By Arturo R. García

A number of ads during the Super Bowl Sunday night focused on the good things about Detroit and the auto industry. But the worst commercial of the day, aimed at Michigan voters, didn’t make the national airwaves.

The ad shown above for Republican state senatorial candidate Peter Hoekstra hinged its attack on incumbent Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) on Orientalism. The actress, playing a “Chinese national,” says:

Thank you, Michigan Senator Debbie Spenditnow. Debbie spend so much American money. You borrow more and more from us. Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good. We take your jobs. Thank you, Debbie Spenditnow.

The commercial, slated to run for two weeks, pointed viewers to its own website, of course, covered in a matching decor, with the video displayed front-and-center. The only mention of any of Stabenow’s policies comes at the very bottom of the page.

This marks the second major political ad in little more than a year to use xenophobia as a primary tactic, after Citizens Against Government Waste’s “Chinese Professor” spot from October 2010:

Hoekstra defended his commercial in an interview with WMMT-TV before the game, saying, “If it’s got their attention we must be doing something right.”

Unfortunately for Hoekstra, it’s getting the wrong kind of attention, too: not only is the ad getting rightly pilloried in media circles, but at least one in-state consultant within his own party, Nick De Leeuw, has criticized the spot, saying, “Stabenow has got to go. But shame on Pete Hoekstra for that appalling new advertisement. Racism and xenophobia aren’t any way to get things done.”

Funny thing, though: even though Hoekstra’s ad accuses Stabenow of letting jobs and money leave their home state, as Politico reports, the commercial wasn’t even filmed in Michigan; it was made in California, something state Democratic party chair Mark Brewer quickly seized upon, calling it “nothing more than a hypocritical attempt at a Hollywood-style makeover.

“The fact is, Pete spends a lot,” Brewer said. “Hoekstra voted for the $700 billion Wall Street bailout and voted for trillions more in deficit spending before quitting Congress to get rich at a Washington, D.C., lobbying firm. Hoekstra is using the big game to play games with Michigan voters, covering up his real record on deficit spending and rigging the rules for the big money insiders he serves.”

By Guest Contributor Anurag Lahiri

During my four months of funemployment after grad school I became hooked on a list of TV shows. A couple of my queer desi friends had been raving about The Chicago Code a while back and when I finally watched it I enjoyed it. So of course when the same friends started tweeting about The Good Wife, and specifically about one character, Kalinda Sharma, I decided to take the hint and marathon it.

The same things drew me to both shows: aside from the suspense and drama, they’re both set in Chicago. As a girl from the Midwest, I enjoy watching a show whose city politics I can relate to.

There is a difference between the two shows though: Chicago Code was mostly special for me because Jennifer Beals was in it and, for an L Word fan, she will always be Bette Porter. Yes, even if she is playing a superintendent of a police department. On the other hand, I will gladly embrace Archie Panjabi as Sharma, a queer, desi, private investigator on The Good Wife.

When there are so few reasonable representations of South Asians in the mainstream media, my first reaction was pure excitement to see Panjabi playing a queer character. I am still extremely impressed that a TV network as mainstream as CBS came up with this character when many more underground producers haven’t been successful, in my opinion. Furthermore, the show hints at the complexity of South Asians with only one desi character/actress, which is more than shows like Outsourced have done even with a whole cast.

On the show, Kalinda’s personality is presented as being multifaceted; she is tough and opinionated. While these attributes are not often paired with Asian women on TV, they are often the reality for women who grow up being underestimated and under-appreciated.

Kalinda’s position–the very opinionated, privately queer, guarded desi girl–resonates very loudly with me:  when I was interning as a social worker in a criminal justice setting, much like her, I tried to stay private while others shared stories about their personal lives. Staff at my internship made heteronormative assumptions about me. The show challenges such assumptions about brown women, and people in general, while offering reasons for why women, regardless of sexual orientation, are often private in the workplace.

While I don’t necessarily believe that Kalinda’s work–digging up dirt for her boss’ law firm, Lockhart/Gardner–was ever underestimated, I would argue she was still under-appreciated. She regularly goes above and beyond to help the firm, yet she struggles to ask for a raise. I know that it takes a lot of thick skin and hard work to prove oneself in that type of environment.

I admire Kalinda for discussing race at work and her immigrant family background, yet refusing to be tokenized. She uses her knowledge and experience to enhance her work and her job, yet she remains in control of her identity. It’s very easy to be turned into a token when you speak up as a minority, so I have looked at Kalinda to see how she does it.

In real life, this balance is very difficult and tiring to maintain. In the U.S. it is especially difficult because South Asian women struggle to find appropriate mentors in the workplace. There are some peer support systems for women in professions like engineering, medicine and law, but it is a struggle if you feel you have no one to turn to for advice and a mentor. Being able to visually relate to a brown woman on TV is helpful for me and, I assume, other desi women who are trying to establish themselves in a workplace.

Aside from her professional character, I am also impressed with the treatment of Kalinda as a personal and sexual character. Kalinda’s sex life is exhibited as much as the other characters and, while the manner of it tip-toes around exoticism at times, it is impressive considering the frequent shaming of brown women’s sexuality on TV. The show speaks to me by creating a South Asian character in the media that does not feel the responsibility to prove her sexuality and womanhood to people. While Kalinda confidently told one interested woman that she “follows through” when she flirts, she pulled away from another as soon as she found out she is married.

I’m still struggling with this unnecessary need to validate my sexuality, since queer desis’ existence has so often been denied and mistreated. Healthy and realistic media representation, like in The Good Wife, can certainly help queer women like me. I now have a character on TV who is reminding me, each episode, to just be. These types of reminders help us come into our smoother, more natural identities. They also remind others that there is more than just tragic queer desis living double lives, and triumphant queer desis marching in Mumbai Pride.

With Kalinda, the show gives the U.S. public a chance to see how an adult desi can be confidently queer whilst handling her imperfections. Her personal vulnerability is not portrayed in a way to make her seem like the “weak Asian girl” archetype, but rather, it is acknowledged as a major part of her complex history. Her vulnerability is always bubbling under her surface, in her extremely rare smiles and tense stature. Her strength is also evident, and it took an extremely dramatic plot twist – which I won’t spoil here – for Kalinda to cry even once. Her mysterious past serves to complicate her character beyond her appearance and challenge the audience. Just like any woman of color, I hope people realize that while Kalinda’s strength is admirable, it may not have been gained out of choice.

From death row to deportation, the show takes on some difficult issues in a way that is accessible. I appreciate watching the characters challenge each other personally and politically, because they each add something meaningful, but I am clearly partial to Kalinda. I’m so accustomed to the media being an exaggeratedly unhealthy version of reality, especially for queer and minority people, so Kalinda makes me really happy. Panjabi has come a long way from playing “standard” desi roles to opening doors for much more.

I can’t stress enough that the following article only represents my opinions as an individual, and are not to be affiliated with any other person, organization or community.

December 15, 2011

Tonight was the march and vigil for Private Danny Chen, who was killed in the army on October 3, 2011. We don’t know how he died. The army is withholding all evidence, which it owes to the family, that could answer this question. What we do know is that he did not die in combat. We know he was constantly harassed and discriminated against by his fellow soldiers for being Chinese. We know some really twisted, violent hazing was committed against him by his superiors, right before he was found dead. We decided to hold a march and vigil because the army is currently carrying out an investigation, and we have to show them that the public is watching and that they cannot get away with another cover-up.

Just yesterday, board members of OCA-NY along with Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez and Council Member Margaret Chin went to the Pentagon to meet with high-ranking army officials, where they made demands that may fundamentally transform the way that hazing and bias crimes are dealt with in the military. We need them to know that the public and the media are watching, and that if they do not meet our demands, we will redirect our campaign to focus on our young men and women who are thinking of enlisting. These young people need to know before they enlist, the Army will not protect them from harm by fellow soldiers.

Before the vigil, we reached out to many organizations to support, and 36 signed onto our cause. We also reached out to Occupy Wall Street because justice and government transparency are in its mission, and we thought we could use the numbers and networks in OWS to bring out more support for our vigil, and we also wanted to show our solidarity with OWS.

So imagine my surprise when protesters from OWS showed up with OWS signs, not to stand with others lining up for the march to Columbus Park in support, but to stand in front of everyone, trying to direct them. These people, who had not, until that very moment, put in one bit of effort into organizing this action, who had no idea what the plan was, who had no idea who we were or who the family was, decided that they were going to make this an OWS event.

Conflict erupted when one of the OWS-affiliated protesters came with a giant Communist Party of China flag. This white man decided that he was entitled to represent us, at this protest for an American soldier, with a flag that has been used by this country to vilify the Chinese American community. When people began asking him not to demonstrate that flag because it was not the purpose of the event and we were in no way representing China or political parties, he began screaming at us about how we were ANTI-COMMUNIST and trying to take away his first amendment rights. We told him that Danny Chen was an American soldier and we wanted to respect the family and their wishes, but he continued screaming violent accusations at us at the top of his lungs and disrupting the event, until one of Danny Chen’s family members, on the verge of tears, finally convinced him to leave.

Then I overheard another OWS protester, who had earlier been trying to direct the protesters, give a video interview, and heard him saying, ever so solemnly, “They don’t want me here.” My question is: who are we and who are you? How do you expect to be welcomed as one of “us” when you have, from the beginning, made every effort to set yourself apart? Why do you think that you as an individual should be primary in this march for Private Danny Chen and his family? Why are you here giving video interviews?

Another white OWS protester began trying to use the human mic to direct the protest, and told me that I shouldn’t be using the blowhorn because the cops were going to take it away. I told her that, no, we had a parade permit and sound permit, which was why the police were there clearing the streets for our march. She looked confused and stopped yelling.

OWS protesters often make it seem like they are the birth of social justice activism, that they are here to teach us how to protest because none of us know what the fuck we are doing and need their wealth of experience to help us out. I was not at all surprised when that woman so naturally assumed that she, as a white woman, knew better than me – she thought that I had found a blowhorn somewhere and decided to play around with it. It didn’t occur to her that we had been planning this for weeks and thinking critically about every step, that it was led by a civil rights organization that has been at work for decades, that we had applied for 4 different kinds of permits so that our event could safely and effectively achieve its purpose.

The actions of these OWS protesters showed that they were at the march and vigil, not to show their support for Danny Chen’s family or the ongoing work on their case, but to provoke and garner attention for themselves and their brand, and then try to turn our strategic work and planning into a nonsensical, self-righteous tantrum. They acted like tourists on vacation in the social justice world, and our efforts and long-term goals were expendable in light of their self-interested pursuit of an interesting experience.

This is the problem I’ve always had with OWS—that it was a movement that came to earth as Christ himself, here to save us, to make the history of struggle, and the ongoing social justice work in this country by marginalized communities, irrelevant, and then to take the moral high ground and act as if we were the face of THEIR oppression when we took issue with their tactics.

