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June 23, 2008

Leave it to a former rockcrit -- and a McClatchy employee (the company just cut 10% of its workforce nationally) -- to come up with an eloquent essay on the decline of the newspaper industry and the ascension of the Internet. Online people, myself included, have been saying for years that the Web should be first in news priority, and that journalists shouldn't think that they work for newsPAPER companies, but instead NEWS companies. Maybe, coming from an august writer like Leonard Pitts, a world-class columnist at the Miami Herald, this idea will start to sink in with those of you who still have ink in your veins. He sounds like speeches and conversations I heard going on a decade ago, but better late than never, I say:
We still tend to regard our websites as ancillary to our primary mission of producing newspapers. But I submit that our primary mission is to report and comment upon the news and that it is the newspaper itself that has become ancillary. So maybe we should regard the Internet not as an extra thing we do, but as the core thing we do.
June 21, 2008

Growing up, I didn't think much about it, but seeing old Westerns now, it's amazing to me that movies got away with casting white people in the roles of American Indians or Mexicans -- almost always as "bad guys." Seeing these movies today, you could tell they're not ethnic actors, and could almost see the smudges from the makeup smeared over their faces and hands. It wasn't any more sophisticated than the blackface makeup white actors wore to play African American roles in silent movies or the early talkies, wide-eyed, shiny black visages like masks, singing about "mammy." You don't see that any more, at least, not with blacks and Latinos. Hollywood also has a long and tiresome tradition of "yellowface" -- having Caucasian actors portray ethnic Asian roles. And, unfortunately, you can still see that on the big screen today. The most famous early examples of yellowface are the various actors from Warner Oland and Boris Karloff to Peter Sellers who played the evil, inscrutable Fu Manchu; Oland and Sidney Toler as the detective Charlie Chan in a series of hit movies; and the German-born, diminutive Peter Lorre as the Japanese detective Mr. Moto in another string of movies. Even the great Katharine Hepburn, one of my favorite actresses, put on yellowface, to play a Chinese woman in the 1944 movie "Dragon Seed."
June 21, 2008

The Boulder Daily Camera today ran a front-page story about the recent study about Asian Americans and the model minority myth. The study found that because Asians are not all high-achieving academic wiz-kids, and that the diversity of the Asian communities (we're not just Japanese, Chinese and Koreans, but also Laotian, Hmong, Cambodian, Indian, Filipino, Vietnamese, and so on) and the range of generations from first-generation immigrants with poor English skills to fourth, fifth or sixth generations of Americans, leads to a reality that's less modeled and more uneven. Not all Asian Americans go into the top Ivy-League schools, either: a growing number is opting to go to community colleges instead of major universities. The article quotes CU professor Daryl Maeda, an assistant professor of ethnic studies:
Another part of the “model minority myth” — that Asian-American students should perform well in science, technology, engineering and math fields — also can be unfair to students, Maeda said. “Some are great at music or English,” Maeda said. “And if they don’t live up to the model minority myth it puts an extra pressure on them, giving them the idea that they somehow aren’t good enough in their endeavors.”
June 18, 2008

It's been a couple of weeks, but congratulations are in order for Amanda Igaki, the winner of the "Miss Asian American Colorado" pageant held in Denver May 31. Now, before you recoil at the thought of a beauty pageant, rest assured that this pageant, organized by a crew of young people led by the energetic and entrepreneurial Annie Guo, whose family publishes Asian Avenue Magazine, was not a traditional beauty pageant. The most obvious proof that this wasn't a typical pageant was the lack of a swimsuit competition. In fact, although Igaki was crowned "Miss Asian American Colorado" at the end of the four-hour event (which felt much shorter because it was so interesting), it didn't feel like a competition between the 26 contestants at all. These women had become close friends, like a small, tight sorority.
June 17, 2008

