racial issues in lost please give me your opinions :)

hello, my name is geneva. I am doing my media coursework on racial issues in lost. I would like to know if any of you have any view on how the characters are represented according to their ethnicity. Playing to steriotypes? Has this affected anyone's opinions? This can be Korean, Nigerian, Black-American, Iraqi, Scottish, English or Latin American. Also have any of you read the interview with Harold Perrineau, who plays micheal, where he speaks about is departure from the show? I would really like to hear people's views on this please

I haven't noticed any characters being negatively represented according to their ethnicity. But of course this subject to one's personal interpretation.

Some people might look at LOsT and say "Here we go again, another American TV show where the main character(s) are white."

I guess Hurley's mom would be considered a stereotypical Latin American mother,
because she is a devout Catholic and overbearing towards Hugo.

Early in the show the relationship between Jin and Sun as husband and wife would be a stereotypical one of husbands and wives in the Korean culture. And I guess the same for Sun and her fathers relationship.

There are many different ethnicities represented on LOsT and some of the characters may be stereotypes. But I can't think of an example (not to say there isn't one) that effected my opinion of the show. I guess what I am saying is that Hurley's mom may be stereotyped but I don't think the show is trying to tell me that this is how ALL Latin American mothers behave.

anyways.... hope this helps with you coursework

10:05 AM

geneva123- good luck with your interesting course work

Racial issues are often assumed to become apparent only in negative contexts, like only when racist or discriminating utterance takes place- and I guess that's why we often miss noticing its many forms other than stereotypes etc. I think LOST narrative overall makes a good job of presenting stereotypical look at 'other' people without being stereotypical itself. Certainly not in some didactic fashion, it shows the shortcomings of discriminating, stereotypical look based on cultural and ethnic differences, and does so without affirming a world-view as such.

Some of the examples I can think of: Many of the nick-names Sawyer had for Sayid, especially in the First Season, making references to 1) Sayyid being a Iraqi, thus the illogical short-cut that he must be an Arab, if so a Muslim, if so a religious fundamentalist, if so a terrorist, if so a threat to the rest of the survivors. 2) (but also) quite the mistaken yet common expression of ethnic other-ing. In some flashback, the audience saw other occasions in which Sayyid experienced similar discrimination at the airport, before taking the Oceanic 815.

First or second reason, I can't remember, Michael, in one of the many disputes he then had with Jin, explained the conflict to Walt with the implication that Koreans don't like Black people. Again in later unfolding of the events, Michael and Jin had quite a strong bond established which surpassed Michael's ethnic prejudices. Michael was among the first (with Hurley) to acknowledge Jin's ethnicity on positive terms: He (Michael as well as Hurley) would correct another when Jin gets to be thrown into the melting pot of "Asian" or "Chinese" during the conversation.

Like folie a deux wrote above, Sun & Jin's relation is also important. In the very beginning of the show when we, as well as the rest of the survivors, had little insight to S&J's history (a lack of sense heightened with occasional lack of subtitles as to what Jin says), the producers seem to have calculated an expected reaction of "yet another case of the authoritarian Eastern man and the submissive Asian woman" everytime the two were portrayed together on the island. (That's how the woman who saw S&J's coffee accident at the airport seem to have interpreted Sun's embarrassment and eagerness to fix it.) Following episodes proved that nothing of the sort was the case with those rare unsubtitled dialogues or passionate quarrels between S & J. It was a very human tragedy built around their very human love, that explained it all, and not something essentially Asian, or Korean.

I think those binaries of Survivors vs Others, Others vs Dharma, Dharma vs The Hostiles could be read as an abstract yet larger presentation of such logic of other-ing, thus its limitedness. I'm not at all saying they would be metaphors though: obviously, with each of these groups there's a history of events and agendas real to the overall LOST narrative of the island. But lack of knowledge, prejudice and power struggle is what's common to these binaries and other-ing thoughts of many kinds, huh?

One more surprise of the show that's somehow related to the subject: Sawyer gives 'redneck' a good name..