I understand many people who came to the vigil from OWS were there with the right intentions, and it was great to have their support and solidarity. But these incidents of ignorance from OWS have been way too frequent and predictable to be isolated events. These incidents show that the OWS movement, while creating new opportunities to change the unjust world we live in, is, in many ways, the beloved child of our racist, sexist, intolerant capitalist society.

As marginalized people in this country rise, new forms of oppression are at work – those who have not experienced systemic oppression are claiming it anyway, turning social justice on its head and diluting the messages and movements that have been our hearts and souls. I think this quote from the New Jim Crow sheds a lot of light on why OWS emerged the way that it did: “Following the collapse of each system of control, there has been a period of confusion—transition—in which those who are most committed to racial hierarchy search for new means to achieve their goals within the rules of the game as currently defined. It is during this period of uncertainty that the backlash intensifies and a new form of racialized social control begins to take hold.”

I tried to love the movement. Since I wrote about OWS last, I’ve been attending OWS meetings and marches. I reached out to OWS about this action. I tried so hard to understand the movement, to check my own biases and question any negative feelings I had towards it, to engage with it as much as time would allow. I had so many conversations with people in OWS spaces, which usually just left me feeling perplexed, as the basic factors involved in social and economic inequity always seemed to be news to the people I was speaking to or a curious piece of trivia to be quickly passed over, and people would instead start talking to me about things like herbal medicine as if I had any fucking clue, or would say really ignorant things that would leave me feeling attacked.

I deal with ignorant bigots every day and am willing to do so as part of my own commitment to my work, but when bigots come posing as allies and then very dramatically play the martyr when we call out their bullshit, it really derails our ability to do our work.

I now realize that my time cannot be wasted trying to work in spaces that are paralyzed by ignorance. I will continue to engage in my activism using my experiences and empathy to guide the way I choose to live and work. But I’ll choose to do it in spaces where bigotry, drama, and ignorance do not masquerade as the thing I love. And I’ll choose to work with people who join community actions to respect and support those communities, not to objectify and use them as ornaments for their movement bereft of genuine compassion and understanding.

Besides the oppression brought by some OWS protesters, the march and vigil were beautiful. Over 400 people came out, and the interactions were passionate and heartfelt. I am proud to be an Asian American and glad to be involved in the struggle for a military and a world that does not ruthlessly exclude and exterminate those who are different in any way. I feel blessed to have a fierce mentor who, during the meeting with the Pentagon, told the Assistant Secretary of the Army to sit back down when he tried to leave their meeting early, and he actually listened. I think that our capacity for resistance is growing and we are finally feeling empowered and entitled in this country. We have taken far too much shit, and we are unapologetically asking to be seen as fully human. I am excited for the future of our communities and look forward to growing with each other and our true allies, and despite the importance of building relationships with the more enfranchised, we should never have to tolerate that kind of oppression, least of all in the spaces where we are trying to fight it.

Photos courtesy of Kwong Eng

Click here for coverage about the march and vigil.

Editor’s Note: Shortly after this one, Esther wrote a second piece. She wanted to center Danny Chen and the struggle for justice and not OWS. Also, in the time between the articles, eight soliders were charged in the death of Danny Chen, meaning that some progress was made. Click here to read “Private Danny Chen and threats to justice everywhere.” Next time the Chen case surfaces up in the news cycle, we’ll post the full piece here. – LDP

In September, I wrote a piece describing my perspective as a disabled woman of color and psychiatric survivor. I explored how race-specific self-killings are differentially represented by the media to demonstrate how public perceptions of suicide depend on social and political contexts. My intention was to de-sensationalize model minority suicide in order to draw attention to how particular non-white bodies are often presumed to be volatile and violent.

This month, I look more closely at clinical explanations of ethnic minority suicide and respond by citing current non-clinical and community-based anti-racist reflections on the significance of emotional pain and anger.

Before I proceed, I would like to draw attention to how the term suicide is invoked by the viewer rather than the subject of suicide: the neighbor who calls 911 rather than the person exhibiting suspicious behavior. This can have negative repercussions on the “allegedly suicidal” that we don’t often think about. In fact, daily we are surrounded by public campaigns that encourage us to report at-risk behavior with the intention of saving lives: we believe it is our civic duty to do so. This is especially true in communal living environments such as campus residences.

The “peril of help” arises in (1) how we, as the public, determine what is suspicious or at-risk behavior and (2) how our social infrastructure then deals with the people we “call out.” Behavior can be “cut out” of context, of an individual’s life history, when it does not make sense to onlookers, including family, friends, and employers. Behavior might not make sense and alarm us because an individual’s actions are inconsistent with social rules and, furthermore, associated with narratives of harm we are taught to recognize daily by institutions around us. For example cutting is strongly associated with suicide. Seen in the absence of context, most of us would be compelled to stop this action and probably call on professional expertise to intervene and solve what we identify as a threat.

However, a growing number of self-advocacy groups and allies assert that attention-seeking and attempted suicide are professional myths about self-harm. According to Mark Cresswell, these groups critique the underlying pathology and disease assumed with self-harm, despite there being socially acceptable forms of self-harm such as smoking, body modification, and waxing. More importantly, he notes that people with experiences with self-harm identify strongly with the concept of survival. Activists such as Louise Pembroke have spoken about needing to self-injure to stay alive and survive the pain of sexual violence and institutionalization.

Thus, when a mobile crisis intervention team is called because someone appears to be a danger to himself, it is important to reflect on the potentially negative effects this can have on self-harm survivors because of existing mental health laws.

When mobile crisis teams work jointly with the police, the police — regardless of the outcome of an intervention — may keep a record, which can affect civil liberties. According to Ryan Fritsch, legal counsel for the Psychiatric Patient Advocate Office in Ontario, there have been eight recorded cases of non-criminal contact between police and Ontarians with various psychiatric histories appearing in the Department of Homeland Security in 2010. None of this actually benefits the well-being of persons in distress and can create numerous lifelong barriers, all thanks to one phone call. By equating mental health records with violence and criminality, border control has prevented people from traveling and immigrating.

Combined with the criminal justice system’s unsavory history of racial profiling, this link has at times produced deadly results. For instance, in 1997 police shot and killed Edmund Yu after he raised a small (toy?) hammer over his head on a bus in Toronto. Psychiatric survivors in Toronto have remembered Edmund Yu through memorials such as Edmund Place, which provides supportive non-medicalized housing to ex-users of psychiatry, who are typically discriminated against in other forms of housing.

As someone who has a psychiatric history and who identifies as “mad,” my survival hinges upon having a network of loved ones who can approach the subject of distress with an open-mind and willingness to learn about other “rhythms” to our existence — on knowing people who will not assume that X or Y thought or behavior will equate with danger to myself or others. Besides the everyday violence of medical records and police reports, increased suicidality has been associated with the use of various anti-depressant medications, such as the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor fluoxetine.

This kind of evidence complicates the professional consensus that ethnic minorities are at higher risk of suicide in North America and in need of specialized services. McKenzie and Crawford argue that rates of ethnic minority suicide have been consistently higher than those of the majority group in the USA and Australia, especially in areas where there is a lower concentration of ethnic minorities. They suggest this is because of “a relative lack of support by people with similar social situations or the perception of a more hostile social environment,” and that on an individual level “socio-economic stress, thwarted aspirations, racism, acculturation, culture clash with parents, loss of religious affiliation, difficulty with identity formation, and loss of family and community support may have effects on suicide risk.” While I would like to examine these claims carefully in separate post, what concerns me are the solutions that McKenzie and Crawford propose.

They suggest that untreated mental health problems in ethnic minorities (due to factors such as a reluctance to seek services, conflict with services, and poor compliance) exacerbate rates of ethnic minority suicide. They combine the above with “skewed age distribution” towards “younger age groups,” and recommend further investigation of risk factors to develop youth-focused prevention strategies.

The ever-expanding circle of “risk” factors turns an increasing number of people and whole communities into disabled targets of mental health services, and helps to justify psychiatry’s expertise and expansion at the exclusion of suggesting or fostering other kinds of explanations for distress or other types of support for racialized communities. McKenzie and Crawford assume that the community is incapable of developing its own strategies to prevent death and that they have already failed due to second-generation suicides. What if we reconsider rates of “death” beyond sensationalized self-killing and reflect on how we get to live day to day — what Jasbir Puar refers to as the unevenness of our rights to a certain lifespan? For example, poor housing infrastructure changes the everyday bodily comportment of marginalized communities, displacing long-term goals such as education with the immediate need for shelter.

In the context of the myriad ways in which racialized people slowly die, educating “at-risk” individuals redirects us to be happy in conditions that are reasonably unhappy. What possibilities exist for us to grieve this everyday struggle without the imposition of becoming normal — indeed, “civilized” — and okay with our conditions? I don’t have any fast answers. However, I can say that non-clinical modalities such as community acupuncture can illustrate some of the possibilities growing across North America. In an account I shared with Six Degrees Community Acupuncture, I described how community healers who work in solidarity with queer, Indigenous, and people of color political organizing are sensitive toward the bodily labor of resistance and anger, accepting rather than rejecting the need to put our bodies in potentially compromising situations for social change. Here acupuncture has served as a tool to mediate how strong, yet informative emotions register on the body. I am amazed by how acupuncture can be a thread of connectivity between different communities of color who all want alternatives to Western medicine — a source of dialogue.

There have also been non-pathological ways developed by artists and activists to talk about and speak out about our distress, such as Yolo Akili’s perspective on emotional justice. Rather than drawing conclusions about how oppression leads definitively to illness or suicide, Akili encourages people to explore the emotional texture of social inequity by transforming the way that activist work typically occurs. In activist spaces, Akili suggests we challenge misogyny by revealing our feelings and intuition, as a way to begin our intellectual work while at the same time mediating that expression by avoiding hurtful tactics such as interrupting, yelling, and belittling. His objective is to address, but not remove, pain by thoughtfully expressing it within our support networks, which include activist networks.

On the West Coast, there is also Creative Collective Access (CCA serving the Bay Area), a group of disabled queer and trans people of color working to create interdependent care networks. One of their goals is to resist the culture of individualism through resource sharing. Their most recent project is The Living Room Project, a multi-disciplinary space for healing, wellness, art, and youth events — founded by Micah Hobbes, a somatic doula and healer.

Anthropologists such as Miriam Ticktin have begun to trouble how “biology plays in the politics of immigration,” determining who is worthy of citizenship and asylum. Scholars should likewise trouble “psy” technologies (such as the criteria for “competency”), as they are deployed by institutions like mental health and law to determine who has freedom of movement — to determine who is fully human. This relationship between psychiatry and detention, from forced institutionalization to border control, particularly affects the lives of people of color.