Update 18 June: News media are reporting Tiger Woods will miss the rest of this year's golf season because he needs more surgery on his left knee. That's a big bummer, but not surprising, given how he grimaced after many of his tee-offs. I almost winced with empathy pain as he twisted his knee each time. Everyone's favorite hapa/Asian American, Tiger Woods, is important enough news to accomplish a pretty impressive feat. I'm not just talkin' clinching the U.S. Open Championship in a nail-biting last round and sudden death match against Rocco Mediate. I'm talkin' about pushing up the publication date of one of the most popular magazines in the country, Sports Illustrated. MinOnline.com reports that the July 23 issue of the mag, which had been scheduled to hit the newsstands with a Woods cover on Wednesday, was rushed to the printers early, and is already out, one day after the golf superstar's victory.
June 15, 2008

Here's a blog post I just came cross, from AdAge.com, that adds to the dialogue on the use of the word "uppity" to describe African Americans. Pepper Miller points out that some African Americans take the use of "elitist" to describe Barack Obama as code for "uppity":
As another example, WVON-AM Chicago talk-show host Perri Small nailed the rationale for black frustration over charges of Sen. Obama's "elitist" attitude during an appearance on CNN last month. Ms. Small explained that many in the black community took "elitist" to mean "uppity," a particularly troublesome translation as the term "uppity" dates back to pre-Civil Rights and the Jim Crow era. Despite progress in the black community, "uppity" continues to be perceived as code for blacks who do not "stay their place."
June 10, 2008

Stereotypes sometimes are based on a kernel of truth, but they're twisted and blown out of proportion and used out of context. Sometimes, stereotypes can even be "good" in that they're not negative images. But trust me, a stereotype is still a stereotype. It's a generalization that's not universally true, and even the good ones are impossible to live up to. Asian Americans are very familiar with the stereotype of the "model minority." It goes like this: Asian Americans are smart, quiet, dependable, hard-working and never complain. Asian American kids are smart, quiet, straight-A students, play classical music on instruments like piano, cello and violin, and never complain. It's all hogwash, of course... but it's based on that kernel of truth. Asian Americans were known for a hundred years for successfully assimilating into mainstream American society. It never completely worked because we could never be accepted racially into the mainstream like European Americans could, but Asian immigrants and their families worked hard to become economically successful in America. But a brand-new report published by New York University, the College Board and Asian American educators and community leaders found that the idea of "model minority" is a myth, and that the APA (Asian Pacific American) population is as diverse and no more homogeneous than the rest of America.
“Certainly there’s a lot of Asians doing well, at the top of the curve, and that’s a point of pride, but there are just as many struggling at the bottom of the curve, and we wanted to draw attention to that,” said Robert T. Teranishi, the N.Y.U. education professor who wrote the report, “Facts, Not Fiction: Setting the Record Straight.”
June 9, 2008

Clint and Spike are having a spat. (from Gawker.com) File this under "you're too sensitive" if you want, but I think people of color notice these types of media mistakes because they reflect, deep-down, America's lack of evolution on the diversity front. From Gawker a few days ago: an MSNBC reporter described Spike Lee as "uppity" because of his back-and-forth spat with Clint Eastwood over the lack of African American soldiers represented on his two films about the World War II battle for Iwo Jima, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima." When Lee's criticism, which he made when he was at the Cannes Film Festival in May, was published, Eastwood responded that Lee should "shut his face." I linked to the Gawker story in my Facebook page, and this morning I got an IM from a friend in New York, Peter V, who said he didn't get what the fuss was about. "Forgive my ignorance - but is 'uppity' a racial slur? I missed that one," he said. I thought about it, because I had immediately linked to the Gawker piece, but upon reflection, he was right "uppity" in itself is not an offensive word. It's the historical context that I was responding to. "In itself, no," I replied. "But someone in the national media should know the loaded nature of using the word when referring to a black man.... She may not have meant anything by it, but shame on her. It has hundreds of years of hate and hangings behind it..." As I explained in a follow-up email, the parallel, for me, is that I grew up hearing the phrase "sneaky Japs" -- all my life, from other kids in school, on the playground, at work (back in the day, when workplaces were less enlightened) and elsewhere, from all ages.