see this occurring.

The doll on the right hand side on the front row is obviously a black woman, but
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