Ironically, as social workers and psychologists (many of whom are African American and Asian American themselves) seek to use mental health as a tool to fund anti-racist community services, their research fortifies an ever-growing body of knowledge about race-specific mental illness, knowledge that can be appropriated by other institutions to increase the surveillance of ethnic minorities. We are left with the question of how service providers who are critical of the power relations between helper and user can be better allies to (take greater ‘risks’ with?) patients who are looking for support, and not be another source of barriers. Though the alternatives I have described are largely grounded in social justice movements (which may or may not appeal to your needs), they demonstrate just some of the possibilities that exist for living.

* * *

Louise Tam is a graduate student in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education at the University of Toronto.

(Image Credit: “Image of a Lonely Lady,” Low Chin Han, via Shutterstock)

By Arturo R. García

You might want to keep an eye out at your local arthouse theaters around March 9, when Jiro Dreams of Sushi is scheduled for release.

As the trailer above begins, David Gelb’s documentary would seem to deal with master chef Jiro Ono, who has developed his 10-seat restaurant, Sukiyabashi Jiro, into a $300-a-plate hot ticket. But this extended trailer clues us in on a deeper story: when will Jiro finally hang up his knife? And can his son, Yoshikazu, possibly live up to Jiro’s legacy?

By Guest Contributor Marissa Lee, cross-posted from Racebending

Warner Bros has finally glommed onto a lead actor for its adaptation of the Japanese science fiction novel All You Need is Kill.

Set in a post apocalyptic future, All You Need is Kill is about a young Japanese soldier, Keiji Kiriya, who serves on an international fighting force fighting an alien invasion. Keiji gets stuck in a “Groundhog’s Day” scenario where he keeps reliving the day he died.

Set to play the main character in the film adaptation? On December 1st, 2011, Variety reported: Tom Cruise.

Is Warner Bros on a racebending roll?

Throughout November, Warner Bros kicked around names for its adaptation of another property with Japanese origins: Akira.

After considering Brad Pitt and Keanu Reeves, WB nabbed Garrett Hedlund (Tron Legacy) for Kaneda, continues to evaluate a shortlist of unknown Caucasian actors for Tetsuo, and has offered Kristen Stewart (Twilight) the role of Kaneda’s love interest.

Gary Oldman and Helena Bonaham Carter were also propositioned for supporting roles. After Gary Oldman turned down his offer to play the antagonist in the adapted story, the Colonel, Japanese stage actor Ken Watanabe was reportedly offered the role. A casting call has also gone out for a “Japanese American” for the role of Yamagata, a side character from the manga.

Warner Bros is also jump starting an adaptation of the Japanese anime Death Note.

One of these films will have an Asian American lead, right? Or at least an actor of color in the lead role?

Why the All You Need is Kill casting isn’t subtle at all

In Hiroshi Sakurazaka’s novel, the lead character, Keiji Kiriya, is a Japanese soldier who is part of an international military unit. For the purposes of the American adaptation, director Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity)has said that the actors will be “totally American.”

And somehow, “totally American” ended up meaning “white,” even though characters need not be white in order to be American.

In the script, Keiji Kiriya’s name was changed to “Billy Cage,” even though named Keiji have been fighting in the American military for generations.

Sound familiar? That’s because history is repeating itself. Starship Troopers, another science fiction novel about an international army fighting aliens, featured a Filipino protagonist named Juan Rico. In the 1997 film adaptation, his name was changed to “Johnny” and he was cast with a white actor. An opportunity for an Asian American actor in the genre of science fiction was completely lost.

Science Fiction/Fantasy is a genre that has characters with names like Kal-El, T’challa, Worf, Neytiri, Teal’c, Cthulhu, Meriadoc Brandybuck, Leeloo, and Slartibartfast. Why was it necessary to change Keiji Kiriya to Billy Cage?

To add insult to injury, unlike Akira (a story that only contained Japanese characters), the original All You Need is Kill already featured characters who were white!

The other lead characters in the book are Rita Vrataski and Ferrell Bartolome, both from the U.S. Armed Forces. Even with an Asian American actor in the lead role, white actors would have had ample opportunities to play important roles in the film!

Instead, the production went out of its way to retool the script, erase Keiji’s name and ethnicity, and essentially, lock Asian American actors out of one of their only chances to star in an action movie this decade.

Impact on Performers and Communities of Color

Our concern is that Warner Bros casting practices employ racebending to reinforce the systemic racism that is already present in Hollywood. Setting Akira in neo-Manhattan could have been a great opportunity to reflect the diversity in modern day New York City, opening up lead role opportunities for not only Asian Americans but also other performers of color. There was ample opportunity for Warner Bros to demonstrate a commitment to diversity by finally casting a young lead actor of color.

Likewise, casting an Asian American in All You Need is Kill would not have locked out white actors from other lead roles in the movie, especially since nearly all Warner Bros movies feature white lead actors.

Harold and Kumar (from back in 2004) aside, it doesn’t seem like Warner Bros is interested in developing unknown Asian American talent–even though they are more than ready to whitewash several lead characters that were Asian to accomodate white actors.

Not to mention, Warner Bros will also be presenting a yellowface joke in it’s Christmas release, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.

(Awkward coincidence given the whitewashing of roles in Akira and AYNIKis a modern evolution of yellowface..)

Not confidence inspiring.

Maybe Asian American actors are like poor Keiji Kiriya: doomed to constantly relive missed opportunities. When the rare Asian lead character comes along…

By Arturo R. García

When last we left the American Akira, the racebending had barely started: Garrett Hedlund was only being courted to play the lead character, Kaneda.

This week, thanks to Geek Tyrant and other sites, we got some more disturbing pieces of the puzzle, when this casting call for extras and stand-ins listed Twilight‘s Kristen Stewart stepping in as “Ky” – possibly because the character’s original name, Kei, was just too long for somebody’s tastes – and Helena Bonham-Carter playing Lady Miyako.

The casting call also shed some light on how the new version’s vision of “Neo-Manhattan” might play out. As “adaptations” go, it sounds like this Akira could hew as closely to this Akira as Jesus Christ Superstar did to the Gospels. Spoilers are under the cut.

Here’s a transcript of the plot summary:

Kaneda is a bar owner in Neo-Manhattan who is stunned when his brother, Tetsuo, is abducted by government agents led by The Colonel.

Desperate to get his brother back, Kaneda agrees to join with Ky Reed and her underground movement who are intent on revealing to the world what truly happened to New York City thirty years ago when it was destroyed. Kaneda believes their theories to be ludicrous but after finding his brother again, is shocked when he displays telekinetic powers.

Ky believes Tetsuo is headed to release a young boy, Akira, who has taken control of Tetsuo’s mind. Kaneda clashes with The Colonel’s troops on his way to stop Tetsuo from releasing Akira but arrives too late. Akira soon emerges from his prison courtesy of Tetsuo as Kaneda races in to save his brother before Akira once again destroys Manhattan island, as he did thirty years ago.

Depending on how many “liberties” are taken with the source material, this incarnation of The Colonel could be more of an antagonist to Kaneda and company than the original. If the latest rumors turn out to be true, and Ken Watanabe actually does play the character, the only POC in a principal role could be playing the bad guy. As our friends at Racebending said on Facebook, “This doesn’t sound like a terrible rehash of Airbender at all.”

Besides that, this summary – again, if it is indeed the plot of the new version – points not only to a whitewashing, but to a PG-13 dumbing-down of the original: Kaneda and Tetsuo are brothers? An adult Kaneda with a job? Akira as a villainous force? This isn’t even reprehensible anymore, it’s almost laughable. Unless this unnerving theory by Cracked Magazine’s Robert Brockway turns out to be right:

With all of these factors considered — the change in race, age, and location — there’s only one thing this live action version of Akira can be about. The same thing every other “meaningful” Hollywood movie has been about since the day it happened: 9/11.

Think about it: There’s a city, emblematic of its nation, that undergoes a great hardship, but after many years of struggle, they finally rebuild. Then a group of friends, their gang analogous to a controversial real life group, ostracized and hunted by the government, somehow causes the destruction of said city. It was an important moment in our history, and of course it deserves coverage. But why choose Akira to talk about it? Well, because Hollywood believes that the only disaster Americans can relate to is 9/11, but sometimes work is hard and it takes a lot of time, and that sucks. So instead of setting to work on an original script, they’re just going to up and steal a movie that perfectly captured what it was to be Japanese in a tumultuous period of history, and make it all about white people problems instead.

And if that’s indeed the case, I hope this film makes Airbender’s box-office take look like Avatar’s by comparison.

I know, I know. It’s just a clothing line! Lighten up! And it’s so kawaii as the ads keep telling me, forcing the word on me like a pacifier to the lips of a crying, reluctant babe. (Wouldn’t be surprised if Gwen Stefani had tried to trademark the Japanese word for “cute” some time in the last 5 years or so. She’s already pretty much got “Harajuku”–the name of a Tokyo neighborhood–locked down legally.) And look, the Harajuku Mini for Target children’s clothes collection, which launches Sunday online and in stores, is“kawaii,” in a “What if a little panda cub who was part skater-punk threw up and it looked like lollipops and rainbows?” sorta way.

But, you know, I can forgive, but I can’t forget. Wait, who am I kidding? I can’t forgive either! Because when I see this ad plugging Gwen Stefani’s latest business venture…

…all I see is this:

And that is still, always, and forever whatever the Japanese word for “bullshit” is.

[The Stir: Gwen Stefani Harajuku Mini Arrives in Target Sunday!]

I really, really wanted to like CNN’s Black in America 4: The New Promised Land: Silicon Valley (which premiered last night) as well as Miss Representation, a documentary currently airing on OWN. Both, however, left me feeling the same way, which looks something like this:

A couple of synopses before I state why I felt this way:

Black in America 4 explores the rarely discussed facts and stories of Black people in digital technology, especially those who are inventors, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Host Soledad O’Brien frames this through the stories of eight African American entrepreneurs who move into together as part of digital business owners Angela Benton’s and Wayne Sutton’s NewME Accelerator program, which provides Black entrepreneurs time and (relative) quiet space—and possible connections with venture capitalists—for their business ideas.

Jennifer Siebel Newsom’s Miss Representation connects some of the dots between the stats, the personal stories, and media images about women and how those images affect not only those in the media— Margaret Cho recounts the fatphobia and other drama around her 1994 comedy All American Girl — but also those consuming the media, meaning the rest of us.

Now, I know that both shows are, respectively, very much Black Studies and Women’s Studies 101, presented as and for those who may know very little to nothing about either Black tech innovators and owners or media literacy and feminism. So, I can see both try to provide a “hook” for their audiences with that in mind. However, the way their respective creative teams frame their stories does both topics a disservice.

