The Reality of Diversity 03-11-16

A mother once described how her three children responded to a big spider’s web in the garden: The first child examined the web and expressed wonder at how the spider wove it. The second child worried about where the spider was hiding. The third child exclaimed, “Oh, look! A trampoline!”

The way we see and respond to life is so different. It’s almost as though diversity is hard-wired into human beings (though we have a big tendency to obscure and forget this reality).

Sony came out with a creative advertisement in 2005 for their new LCD television, the Bravia. They wanted to emphasize a very simple message: the color you see on these screens will be “like no other.” So the Danish director Nicolas Fuglsig, along with the creative team from Sony, shot a movie of 250,000 balls of every color bouncing down a steep street in San Francisco. The visual result was brilliant, stunning and dazzling!

The degree of dazzling brilliance is directly in proportion to the availability and maximization of the entire range of colors. So Sony wants the public to know that their advanced technology capitalizes on this reality and makes the viewing experience unprecedentedly appealing. “Color like no other.”

And they chose to shoot the ad in San Francisco, a city known for its rich diversity in numerous levels: from the unique blend of old world and contemporary architecture to the cultural melding and morphing pot of ethnicities and lifestyles. For example, typical of this reality is when Temple United Methodist Church befriended a Ukrainian refugee woman who works in San Francisco’s most traditional German restaurant, which is owned by an Arab who is married to a Chinese woman who runs a pizza restaurant managed by a Russian. All of these differences and more make San Francisco one of the top five most visited cities in the world. And it certainly reflects our global economy.

In a Big Mac hamburger sold overseas in one of the 100-plus countries where McDonald’s has a restaurant, the onions are from the U.S., the beef patties from Hungary, the lettuce from Ukraine, the bun from Russia, the pickles and special sauce from Germany, the sesame seeds from Mexico, and the cheese from Portugal. This is what one author describes as a “polyglobal world,” (Sweet, p. 369) the globalization of economic and cultural life, which means the subsequent loss of Western hegemony and a lessening of the leverage of the Western authority over the rest of the planet. We are fast recognizing the need to embrace our planetary diversity.

Sony’s marketing mantra for the Bravia TV–“color like no other”–is becoming the description of American culture where some 10 percent of the population (28.4 million people as of the 2000 census) was born in another country, the highest share since 1940, and some 13 percent speak another language at home besides English. The population of more than 50 of the 100 largest U.S. cities is made up predominantly of immigrants and ethnic minorities.

And old ethnic categories no longer work. Tiger Woods, the most famous golfer in the world, calls himself, not African-American, but “Cablinasian” (a combination of Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Asian). For the first time, the United States has a president of color: Barak Obama, whose father is Kenyan and whose mother is Kansan and who grew up in Indonesia (attending a Muslim school) and Hawaii. America is a truly colorful place and simply reflective of life on the entire planet.