Gil Asakawa's Nikkei View | halloween
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Yesterday I was heartened to see the news that the Cleveland Indians Major League Baseball team is going to stop using its blatantly racist caricature of an American Indian, "Chief Wahoo," on its uniforms starting the 2019 season. The leering cartoon character is so obnoxious that my wife Erin has included it for years in a workshop she gives on racist icons in American culture from Aunt Jemima to the Frito Bandito. But this being American in 2018, the philosophy of yin and yang means that for this bit of good news (the chief will be benched from uniforms but not from team merchandise) there is a balancing blast of bad news. That came at practically the same time, when I saw a post on Facebook sharing a godawful item from Walmart.com, a "Kids China Boy Costume," complete with a photo of a young white boy dressed in an inappropriate, culturally appropriate and inexcusably phony polyester suit with baggy pants, a Mandarin-collared shirt with Chinese-style knot buttons, and a matching hat with an attached queue of braided hair (which is sold separately to "improve your costume").

Racist "Fee Ling yu Variation of the racist "Fee Ling yuI'm starting to dread Hallowe'en. It seems like every year, there's some new offensive costume that makes racist fun of Asians or perpetuates a racial stereotype. I wrote about this back in 2002, when a really sick costume called "Kung Fool" was sold. Today I read AngryAsianMan.com and saw that mainstream America once again thinks it's cool to manufacture a caricature of Asians into a mass-market costume: One that's even available on Amazon.com. The Fee Ling Yu mask is disgusting -- the mask itself is bad enough, but there are variations being sold and shown online that include a different cap and thick round glasses. I grew up with this image of myself and others like me. It's incredible and sad and horrifying... downright scary... that I still have to see this now, decades later. Some of the annual parade of costumes simply perpetuate a stereotype, like geisha costumes and wigs that are standard fare.