When I asked O’Brien about the aim of this installment at a preview screening, she said, “First of all, [Blacks] are clearly using the technology, but we’re not innovating the technology. And Silicon Valley keeps saying how colorblind it is. So, this part of the series examines that statement.”

Watching BiA4, I felt like I was watching O’Brien trying to mash a news report with a reality show. (“Watch what happens when tech-y Black folks get real…with Soledad O’Brien!”) I can understand that the NewME Accelerator was a good (and, from a seeing-news-as-a-business standpoint, a fiscally feasible way) for CNN to gather a group of Black tech business owners (and the non-Black people who attempt to help and/or comment on them) to tell a relatable narrative about the dearth of Black people in the field.  (BiA4 states early on that less than 1% of digital entrepreneurs are Black. The majority, it says, are white, young, Ivy League and first-tier university drop-outs, which, as pointed out in the post-screening Q&A screening I attended, is a privilege unto itself as far as starting businesses.) But I actually think a better way to tell both stories is to decouple them. If I could reconstruct the story, I would have had O’Brien, say, follow one or two Black digital entrepreneurs in depth as they attempted to get investors and utilized Benton and Sutton as pundits— along with angel investor/philanthropist Mitch Kapor, who directly refutes Michael Arrington’s claim of the digital ownership as “meritorious.” Or I would have followed the NewME Accelerator crew as the main subjects of a full-length documentary to air on CNN.

Also, another questionable point is how Asians and Asian Americans are considered in this report. The show starts off by saying that the tech-innovation worlds are “white and Asian.” Though the presence of Asians and Asian Americans should not lead to Arrington’s erroneous conclusion that the tech world is, therefore, “colorblind,” the presence of Asian and Asian Americans shouldn’t be discounted as failing to bring racial diversity to tech communities. The more subtle equation BiA4 makes, however, is “Black=racial diversity.”

At least BiA4 addresses, albeit imperfectly, race and racism in the tech field, Miss Representation — for all of the visually racial diversity (you see Cho, former Secretary of State Condeleeza Rice, Dreamworlds director Sut Jhally, media-literacy advocate Malkia Cyril, and Newark, NJ mayor Cory Booker, among others) — fails to talk about the issue of race and racism. When I asked why at a post-screening Q&A, the response was “We only had 90 minutes, though we’re planning a second movie to deal with race.” (Refer to image at top of this post.)

However, there were places in the film where race and racism could be mentioned, and it would have taken about 30 seconds. For example, a young Black woman talks about her hair and how media images make her feel about it. The narrator could easily say something like, “Far too many images we see in the media are of white women swinging long, flowing hair. Imagine how that would make a woman of color, whose hair may not do that, feel?”

I timed it: the quote took all of 15 seconds to read out loud. (I’ll be generous and give it about 30 seconds to account for dramatic voiceover.) Or even acknowledge that the majority of media images—both in the film and in entertainment itself, from news to shows to porn—are mostly of white women as both idealized and in variety of roles…and these are, quite a bit of the time, functioning in tandem. Again, all of a thirty-second voiceover or a statistic that could be one of many the film uses to further its argument on how the media hurts women and other people. The silence about race (actress Rosario Dawson is the only person who explicitly mentions “people of color”) — as well as class, gender identity, sexual identity, and  and physical ability, though the film does give a nod at how the media, especially television, fails to acknowledge women above the age of 35 as an audience or as characters — flattens the documentary’s discussion about women to the category of “woman,” as if female-presenting people all suffer from media images the same way. Of course, we don’t.

And I just quite can’t with Black in America 4 and Miss Representation.

Image credit: Bossip

Back when Warner Bros. greenlit their Americanized Akira movie everyone was buzzing that Tron Legacy star Garrett Hedlund was the lead contender for the role of Kaneda. Now it seems he’s been offered the part. Gah.

Listen, we don’t have anything really against Hedlund, he’s nice to look at on screen and his acting certainly wasn’t the only reason Tron Legacy failed so dreadfully. But come on, Hollywood, this is just boring. Can we at least consider an Asian actor, just one? And are we really going to call this guy Kaneda? Or are you going to Americanize all the Japanese names as well? Will Shotaro Kaneda be turned into Kenny, and Tetsuo Shima into Timmy?

- From “Garrett Hedlund offered lead role in Akira. Crap,” by Meredith Woermer

By Guest Contributor Jaymee Goh, cross-posted from Silver Goggles

I’m currently re-reading Angela Davis’ Abolition Democracy, and her interviewer, Eduardo Mendieta, in response to her reiteration that “we need a new age–with a new agenda–that directly addresses the structural racism” (30) about multiculturalism: “very smart strategies are being used, ones that displace attention from issues of racial justice by speaking in terms of multiculturalism” (31).

Over the last year or so, I’ve become incredibly disillusioned with how the term “multiculturalism” is used in various spaces, including steampunk.

I’ve always loved the term, and multiracialism as well. In Malaysia, we are openly a multi-racial society; you see food stalls with Chinese lettering and Indian mamak shops. Wherever you go, there are clear signs that any given space caters to the needs of specific races, and it’s only hyper-consumerist spaces that cater to as many people as possible, that are, ahem, “race-less”. (Neocolonialism, you see, strips a country of its cultures, and replaces it with a singular culture of buying and selling and marathon window-shopping.)

We’re super-imperfect, and there are a ton of things I do not know about the different races and cultures within Malaysia alone. Partly because it’s simply not part of regular interracial interaction and thus it never comes up in conversation. Partly also because sometimes these practices are deeply private and specific to certain groups, and we kind of don’t see why we HAVE to tell others about it. But at functions, we are fairly happy to see each other dress appropriately, and in the cultural clothes associated with the race of the host.

Contrary to the politics of Malaysia, I really do think that the Malaysian people get it right sometimes, or at least, it did. Recently I’ve come to believe that our taciturn attitude towards talking about our cultures has become a wall and now we stand around awkwardly and don’t really know how to talk to each other about our cultures anymore.

Multiculturalism is much unlike what France and Britain’s leaders think. When those prime ministers bleat about how multiculturalism has failed, they’re really saying, brown people refuse to get in line. Non-white people are refusing to learn the language properly (by abandoning their own and their funny accents) and they are refusing to integrate properly (by entering and staying in white spaces that alienate the shit out of them). Multiculturalism to these people has failed because these immigrants have refused to play by the rules set by the white people who so nicely let them into the country. (Sara Ahmed’s chapter on the Melancholic Migrant in her book The Promise of Happiness talks about this.)

I’ve said this before, but it is worth saying again: culture is about the people, not just the stuff. A culture isn’t just about the clothes and the language and the literature. It’s also in the way people interact and behave, the way we think, the way we live.

And I just don’t see this happening in steampunk very much.

Now, I get why. If you’re white, you can’t very well pass as someone of another race without engaging in some squicky, racist-as-fuck colour-face. And I don’t deny that some folk do some fine work adapting the fashions of non-Western European cultures into workable, lovable clothing that looks good, makes sense, stays true to the original garb, and doesn’t bank on racist stereotypes.

But here’s what bothers me most: the fact that when we say “multicultural” in steampunk, I’m often hearing “non-white”. It’s just another way of saying “ethnic” which is also code for “not white”. And “exotic”, which means “foreign.”

This bothers me, partly because it’s semantically incorrect (there are various ethnicities associated with people lumped into whiteness, and multiculturalism includes interacting with whiteness as well, or European-derived cultures, but from what I can see, “multicultural” currently signifies anything that’s not Western European), partly because it’s another way of celebrating some mythical post-racial state (“we’re all human! let’s celebrate each other’s cultures by raising awareness about them through these clothes we are wearing on our white bodies!”), partly because… I just don’t see anything that really engages with what it means to be multicultural.

Multiculturalism, in its very name, indicates the interaction between multiple cultures. Which could be very different cultures. With some major disagreements between them. Living in one space.

And, in our racist world, these disagreements have some shitty consequences that include but are not limited to work discrimination, disproportionate crime rates, exclusionary laws, and flat out shitty behaviour that receives no punishment or is outright supported. In our world, the presence of multiculturalism means that certain cultures get to be dominant, and stick the others into disadvantaged spaces (aka ghettos).

I have never encountered a space which consists of a plurality of cultures living alongside each other, elbow to elbow, where each community has the wherewithal to take care of itself, and members feel free to speak to other communities without fear of reprisal or discrimination. A space where any neutral ground has rules negotiated upon by representatives of different groups (like in Nancy Fraser’s articulation on public spaces in plural societies, as opposed to hegemonic societies).

And let’s face it, this shit ain’t happening in steampunk. Non-white people are expected to play by the rules. We’re expected to mess around in the Victorian era. We still come in by way of Western European, specifically English, frameworks and paradigms. If we’re there as purposefully non-white, we’re nifty, but… beyond that? What do we mean to white steampunks who dominate the scene? How is someone like Monique Poirier supposed to comfortably do Native American steampunk if random folk will joke about the “steampunk Trail of Tears” around her?

That is why I can’t get behind a celebration of multicultural steampunk that really seems to bank on being able to create and dress in costumes and clothing and props of other cultures. Something different and something fun to do. Something cool to research. Something interesting to get to know, and maybe learn something about a different culture. But for all your knowledge about how we dressed and what the gender norms of 19th century China were, what is being done to ensure POC steampunk feel safe? Feel more than just tokens? Tony Hicks of Tinplate Studios said to me at GearCon, “sometimes, you just want to be.” And sometimes, that being also means being able to talk about some of the dumb shit we experience and being understood for that, being comfortable that no, we’re not alone.

Before you start bleating about how it’s a multicultural world and ain’t we all human and race doesn’t matter and we should all be free to use different things from different cultures, let me reiterate once more: culture is more than just things. It’s about people. And people of colour live in the still very racist system that dictates the discourse on what multiculturalism should be like. And thus multiculturalism is co-opted, not to begin critical conversations between peoples, but so white people can get their jollies off dressing like an exotic non-white person, eat weird foods, learn about foreign cultures, as a nifty thing for the day, without necessarily doing the hard work of confronting how difficult living in a multicultural world can be, when certain cultures are privileged over others.

And this needs to change.

Longtime Racialicious readers know this time on the calendar has prompted the R to read someone (or several folks) about their racist costumes or some other Halloween-related foolishness. Well, this year, Ohio University’s Students Teaching about Racism in Society (STARS) put on posters what we’ve been putting into words for quite a while.

I think that, for the most part, the campaign deserves the accolades, coverage, and support it’s been getting around the web, from Angry Asian Man to the 17,575 (and counting!) responses on the STARS president’s Tumblr to The Root to Bitch to the former Racialicious owner Carmen Sognonvi .

Of course, we can argue, among other things, that phenotypes don’t equal culture and cultures aren’t static or even talk about the historical-religious appropriation of Halloween itself.

