Response 8: George Washington

In statistical analysis, there’s a method of choosing subjects for a study called stratified sampling. One of the biggest problems with statistics is that it’s hard to get a sample of people that represents the population. There are always minority groups that are likely to be missed. When you take a stratified sample you make sure to pick people from each group. This concept can and should be applied when studying or creating media. There are a lot of kinds of stories, and a lot of kinds of people. Our media says something about who we are, and it’s important for us to make our media representative of our world.

“George Washington” is not set in a city. The main character is not a superhero, though he aspires to be one. Most of the major characters are not white, and none of them have much by way of worldly possessions or status. The storyline is atypical as well. Most of the lead actors were not professional actors, and I doubt very much that the setting was props built in a studio. The portrayal of the story had an artful sense of reality to it, and it focused on parts of our world and our country that we rarely see represented in media.

An ecosystem with very little diversity is rarely stable or healthy. Neither is a culture. We need lots of kinds of people, and we need lots of kinds of stories. I think this film is a good example of something that steps outside of the norm, but it’s also just one kind of movie. In class we watched clips from a movie set in India, and another set in New Zealand—or at least in Maori culture. Before we watched the Maori one, I was considering diversity to be exclusively unfamiliar things. However, my family has lived in Hawaii for the past five years, and Polynesian cultures are very familiar to me. The setting of the Maori clip, including the lighting, building style, and accents reminded me of home. So diversity isn’t necessarily what is unfamiliar. My home town of Laie, Hawaii, which is where BYU Hawaii is, is probably one of the most diverse places on the planet. If you go to any sort of event there and look out over the audience, you will see literally every skin color in the world. It’s a unique place, because there is no racial majority. There’s prejudice, like there is everywhere, but the level of diversity, I believe, makes the town stronger. I think it’s the same with films, and I think our national culture would become stronger if we portrayed a wider variety of characters in our media.