Category Archives: race

NMA.TV responds to US college student’s racist video, “Why I’d hate to be Asian”

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Taiwan’s Next Media Animation, which produces animated commentary on news events, has become a reliable source for grins after every big international news story for their… uh, slant on world affairs.

This time they’ve responded to a U.S. college student Samuel Hendrickson’s racist rant on YouTube, Why I’d hate to be Asian” (which has since been removed, but you can read his points on 8 Asians’ response). His video evoked memories of Alexandra Wallace, who produced an offensive video after the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami that made disparaging remarks, among other things, about Asian students at UCLA who were calling their families in japan to see if they were OK.

NMA’s response had me laughing out loud, though to be honest, it traffics in Hendrickson-style racist stereotypes by showing white women in Indiana to all be big fat farmers. My favorite responses are to “Most Asians look alike” and Hendrickson’s comment about pot-smoking Asians (the point he makes is that smoking pot makes Asians’ “Chink-eye” so small they look closed). (Language NSFW…) Also, NMA’s counter to Hendrickson’s crack about sweat shops is a little too approving of the reality of sweatshops.

It’s been a bad week for anti-Asian racism:
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Sign a petition to remove racist “Make Me Asian” app from Google’s app store

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Make <Me Asian and Make Me Indian Google appsUPDATE, JAN. 17: It took longer than I thought, but Google finally removed the app from its Play Store. Now, back to your regularly scheduled blog post…

Phil Yu got pissed off about this on his Angry Asian Man blog back in November, but CNN just noticed the story is still simmering on the interwebs. So I downloaded it for posterity, to use as an example in lectures about racist stereotypes.

“Make Me Asian” (and the related “Make Me Indian,” both shown at left) is an Android mobile app that you can download for free from the Google Play app store.

Say what? Yes, it’s true.
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PSY performs on American Music Awards, and racist haters come out on Twitter

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PSY, the Korean pop sensation whose viral hit video, “Gangnam Style,” has been viewed alomst 800 million times on YouTube (that’s the official video, never mind the countless other users’ uploads and all the spoofs and tributes), closed out the American Music Awards on Nov. 18. In a savvy, surprising and ultimately, ironic, collaboration, the 35-year-old PSY (real name: Park Jae-sang) was joined for a mashup of his hit with MC Hammer’s “2 Legit 2 Quit” (above) and brought the house down, with celebs and fans (Hammer too) mimicking his horsey-cowboy dance moves.

Within minutes, blowback flew out over Twitter. Most of the messages were gut reactions to the irony of a song sung mostly in Korean being featured on the “American” Music Awards. Here’s one example: “Seriously psy is closing the show?? It’s called the AMERICAN music awards not the Korean..” and “I’m pretty sure this is called the American Music Awards #gobacktoAsia.” (Okay, the “gobacktoAsia” hashtag is pretty offensive — I’ve had that yelled at me in the past.)

The fact that the tweeters didn’t catch the awesomeness of the irony and only expressed their xenophobia and ignorance was disappointing but not surprising.

Some of the tweets, though, were flatout racist, like “Why is chink PSY at the American music awards he doesn’t make American music what is going on” and “are you kidding this chink is on the AMA’s? #sad #keywordAMERICAN.” You can see a sampling of offensive tweets at the Public Shaming Tumblr blog.
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Does Buddhism have a diversity problem?

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Bronze Buddha at Todaiji Temple, Nara, Japan

This bronze statue of Buddha, at 15 meters (almost 50 feet, or five stories) tall, is the largest bronze statue of Buddha in the world. It sits in one of the largest wooden structures in the world, Todaiji Temple in Nara, Japan. I shot this photo during a 2011 trip.

An excellent, thoughtful and thought-provoking article on Huffington Post about the lack of diversity in the Buddhism community in the U.S., “Buddhist ‘People Of Color Sanghas,’ Diversity Efforts Address Conflicts About Race Among Meditators” got me pondering about race and religion. The article, by Jaweed Kaleem, HuffPo’s National Religion Reporter, focuses on Buddhist groups throughout the country but specifically in Seattle, which are almost entirely run by older white practitioners of Buddhism and meditation. This lack of diversity, Kaleem says, has led to a subculture of Buddhist “sanghas,” or groups, of color — white folk not allowed.

Here in Seattle, one of the least racially diverse cities with one of the largest Buddhist communities in the country, a controversial movement in American Buddhism is forming. A handful of exclusive “people of color” Buddhist groups have started to meet each week, far away from the long-established — and almost entirely white — major Buddhist meditation centers that have dominated the Pacific Northwest’s well-known Buddhist scenes. Many members, who have until now shied away from meditation and Buddhism, say practicing away from the white majority, among whom they say they don’t feel welcome, has spiritually empowered them — and they wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s part of the same demographic tsunami that washed away hopes of a Republican White House and Senate a few weeks ago, but scaled to spirituality. As someone who often enters a room looking for people of color as a measure of diversity, I certainly understand one black woman’s reaction in the article when she attended an all-white Buddhist group’s meeting — she felt she didn’t fit in.
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Jeff Yang in WSJ deconstructs “model minority” & “New Jews” stereotypes of Asian Americans

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Gil Asakawa cowboy

This is me, being a typical American kid in the early ’60s … in Tokyo, Japan where my family lived at the time.

The “model minority” myth applied to Asian Americans has been a persistent trope since the phrase’s first use in 1965 by a sociologist in a New York Times column that used it to face off Japanese Americans against African Americans.

The not-so-subtle underlying message was, look at this Asian minority, they went through hell during World War II (the imprisonment of more than 110,000 people of Japanese descent in American concentration camps) and faced racism for most of a century, yet they work hard, don’t complain and succeed as students and employees.

In contrast, of course, blacks were marching and protesting and causing white America a whole bunch of angst at the time by demanding equality and fair treatment.

The model minority canard pops up every decade in mainstream media, like an insane cultural Wack-a-Mole game. In 1997 TIME magazine ran a story about “Those Asian-American Whiz Kids” with a group of young AAPI student overachievers beaming from the cover. Every once in a while, a story or report acknowledges the lie of the myth: In 2008, a New York University study did just that.

But then some other report adds fuel to the mythic fire. Earlier this summer, the Pew Research Center published a much-hyped report titled “The Rise of Asian Americans,” that concluded that Asian Americans are now “the highest-income, best-educated and fastest-growing racial group in the United States.” That study caused a lot of discussion in the AAPI blogosphere, and disappointed me, because I generally think Pew’s demographic studies are unassailably pure. This tie, I felt Pew swallowed the Kool-Aid and found evidence that bolstered that view without working very hard to dig deeper.

Now, the idea of Asians excelling in academics is back in the news with the Supreme Court’s review of Affirmative Action in the “Fisher Vs. University of Texas at Austin” case.

And this week, the Wall Street Journal posted a commentary by Lee Siegel, “The Rise of the Tiger Nation” that not only ascribes to the model minority notion, but picks up another theme that’s been aired on occasion: That Asians are the new Jews.
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