My only quibble with the campaign is that I may have chosen photos where the models conveyed different body language. Not that the models didn’t pose how they wanted, being a student-driven campaign. What I do think is quite a few photographers rarely get The Shot in one shot; in fact, several photographers submit several photos for clients/collaborative partners to choose from.

I would have chosen, say, the Latino looking down at the photo, the East Asian woman giving the “geisha” picture the side-eye. Or all of the models giving their respective photos the side-eye. Or all of them looking out at the viewer. Or all of them looking down. As is, the photo of the East Asian woman looking down may suggest non-confrontation (“meek Asian girl”)

juxtaposed with the men of color (the photo at the top of the post and this one)

and the Black woman

may  inadvertently suggest stereotypes of anger and aggression (“angry Arab,” “Latino with a temper,” “aggressive Black woman”). Just a thought if and when STARS decides to tweak this incredible campaign.

But, again, that’s my only quibble. STARS did a wild-applause-and-rose-tossing job with this campaign.

Others, however, have taken this serious and timely message and parodied—if not downright attacked–it. (Color me unshocked by this, Racializens.) Now, some of the parodies made me chuckle, like this Avatar-based one

and the zombie one

mostly due to the ideas of the creatures being symbols for people of color.

The ones about white people, especially poor whites, produced mixed results mostly because the parodies don’t quite grasp that, yes, poor white people do have a mitigated privilege via their skin color and that white people of various class standings making fun of poor whites may be viewed as “inside joking,”

but white poverty is also thoroughly ridiculed and dismissed—and, therefore erased–in US society by that very same mitigated privilege.

Oh, and let’s not forget the sexism and the fatphobia in these parodies.

As we’ve witnessed in our posts about racism in costuming, people have rushed to defend their choice to dress up in racially offensive Halloween garb in some of the comment sections about the campaigns, with the usual mixture of the “I got my rights!”, “my best [insert race and/or ethnicity here] friend/partner/co-worker/neighbor didn’t find my costume offensive,” (bonus points if the person saying this is a person of color wears the stereotyping costume of a PoC culture), “y’all are being oversensitive/overemotional/hostile,” “you’re the racist for calling out my racism,” and other derailing techniques.

Some of the Derailing/Apologist/Other-Blaming hits and remixes?

From “Jerry Stein” at Autostraddle

OMG, get a life. This is pathetic. Would an Asian woman be OK to go as a Geisha on Halloween? If not why not? And if so are we now saying that only people of the exact origin or race can have fun dressed as a CHARACTER on Halloween? Stop being so sensitive. If America is to get passed all of this nonsense then it needs to get some perspective and start smiling again.

Watch any movie or TV show and you will see a racial stereotype. Are all stereotypes negative NO! Why is it that this campaign only sees that.

This country is dividing itself. Nobody wants to be American. Everyone is so narcissistic and self important it makes me sick to my stomach. Bring back people with humility and a sense of humor before we all end up selfish deluded idiots thinking the world owes them something.

Based on this all costumes which feature Cowboys, Irish Leprechauns, Michael Jackson, Lady GaGa, Bin Laden, OJ Simpson, Madonna, Jersey Shore cast members will all now be banned because they offend the Irish, African Americans, Italians and Muslims. Thats pretty much Halloween cancelled.

This country is becoming a laughing stock for the wrong reasons.

Mohamhead from GOOD

I am not white myself but I don’t see what’s wrong with people doing that kind on stuff on Halloween. I might even dress up as a white guy. Is that racist too? Or is it only racist if white people do it? Hypocrites.

didimydoe3, also at GOOD

I don’t mind stereotypical costumes of my race because I’m mature enough to know it’s a costume.

Sometimes it is offensive. Mine is. It’s the only reason I’m doing it. I’m going blackface.

Oh, I could go on and on and on with these kinds of comments–because these comments are out there ad nauseum–but you get the jist.

But see, here’s the thing, People Who Defend Racist Costumes: you all are proving STARS’—and Racialicious’—point…and quite well. You’re welcome.

As Bitch’s headline says, don’t mess up as you dress up, and have a Happy Halloween!

Image credits: Uproxx and Hard to Be Humble When You Stuntin on a Jumbotron

By Arturo R. García

In Akira, a corrupt government courted disaster with little regard for leaving well enough alone, only to be undone by its’ avarice. At least it looks like Warner Brothers’ adaptation is getting that right.

As reported by Racebending and other outlets late last week, WB is officially moving ahead with a live-action adaptation of the classic manga series.

At this point, though, you would think the company should have noticed the law of Diminishing Returns kicking in with this production. The project has been scorned by fans of the original manga since it was originally announced three years ago, and that vitriol hasn’t stopped – especially after word got out that this new Akira would be Americanized/whitewashed, and moved to the New York area.

As of last week’s reports, Garrett Hedlund was being mentioned as the front-runner to play reluctant hero Kaneda. You might remember Hedlund failing to light up the screen with charisma last year in Tron: Legacy, alongside Jeff Bridges and, in this clip, Olivia Wilde as Quorra, the Manic Pixelated Dream Girl.

Granted, Hedlund and Wilde were hamstrung by a cowardly “feel-good” script that bungled what should have been a slam-dunk piece of sci-fi. But maybe Hedlund’s biggest advantage is a willingness to work cheap. The project’s budget was originally rumored to be in the $300 million range, but that’s not going to happen. Instead, when shooting begins early next year, new director Jaume Collet-Serra will have a comparatively meager $90 million available to somehow make his take on Akira not suck.

Casting calls have also gone up online for two other characters: Tetsuo and Ky (known as Kai in the previous versions of the story). Here’s how they were described:

• Tetsuo: Male; any ethnicity, 20-25 years old; strung out, intense, street rat. (LEAD)
• Ky: Female; 20-30 years old; any ethnicity; tough, sexy, strong willed, street savvy. (LEAD)

The “any ethnicity” clause for both characters is worth noting; it’s possible WB would try to mollify some of the PR damage associated with this project by casting POCs in these roles (while making sure that Ky/Kai is still “sexy,” of course). Or we could end up seeing someone like Misfits’ Robert Sheehan playing Tetsuo with some sort of “New Yawk accent.”

By Guest Contributor May Lui, cross-posted from Black Coffee Poet

Souvankham Thammavongsa is a Laotian Canadian poet, author of the ReLit-winning Small Arguments and Found. Found was also adapted into a short film by Paramita Nath, which screened at film festivals worldwide including Dok Leipzig and Toronto International Film Festival.

Souvnkham has been published in many literary magazines and journals and has been invited to read at Harbourfront’s International Festival of the Authors 2011. Born in Thailand in 1978, she was raised in Toronto.

May Lui for Black Coffee Poet: Why poetry?

Souvankham Thammavongsa: It’s sort of like swimming in the deep end of a pool. You better know what you are doing there because it’s going to become very clear if you don’t. Looking good in a swimsuit isn’t going to help you out.

ML: Tell us about your writing process.

ST: I don’t write everyday. Sometimes I try to do anything but write. I work for a financial newspaper full-time and have been there for ten years. I work with numbers all day and this allows me to think in a language that doesn’t have anything to do with words, to remember that sometimes words aren’t everything. No one at work knows I write poetry and I prefer it that way. I like that there’s a place for me there no matter what happens to my writing, whether it fails or if it’s successful. It doesn’t matter. I also owned a used bookstore with my husband and wrote short stories all day when it snowed and we had no customers, except for the ones who told us we weren’t going to make it or asked us what we were doing there or if the knapsack in our window display was for sale. I learned that there are people in the world who want nothing to do with books, that there are those who at the sight of a bookshelf start to slowly back up towards the exit, that there are those who would buy themselves a three-dollar book and tell their curious and bright son they don’t want to buy him a book of his choosing because they’ve already spent more than they’ve wanted. That was a learning experience for writing I don’t think I would have gotten by writing.

I always let my writing sit around for a very long time and I never show my work to anyone until it’s done. If I give a reading at a festival or at a reading series, I’ll write something new to surprise myself or someone else who has seen me read before. I read whatever interests me like articles about boxing in Sports Illustrated or about the latest fashions in American Vogue. I try to keep up with the Leafs or catch a baseball game. I take sewing classes and learn how to make skirts and quilts, go to the museum or art gallery, get my hair cut or get my nails done to see how other people outside of writing create. I read old diary entries from when I was twelve-years-old to remind myself where I come from and to just have a giggle at myself because I know exactly how things will turn out or I read books written by writers I want very much to be. I try to learn new things like new recipes or garden or swim or drive—so I have new skills or something to talk about that doesn’t have to do with writing but can have something to do with writing. I watch a lot of silly movies and listen to music. I watch Pawn Stars and American Pickers on television. I like to meet with good friends for dinner at Guu and talk for hours and hours. When I do sit down to write, I can do it anywhere: on my lap, in a noisy bar, in the kitchen on the stove (off, of course), on the wall, and only when I must, on the computer.

ML: Found is a remarkable book of poetry. Tell us about what it means to find poetry in everyday items.

ST: For me, to find poetry in everyday items is remarkable. What precisely makes a thing remarkable? I like how the remarkable can come from and is held by what is unremarkable.

ML: How many poetry books have you had published?

ST: I have had two books published by Pedlar Press.

ML: How do you select the poems for each book?

ST: I try to choose the ones that make the prettiest dots.

ML: How long have you been writing poetry?

ST: If I count from the time I was first published in a little magazine, then it’s eleven years—but that isn’t considered to be very much time at all.

ML: Who are your influences?

ST: I like Agnes Martin, Richard Pryor, Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, Elizabeth Bishop.

ML: What inspires your writing?

ST: Other writing. And people, how they behave. Or things. I like to look at things especially.

ML: What are you working on right now?

ST: I am working on a collection of poems about light. It’s about what’s in the world, how it’s been given to us, and what we take from it.

And a quilt.

ML: Is there anything you’d like to say to emerging poets and writers?

ST: I think emerging poets and writers don’t want anything said to them. Especially since they’ve already emerged.

By Arturo R. García

It seems at least one scene in the upcoming film Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows will involve Robert Downey Jr.’s Holmes disguising himself as “a Chinese beggar” for laughs. Because crude racialized cosplay is funny, y’see – especially if there’s a British accent involved!

At least, that seems to be the reaction from some movie bloggers: The Huffington Post breathlessly reported that Downey’s yellowface get-up signifies director Guy Ritchie “has his hero going multicultural — to great comedic effect.”

Actually, what this bit threatens to do is continue a disconcerting trend: the creative teams behind the most recent attempts to “reimagine” Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories can’t – or won’t – let go of some of their most xenophobic elements.

