You choose — triggering, tokenism or erasure

Jennifer (Mixed Race America): Tami, this is an interesting dilemma, and timely since I just taught a film called Slaying the Dragon in my class, which is about media representations (largely mis-representations) of Asian American women throughout the history of Hollywood. I’m so used to Asian Americans being absent from popular culture that erasure seems par for the course. And I suppose compared to what you describe above, I’ll take erasure or absenteeism or invisibility over tokenism or blatant stereotypes that trigger the desire of poking my eyes out or slamming my head into my television set because I can’t believe the awful stereotypes/representation of Asian people on TV. Although usually, in the case of Asian Americans, we don’t need to be represented, visually, in order to be maligned. Case in point: I’ve noticed that on sitcoms, especially, it’s enough to make a passing reference about Asians (especially Chinese–we really have a thing about the menace of China right now) without needing their bodies to be seen on-screen. In a recent episode of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, the chauvinist character, Barney, talks about how he had sex with a Chinese girl and then 2 hours later he felt like having sex again — apparently a reference to the idea that after you eat Chinese food you feel hungry again in 2 hours [Aside: As someone who is Chinese American, I've NEVER understood this joke/stereotype and have no idea what its origins are]. Anyway, it’s a throwaway line, and not even a very good joke, but here you have simultaneously an erasure (no Asian American female bodies are in sight when this joke is being made), tokenism (Barney’s mention of sleeping with a Chinese woman seems to be unusual–something to be noted as different from the usual white women he sleeps with), as well as triggering (Asian American female bodies rendered as the butt of a sexist and racist joke). All of which is to say, that at the end of the day it’d be nice if that joke wasn’t made at all–which means I guess I’d opt for total erasure, although I think what we’d all really like is to actually have some smart, well-rounded characters who are three-dimensional people of color in popular culture, rather than just the standard “token” best friend (and why IS it that there’s only ever ONE black/Asian/Latino friend in a group of white people???!!!!)

Latoya (Racialicious):

In your consumption of media, which is better–to be triggered, to be a token or to be erased?

Ugh, these are the choices? I would say none of the above, but I also read my way through most of the L.A. Banks stories just so I could see a multiracial team of demon hunters and vamp slayers. So, ideally, I would just keep finding gems like Octavia Butler’s Fledgling and build myself a little cocoon of POC focused fantasy worlds…but that still leaves aside the other major worlds I like to relax into. My three favorite urban fantasy writers are Marjorie M. Liu, Kelley Armstrong, and Kim Harrison – I have given up hope on decent characters of color. They always do something to mess it up, or the characters are so background, they almost escape notice. Same with my big fantasy world builders – it took Jacqueline Carey three novels to stop exoticing her token POCs, and I can’t really place any brown skinned George R.R. Martin characters, outside of Khal Drogo.

I can agree that it completely sucks to be tokenized. And to be hit with this ridiculous wall of stereotype every time a POC shows up on screen. However, I’m not willing to advocate for just not being there at all. I remember, as a teen, relating to a lot of the black depictions that were on the small screen. For example, I just rewatched the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers for the first time since I was about 9, and HOLY STEREOTYPES BATMAN! I know we crack that the Asian girl had to be the Yellow Ranger and the Black dude had to be the Black Ranger – but damn. It’s as if some studio head was like “Is that how black people act? No blacker! Make him hip-hop fight! Don’t forget sassy slang!” So it is cringeworthy now.

Page 3 of 5 | Previous page | Next page