A similar issue emerged during the debut season of Sherlock, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss’ generally well-received modern spin on the detective. Last year’s episode “The Blind Banker,” written by Steve Thompson, went beyond using Chinese smugglers as villains to seemingly demonizing the whole of London’s Chinese immigrant community, as one viewer told Monique Jones:

Had it been based on a piece of canon that was rife with this kind of period-appropriate bigotry, I could have better understood it (although I’d have been deeply disappointed they weren’t capable of subverting it and reflecting the reality of London in 2010). But the fact is that this script is derived from a story which has NOTHING to do with Asia in the first place! So it was just egregious, lazy, stupid, reductive, racist codswallop. Which is a damn shame, because in other respects this is probably my favourite episode – but the whole thing is sullied by the racefail…I thought the mafia boss was fairly awesome, and she did a great job with her role, such as it was, and so I could have handwaved that. I like circuses, and so although it was fetishistic I was willing to work with them and handwave the Mysterious Oriental Circus thing. And I was trying to handwave the cliched depiction of the beautiful vulnerable maiden slain by her wicked brother.

But when they put OMINOUS MUSIC behind some normal footage of China Town, as if all the Londoners we were looking at were supposed to suddenly be Evil Scary Suspicious Figures just because they were of Asian extraction?

I wanted to punch someone in the face.

That portrayal was part of a bigger problem, according to 2010 Parliamentary candidate Philip Ling, who wrote in DimSum:

the next day after Sherlock Holmes, the current BBC Radio 5 Live advert for the new football season was on, and the Chinese character was a take away owner, celebrating in his shop. It makes you realise that actually almost all Chinese characters on British TV are:

• An illegal immigrant
• Linked to the criminal underworld
• Or a take away owner.

This despite the evidence that Chinese students in the UK are amongst the highest achieving academic group, many working Chinese are doctors, lawyers (not to stereotype here either), as well as bankers, IT experts, fashion designers, teachers, graphic designers basically any job you can think of that exists. Yet there is none of this on British TV.

Doyle wasn’t averse to orientalism in his original works: In his novel The Lost World, he name-checked Sir Richard Francis Burton, who made a living making his way thru South Asia. And in the Holmes story The Sign Of The Four, Doyle introduced the character Tonga in the most dehumanizing of fashions:

It straightened itself into a little black man – the smallest I have ever seen – with a great, misshapen head and a shock of tangled, dishevelled hair. Holmes had already drawn his revolver, and I whipped out mine at the sight of this savage, distorted creature. He was wrapped in some sort of dark ulster or blanket, which left only his face exposed, but that face was enough to give a man a sleepless night. Never have I seen features so deeply marked with all bestiality and cruelty. His small eyes glowed and burned with a sombre light, and his thick lips were writhed back from his teeth, Which grinned and chattered at us with half animal fury.

Moreover, colonialism informs how Holmes and Watson approach the case, which involves a set of gems from India that goes back and forth between the characters of Captain Morstan and Major Sholto. Sholto is criticized not only for killing Morstan to get them, but for stealing them from an Englishman. Morstan’s theft, however, is glossed over.

Despite this, Sign has been adapted no less than 12 times for the screen (although it’s possible an Indian adaptation, Neekkam (The Move), is more sympathetic to Tonga and Sholto), for its’ bigger contributions to the Holmes canon: it’s the first mention of his drug habit, and the debut of Doctor Watson’s future wife, Mary.

But both of these plot points were already in play when we met Downey’s Sherlock in the last Holmes movie, which makes this costume choice for Downey seem all the more arbitrary by himself, Ritchie and Shadows writers Kieran and Michele Mulroney. As IGN reports, the film is “influenced by” a Doyle story, The Final Problem, but isn’t “strictly based” on it. Of all the disguises they had to choose from, is this really the best they could come up with?

Which isn’t to say that Holmes’ reputation as a master of disguise shouldn’t be played on in any new interpretations of Doyle’s work. But put it this way: when Downey’s character in Tropic Thunder, Kirk Lazarus, went to absurd lengths to “credibly” play a black man, the absurdity of the choice was made plain. It’s possible the same will happen to Downey’s Holmes in this new scenario, but given what’s gone on before, it hardly seems worth it for the sake of a played-out sight gag.

By Arturo R. García

Labor Day weekend brought with it the opening strains of the college football season, and according to Deadspin, Fox Sports wasted no time in going to the bottom of the “coverage” barrel.

In a segment at which only Alexandra Wallace could’ve LOL’ed, “investigative reporter” Bob Oschack set out to give the Universities of Colorado and Utah “an All-American welcome” to the Pac-12 Conference by going to the University of Southern California. The twist being, he only talked to non-white students.

More specifically, Oschack – a comedy writer by trade, if you’re generous enough to call Mind of Mencia “comedy” – focused his mock-report on what appeared to be international students who weren’t football fans. I say “appeared to be” because the students are given a textbook Othering: they’re never identified, nor are their studies mentioned. But that’s not what Oschack is going for here, of course. As Deadspin’s Emma Carmichael put it, “in the world of misguided network television humor, foreign accents and unfamiliarity with good old-fashioned football is funny.”

As Media Matters reported, Asian students made up just over 20 percent of the USC undergraduate student body as of Fall 2010, with international students making up 11.2 percent. About the only thing Oschack got “right” was the fact that USC’s enrollment is more diverse than Utah’s (75 percent white enrollment, according to a “Fast Facts” PDF) and Colorado’s (77 percent white, per CollegeProwler).

Fox quickly pulled the video from its site (although you can still watch Oschack’s compelling – and by “compelling” I mean “creepy wanna-be Daily Show” – report on why Oregon’s cheerleaders are “so f-cking hot”) and issued an apology promising to “review the editorial process” and the usual boilerplate expressions of contrition. No response from Oschack himself, but I’m betting he won’t get the chance to deliver it on any Fox Sports shows anytime soon.

UPDATE 9/7/11: The Associated Press is reporting that Fox Sports has cancelled The College Experiment, the program that aired Oschack’s segment, “effective immediately.”

Welcome back to the Asian panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

N’Jaila Rhee, the mastermind behind BlaysianBytch.com (link NSFW); Elton, long time commenter and friend of the blog; refresh_daemon, blogger and occasional contributor; Christina Xu, friend of the blog and occasional contributor; Eric Zhang, occasional contributor; and Holly, contributor at Feministe.

refresh_daemon: Agreed. Plus, as far as population goes, Asian Americans are smaller and consequently less visible overall. Furthermore, I think Asian Americans even now tend to be less vocal and prominent in mainstream media, so it really has to do with our general lack of presence, combined with the perpetual foreigner concept that gets attached to us.

N’jaila: I also know a lot of Asian Americans that see themselves as “White Minorities” who don’t need to be counted outside of the White mainstream. I think these people are insane.

Elton: I agree. But when institutions treat Asians as practically white, and downplay the fact that Asians experience racism, what do you expect? Especially in higher education, there is an invisible asterisk beside “minority” or “diversity” that says *actually we mean non-Asian minorities, and our definition of diversity is “fewer Asians.”

Eric: I specifically remember the moment on Tyra when a gay interracial Asian-white couple made an appearance.

About halfway through the clip, a gay Asian man in the audience and confronts the Asian man on stage. His speech mirrors many discussions I have heard about “self-hating” Asian women, and in particular the debate around eye widening. Growing up, I had always been aware of the epicanthic fold and “double eyelids,” but it had never registered to me as a beauty standard until high school when I met Asian girls who wore eyelid tape.

Seeing this discussion on a national television show was pretty groundbreaking to me, even if I first watched it with a bit of contempt considering the kinds of melodrama that gets milked – not just on Tyra – but on daytime talk shows in general. And I think bringing these kinds of questions – about self-hate and about racism in the gay community – to a national audience is a pretty bold move for groups of people who already receive very little recognition in the mainstream (gay interracial couples, gay Asians, etc.). On the other hand, and I say this knowing that talk shows like this aren’t really the best resource for having meaningful, thought-provoking discussions, the portrayal of the relationship and of the two gay Asian men was a little hokey and did very little to talk about interracial gay relationships other than “people are racist towards us and think I hate myself.”

I think people don’t know how to speak about these issues, especially in the Asian American community, because we are taught about racism against blacks and rarely about racism against Asians. I don’t believe that many people understand that racism against Asians happens in the first place, or that interracial relationships with Asians can be strife with racist attitudes. People ask me why I consider it racist for a white man to have a “thing for Asians,” or straight up tell me it isn’t racist in the least, and I often have trouble talking about it with them.

Holly: I’m nodding my head reading everything that everyone else wrote. Racism against asians gets buried easily. You can get away with a racist restaurant name, chinese laundry jokes, stereotyped accents. I’m not saying that because I think racism against other groups should be ignored! And in fact, it’s probably true of many groups besides asians too — but I think it does contribute to asians being “invisible minorities” and a lot of asians really like it that way. They want to be the successfully assimilated immigrants, even if the “difference” stigma won’t ever really fade away in the minds of way too many people who see us always as foreigners first and foremost. There’s also an aspect here that has to do with sexuality and gender — I think the hideous treatment of black women by our culture and its beauty standards is more of a “guilty secret” that a lot of well-meaning people would immediately admit exists. Liberals feel bad about this; it’s how we got “I Love My Hair” on Sesame Street. Asian women have a different problem that doesn’t create as much liberal guilt — exotification and another flavor of ridiculous idealization, fetishization, etc. It’s the fallout of a “positive stereotype”; although most people would agree that gross anime-chasers are disgusting, they see it as part and parcel of a typical problem that any “beautiful woman” would face. And Asian men are a total afterthought, because the liberal political culture isn’t even aware that racist stereotypes are constantly affecting Asian men’s gender too. Complaints mostly surface on forums where Asian guys are complaining about how nobody will date them — and it’s way too easy, in the mainstream discourse, to simply dismiss that as a bunch of dudes whining instead of looking at it as a symptom of racism + sexism.

N’jaila: When I was younger I very much felt like the “normal” group of men for a woman to like was White. I felt abnormal because I had a strong preference for Black , Brown and Yellow men. I think for many people that’s always going to be true, White partners are going to be the most accepted because in this country they are considered “normal”.

I remember in high school one of my close friends was a Latina who basically told me I was “too smart” to like Black guys. It was so shocking and deeply offensive that our friendship pretty much ended right there.

refresh_daemon: Agreed with N’jaila re: white people as the default partner. But this also brings up a bit of the point that Elton touches upon below. Until recently, the general visibility of Asian men in pop culture has been very limited and rarely in the context of relationships. Most Asian men I’ve seen in pop culture have largely been paired with Asian women as well (John Cho being the only immediate positive counterexample that comes to mind in “Flash Forward” and “Harold and Kumar”–I would like to forget about the Donger and all the Yellow Peril films of the early 20th century.) Consequently, I do think that it reinforces, to some subtle extent, the idea of Asian men, in particular, staying within Asian populations when it comes relationships.

Elton: It’s frustrating that non-white women are rarely portrayed as equally attractive as white women.

It’s frustrating when I am attracted to a white woman and have to wonder if Eurocentrism is warping my perception.

It’s frustrating to worry about whether someone I like will return my affections because I am Asian.

Being an Asian male is like perpetually seeing a “look but don’t touch” sign.

Holly: It’s just generally disgusting, although I feel like I’ve watched this grow during my lifetime. When I was a kid, there were almost no representations of families that looked like mine — one white parent, one Asian parent. When I saw this start to appear, I felt relieved and less weird — but then it became the MOST well-represented type of interracial relationship, because it’s so innocuous for a white man to have a woman “invisible, feminized minority” on his arm. These representations really hastened the rise of “I want an Asian girlfriend too” throughout my teen years, and it wasn’t really an improvement. I think it’s made it much easier for Asians to date white people, that’s for sure — and that’s an improvement my mother would have been grateful for in her early years (before she decided she hates my dad and pretty much all other white guys.) One of the most disgusting flip-sides, however, is that “dating an asian woman” is the #1 low-committment way for a white guy to show that he is Not A Racist according to some really boring, minimal, conservative definition of racism. Look, he loves people that are NOT WHITE! He eats tofu! Isn’t he amazing? And yes, I have to admit that I’m also thinking of my own father here. It’s not WHY he married my mother in the mid-70s, but it was definitely a benefit, and it still is for such guys.

Eric: If anyone has read “Paper Tigers” by Wesley Yang, from New York Magazine, he follows the “Asian pick-up artist” who holds white women to the ideal. In Romeo Must Die, Jet Li and Aaliyah had a kiss scene that was cut because audiences did not respond well to an Asian man and a black woman being in a relationship. While it is certainly the case that media representations of interracial relationships in general, not just Asian ones, typically feature a white character, I am interested in the disparity between these representations and the visibility of mixed race Asian celebrities, like Naomi Campbell, Tyson Beckford, Cassie, Bruno Mars, Nicole Scherzinger, Chanel Iman, and Tiger Woods. It’s strange that there are so many highly successful mixed race black-Asian, Latino-Asian, etc., celebrities out there, and yet we rarely see couples who could be their parents.

I will say one of my favorite black-Asian interracial couples from television is Manila Luzon (who I wrote about previously) and Sahara Davenport from Rupaul’s Drag Race, though I recognize that they are really an exception to the rule.

N’jaila: I think you rarely see discussions of Blasians because to many people they aren’t considered mixed. Not to mention there’s sometimes very negative reactions to non-Asian looking Blasians like Naomi Campbell and Tyson Beckford. Growing up I felt very alienated from Asians, it felt almost silly to embrace a group I was part of that I felt constantly rejected me.

Also I think most people assume that if someone is Blasian that their mother is Asian and their father is a Black guy in the military. Growing up I NEVER saw a family on TV that looked like mine.

I actually got to sit in with J.T Tran’s workshop. I actually think is a naturally sweet natured guy, but his workshop made me depressed for a good month or two. #

refresh_daemon: The cynic in me wants to say that the reason why interracial couples who would resemble the parents of those multi-racial celebrities don’t really get featured in pop culture is quite simply because a white person isn’t part of the equation and the mainstream doesn’t care if there’s not a white person involved. Also, I think the mainstream tends to ignore the Asian heritage of most (all?) of those celebrities, regardless of how they choose to self-identify.

Is there anything else you want to add that was not covered above?

Elton: The difference between the way Asian men and Asian women are assimilated into Western society manifests itself as the interracial dating disparity. The Asian man is depicted as the foreign other, while the Asian woman is more welcomed and accepted by the West. Patriarchy places a greater onus on men to carry on the family line, so the dating choices of the Asian man are restricted by Asian culture (which wants him to refrain from dating altogether until he has completed his education, then enter an arranged marriage) and by Western culture (which wants him to avoid marrying Western women). Is this why it seems to be more permissible for Asian women to date outside their race or even to date at all?

N’jaila: I don’t know if I agree that Asian women are assimilated into Western culture. I think White male privilege allows White men more opportunities to date any race he pleases. You still don’t see Asian women being seen as examples of standard beauty, something exotic maybe but Asian women are over represented as only sexual objects for White men. #

refresh_daemon: I do think that, at least earlier on in mainstream media, Asian women were more openly accepted than Asian men in the sense that they were more visible in leading and ensemble roles on television and, to a lesser extent, in film. I think as of late we are closer to reaching parity between the two genders, at least in terms of presence (particularly in commercials), but there does seem to be a lingering disparity in terms of representations of interracial relationships with Asian women and men, with Asian women more frequently interracially partnered (usually with white men), but Asian men more frequently depicted with Asian women than with other groups.

Holly: I tend to agree that commercials are leading the way, but I still don’t see anywhere near as much representation of Asian men in fiction film & television. Reality TV is a little closer to parity, for obvious reasons. And I think this goes back to the whole gender + race question, where Asians are the “feminized minority,” and so Asian women (of a certain class status and adherence to western beauty ideals, obviously) are treated as “even more feminine than white women,” a package that comes with fetishization, de-humanization, and more representation.

Elton: Is it ok if I pose a question? As we know, who we are “allowed to date” (by parents, culture, society, and just plain who returns or rejects our affections) differs from who we’re actually attracted to. Much ado is made about the Asian man’s unrequited love for white women. Do you find that there is a difference between the kind of person you prefer (whether for friendship, romance, or sex) and the kind of person you are “allowed to date”?

Holly: That’s a very interesting question, although I probably have a weird answer as a multi-racial Asian with one white parent. I think my early upbringing and exposure to racism made me think of my Asian parent as the “weird, mean one that nobody liked, who ate smelly food and couldn’t speak English as well.” But I also identified much more strongly with her in terms of how I felt relative to my peers: that I was the weird outsider. On top of that, I was also unequivocally taught by my family that inter-racial relationships and kids were a good thing, no matter what anyone else said; they wanted to make us resistant to anti-miscegenation messaging even more than they thought about more pervasive racist ideas about non-whites. So I remember thinking when I was younger that I’d be following in my family tradition if I was in a relationship with a white person, because I wasn’t white, and that my kids wouldn’t be either. (This might be have been influenced by the fact that the first person I dated in high school was ¼ Japanese.) But I’m sure I also unconsciously thought of that as “dating up.” When I got older, I dated more and more people from other backgrounds — indigenous, Latina, South Asian, and a lot of them mixed in one way or another. I guess I still thought of that as “interracial dating” since almost any pairing would be interracial dating for me, and therefore kind of positive. I’ve only dated one person who identified as 100% East Asian, though, and I often wonder why — is it because of negative messages I received about my mother when I was little? Or because I spent a lot of my youth not feeling “Asian enough” either? Probably both and more.

N’jaila: I’m in a weird position where I feel like my natural feelings are going against nature. I feel like if I say “I won’t date Asian men anymore” I’d be doing so because so many people have told me that I shouldn’t be dating them. I don’t want to live my life according to other people, but at the same time most people do. So I feel like my entire romantic life I’ve been trying to box with God, I’m doomed to fail.

Welcome back to the Asian panel on Interracial Dating. Our panelists are:

N’Jaila Rhee, the mastermind behind BlaysianBytch.com (link NSFW); Elton, long time commenter and friend of the blog; refresh_daemon, blogger and occasional contributor; Christina Xu, friend of the blog and occasional contributor; Eric Zhang, occasional contributor; and Holly, contributor at Feministe.

N’jaila: I only know the perspective of the “forbidden” partner. My skin is brown and my hair is curly, my breasts are large and my booty is big. For many of my partners I was something sexually alluring and “dangerous” that was my main selling point. I was forbidden fruit.  I think a good number of my sexual partners took me as a conquest to prove their virility.  Asianness and Blackness is almost synonymous with sexual deviancy for many people.

Growing up I think that white partners felt the most off limits because they were so outside the realm of what was familiar to me.  If they were so alien to me I couldn’t imagine them looking at me and not seeing a laundry list of stereotypes either a dragon lady, mammy , Jezebel or otherwise.  I guess you can say I did not trust white men to make the distinction between genuine attraction and fetish exploration.

Eric: This may be a little bit contradictory to what I said above, but I remember one specific moment, the only moment I had where my mother specifically addressed interracial relationships. She told me and my brother that we were not allowed to marry a black or Japanese woman. My brother took it as a challenge, because he is very much involved in Japanese subculture, but I really just refused to say anything about it. To some extent, my mother’s racist beliefs about black people may have affected me subconsciously, because I remember one time mentioning to my friends that I had a crush on a black classmate, and that he was “the first black guy I’ve ever liked,” which in retrospect was not entirely true. As soon as I said it, though, I realized that I had been brought up to believe that I should not be attracted to black people, whether because of my mother or media representations.

The Japanese part is a result of long-standing resentment in many Chinese of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations towards the Japanese during WWII. I think on an academic level this type of discrimination fascinates me even more, because I have a friend who is half-Chinese and half-Japanese, and she would talk about how her grandparents were scandalized when her parents got married. These kinds of interethnic hostilities are often unspoken about, I think, but many of us who grew up with Chinese, Japanese, or Korean parents have these beliefs instilled in us, so my Chinese friends understand more personally why I was surprised about this girl being half-Japanese than, I think, many of my white friends do.

I often do explicitly wonder what my parents think about interracial relationships, and in particular about my interracial relationships. However, I try to keep them as separate as possible from my dating life, because I think they are uncomfortable with the idea that I date men in the first place, although I believe they accept it on an intellectual level. The only time I’ve told them about my partner was when I came out to my mother, and she was more concerned with the fact that he was a boy than that he was white.

On the other hand, I think many people expect me to date outside of my race, probably because of this common perception that Asian men aren’t sexy, or that they’re not my “type” (which is odd because I don’t think I have a “type,” but I believe that people expect gay Asians to be twinky feminine boys, and rarely think of them as more “straight-acting,” and that, in turn, my preference would be for a more masculine, non-Asian boyfriend, which is untrue). I think my friends especially would be surprised if I were to have an Asian boyfriend, because so far I have only been with non-Asians (though not for lack of interest). I secretly suspect that my parents similarly expect my brother and me to end up with white partners, but hope we will marry Chinese.

Holly: I’ve definitely had the experience of being the “weird, unexpected” partner, because sometimes people (and I guess I tend to think specifically of partners’ families) don’t know how to categorize me racially, and sometimes haven’t been able to make sense of my gender either. Sometimes I think the weird mixture of things has actually helped throw the radar way off: I had one partner whose mother was really upset that her daughter was gay and dating me (and I was her third girlfriend) but was also super-interested to talk to me about my family and Japanese background, plus the fact that she saw me as a “successful professional” relative to the lower-middle-class white surroundings of her family — I don’t know, maybe it was an exotic package that was both good and bad? I’ve had experiences of being seen as too masculine for some partners and too feminine for other partners — and those kinds of things always intersect with race in both predictable and unpredictable ways. Asians are stereotyped and unconsciously perceived as “more feminine” and that sets people’s expecations, which in turn means that they can disapprove of you because you meet the expectations, or be confused and dismayed that you don’t.

Elton:  I have not dated.  A perspective missing from the interracial dating conversation is that of Asian men raised not to date and to focus on education.  Not having a girlfriend deeply troubled me as a teenager, but now I look at the modern Western pressures and expectations regarding romance with much more skepticism.  Am I less of a man because I’m Asian American?  Hell no.  Am I happy being single right now?  Hell yes.

Latoya: I’m going to break the mod wall for one hot second, since you brought up something often not represented in dating conversations, which is not participating. To speak personally for a sec, one of my close friends is Korean American – she’s been on exactly one date, and its one I set up for her. (She expressed interest in dating a few years ago – we are all in our late 20s now.)  She has a lot of trouble picking up dating signals – in our conversations, she told me that a LOT of her friends have never been on a date and never had a boyfriend and were now wondering about marriage as we approach 30.  I have no idea how to cover that though, its so far from my experience…

Elton:  It’s a big unspoken issue–not everyone conforms to the modern Western romantic “plan” for dating and marriage, which is a very, very recent invention.  So how can we deal with intercultural dating when different cultures have different concepts of dating itself?  We can’t just assume that assimilation (Asian men need to ask more women on dates, problem solved) is the only way.

Latoya: True. But in that case, that raises more questions. (And perhaps this needs to be its own conversation, in another post.) So exactly how large of a factor are cultural norms, even in framing this conversation? And how widespread is this exactly? Last time I checked, there was something like a 15% outmarriage rate among Asian Americans; do we need to do an “opt-out” rate as well?

Elton:  I would be very interested to see a post on this topic.  I think many young people are skeptical of traditional concepts of dating and marriage–not because we want to be promiscuous, but because we want to be independent and possibly childfree, we’ve seen how much misery the institution of marriage has caused our parents and others, and the conservative “defense of marriage” agenda has made us wary (and weary) of marriage, period.

Besides, who can afford to date or get married anymore?

refresh_daemon: Like Elton, I’m a non-dater and in my youth, it was because my parents strongly discouraged (but didn’t outright prohibit) me from dating so that I can focus on my studies and getting into a good college. And likewise in college for getting a good job. I was always a bit of a straight arrow, so I complied with their desires.

However, why I am not actively seeking a relationship at the moment is simply because I don’t have the time to invest in one: I have more projects than I can handle at the moment on top of my day job and I’m very aware that were I to engage in a relationship with someone, I would very much be a boyfriend only on paper, which is something I would rather not be.

Were I to actually start dating, despite my parents preferences, I am not opposed to interracial and cross cultural dating, although I would personally also prefer to be in a relationship with someone who can relate well to my parents and someone who would be willing to adopt and learn some elements of Korean culture if they don’t already have it, as well as learn or know the language. Note, it’s just a preference, but I foresee the possibility of working in Seoul as well as the US and so an ability to navigate both worlds is important, as it’s also important to me that a potential spouse would be well integrated into my family.  And, I would likewise be willing, if she is of another culture, to learn and practice critical elements of her culture as well as learn the language of her parents in order to foster deeper communication with them and become a better integrated part her family as well.  Of course, this is an ideal scenario and I understand that in real life, you can’t get everything you want.  And I know that pragmatically limits me primarily to Koreans in terms of an ideal, but I’m probably more than willing to overlook these considerations if I meet a woman of another ethnicity or culture of great character that I share mutual attraction and compatibility with.

N’jaila: My parents forbade me to date when I was younger, it wasn’t until I was 17 that I was allowed to have a boyfriend. Of course my parents didn’t know that I was dating since I was 14 years old. I think It just taught me be secretive and feel a bit shameful about having relationships. Almost ten years later and I still can’t imagine taking a man to meet my parents.  I can talk to my mother about going on dates, but never my father. Its just not spoken of.

refresh_daemon: I am kind of curious as to those who are unwillingly single versus those who choose to be single.  It does explode my brain to think that someone (particularly women, given mainstream dating paradigms) could stay single into their 30’s without willfully choosing to do.  It can’t be for a lack of interested partners, right?  But, I do think that this is a bit off topic and more suited to a separate discussion about singleness.

N’jaila: I actually think that the similarities with Asian men and Black women have been emphasized by grossly oversimplifying issues. I think most people think we are in the same boat because of the disparity that supposedly caused by Asian women and Black men choosing White partners. I think that how each group sees the “problem” is very different.

I think for a lot of Asian men , this is more of an annoyance than a life altering issue. Statistically speaking most Asian American men get married. Do they marry less whites than their female counterparts, no. I think there’s a very vocal minority of Asian men that make attaining a white woman a sign of manhood and belonging. Asian men on the Internet and the Asian men that are in my friends and family seem to see this issue very differently. Of course I grew up in Bergen County NJ where seeing mixed marriages and couples is nothing shocking or of note. So I might have a skewed view of this.

I think many Asian men are angry about being excluded from the white dating pool because they’ve been fed the line that they are the “white minorities” and if anyone was the most qualified to marry into whiteness it would be them. They’re finding that not to be the case. So I think for Asian men its more of a ,”Hey where’d my privilege go?” than with Black women.

I think the much hyped “Black Male” shortage for Black women has a lot more to do with Black women’s reluctance to marry non-Black men. A man of color with a White woman is seen as progress, a Woman of color with a White man is seen as regression. I think many Black women also see marriage and the need for a “traditional on paper” home as something a bit passe. Black women also seem to get married a lot later in life so when people talk about that figure that 42% of Black women are not married they fail to ask what age demographic these numbers came from , usually they are talking about women 18-25 , when you raise the age to 35 the amount of unmarried Black women drops dramatically.

refresh_daemon: The position exists simply because the rates of out-marriage (or it just out-relationships?) mirror each other between Black women and Asian men (in comparison to Black men and Asian women). And I do think there is some correlation in terms of how the mainstream views Black femininity and Asian masculinity in particular, but I think that some Asian men and Black women unfairly take shots at their intraracial counterparts for some kind of perceived betrayal, rather than direct their attention to the overwhelming and subtle messages given by mainstream culture about what is desirable in a partner and who that partner should be.

In terms of cross-cultural discussion, I do think that, at least on the internet, this kind of discussion does tend to happen, but only in hotspots where people of different racial and ethnic backgrounds collide, like on Racialicious. Otherwise, the bigger question that’s begged is: why aren’t we all in more cross-cultural discussion altogether?

Holly: I have a tendency to see this as intrinsically linked to gender stereotypes as well. With white people as the hegemonic “norm” against which everyone else is measured in a white-supremacist society, all the “others” are either seen as more submissive, feminine, smaller, weaker, but maybe smarter (asians, generally) or as more dangerous, threatening, bigger, more masculine (black people, generally). (Of course with the way stereotypes work, contradictions operate simultaneously and manage to both deny and reinforce these things — as with the “angry asian misogynist business-samurai” stereotype and the “emasculated submissive ass-kissing black man” stereotype.) But generally, I think that the hegemonic view is that asian = “more feminine” and black = “more masculine.” Maybe it’s too simplistic, but this also handily explains why asian men and black women have lower rates of out-marriage. Black women are too loud, threatening, angry, big, belligerent, masculine. Asian men are too small, weak, feminine, hairless, whatever.

Eric: (I am going way off topic with this!!)

Within the gay community, which has historically and still presently does at times reproduce many of the same kinds of roles as in heterosexual relationships (perhaps the biggest point of contention being topping/bottoming, which some activists have argued reproduces heterosexist views that one partner must be the “masculine” top and the other the “feminine” bottom), I believe Asian men are often seen as automatically the “woman” in the relationship. Nguyen Tan Hoang’s work “Forever Bottom!” documents the tendency in gay pornography, for example, to cast Asian men as the bottom. There have been exceptions, particularly in amateur gay porn, which seems more open to casting masculine Asian men as tops, but for the most part in mainstream gay porn, the Asian man almost always bottoms. Of course, we can get into a whole discussion about whether bottoming necessarily equates to feminine, and the gendered/sexualized questions about that, but let’s just say for the sake of argument that, at least in mainstream porn, the bottom represents the more feminine partner. Similarly, the fascination and exotification around the phenomenon of the ladyboy, or Thai transsexuals/feminine boys (depending), has created a market around Asian men as feminine.

Although Asian men historically have been marginalized and desexualized, I see that a lot of attitudes have been starting to change. Aside from gay porn, I also mentioned earlier that K-pop has become increasingly popular, to the extent of turning a particular type of Asian men into sex symbols. Obviously there’s still a far way to go, but with the success of actors like Daniel Henney, Daniel Dae Kim, or Harry Shum, Jr., I think people are beginning to see Asian men as sexy. In a way, we’ve always been sexy in the gay community the way that Asian women are marketed as desirable to white men, but the stereotypes persist. In the most basic way, I have noticed that talk about Asian male sex symbols often tend to make mention of penis size (like on Glee, did we really need Tina to say that about Mike Chang? There was also a minor controversy about an amateur gay porn site that described a mixed-race model as getting his exotic facial features from his Asian genes and his “big dick” from his Polish side).

I can’t speak that much to the experiences of straight black women or even gay black men, but while gay Asian men are often cast as effeminate, submissive bottoms (an obvious analogue to the geisha figure), black men in gay porn are often the complete opposite. They are large in all senses of the word, they top more often than not, and usually they do not conform to stereotypes of the fairy fag. More often than Asian men, black men (and white men) are cast as “gay-for-pay” actors to fuel stereotypical gay fantasies about “turning” straight men. What does this say about non-effeminate, straight Asian men?

refresh_daemon: Eric, I know I’m answering a rhetorical question, but I believe that would mean that non-effeminate straight Asian men simply don’t exist. I think you are Holly are on the same track in noting the feminization/masculinization of race in mainstream culture, with white people being “normal”, Black people being “masculine” and Asian people being “feminine”. (Where do all the other people fit on this spectrum?) But I have an issue with the masculine/feminine binary to begin with, especially as many modern cultures are exaggerating these aspects to cartoonish degrees and overemphasizing femininity and masculinity in identity and perhaps how the problem relates to Black women and Asian men having a dearth of relationships is connected to the hyper-masculinization/feminization issue when combined with those racial perceptions of gender.

Holly: Since white people get to be the unmarked, assumed-ordinary norm and actually experience subjectivity and individuality… who do you think has to play the roll of “cartoonishly overemphasized icons” in the cultural formulation of gender? Black people, Asian people, everyone else. It’s part of being the other.