By Special Correspondent Jessica Yee
Last night on American Idol, Ke$ha belted out a performance, and was joined by 3OH!3 who sing a tune in her popular song “Tik Tok”, only to re-appear on stage with a full headdress (and war paint, I guess?) on.

MTV Shows
I think she just might be channeling the appropriation spirit of [...]

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid
(WARNING:  Totally NSFW)
Reader Grace nearly caused a pearl-clutching moment amongst us Special Correspondents with a link to these, ahem, enhanced drawings:

I look at these images as I do hentai and plushies:  some people getting off on the frisson of (hyper)sexualized ideals of taboo images and items connoted to belong to [...]

By Sexual Correspondent Andrea (AJ) Plaid
I guess there are days when I’m thankful for having been an ice-skating fan in my younger days, though I was absorbing some floaty, dreamy, and cornball heteronormative crap against the white-ice backdrop.  So, as much as I did enjoy figure skaters Oksana Domnina’s and Maxim Shabalin’s technical excellence, I [...]

By Deputy Editor Thea Lim

How do you know when a story is allying, versus appropriating?
In other words, if someone of privilege writes a story about the political oppression of a group they do not belong to, what is the difference between:
a) a story that brings marginalised voices to a wider platform and advocates for their [...]

Kirsten Dunst & McG’s ‘Akihabara Majokko
by allbrice
WARNING: VIDEO CONTAINS NSFW IMAGES
By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García
At least she can sorta carry a tune.
After two viewings, that’s about all I can glean from Kirsten Dunst’s cover of “Turning Japanese,” which premiered late last year as part of an exhibition by Takashi Murakami at London’s Tate Museum. [...]

By Deputy Editor Thea Lim
From time to time, we at Racialicious discuss the stickiness of trying to talk about race in the context of cultures we are not familiar with.  It’s easy for us to talk about the U.S. and Canada, since members of our team live solely in these two countries. But when it [...]

By Guest Contributor David Brothers, originally published at 4thletter!
The easiest thing to point to when someone says “What’s cultural appropriation?” (in the unlikely event that somebody actually wants to know the answer to that question) is the theft of rock and roll. ego trip’s Big Book of Racism!, in addition to being an incredible read, [...]

by Latoya Peterson

On Christmas, reader Mel sent us a little present. He wrote in about a flash based indie video game covered by the Escapist. The title? Ching Chong Beautiful.
I click over the link, expecting to see a take down. After all, the Escapist does publish a lot of progressive gaming [...]

By Special Correspondent Arturo R. García

DC Comics has begun drumming up buzz for the “First Wave” world – an alternate universe populated by pulp characters like Doc Savage and The Spirit, and pulp incarnations of modern characters like Batman and the first Black Canary.
Monday, though, we got a first look at a potential wrong [...]

How can you call something “BlakRoc” when the black folks on the project only rap and the rockers are all white?
BlakRoc is the name of Damon Dash’s upcoming project, a collaboration between white rockers The Black Keys and rappers such as Mos Def, Q-Tip, Ludacris, and Raekwon, to name a few.  Ordinarily, I could care [...]

By Deputy Editor Thea Lim
Well, it’s almost Halloween.  And every day that we get closer to Halloween, the more our intrepid readers point out for us some of the season’s most ghoulish examples of racism. Sigh.
Reader Joel sent us a link to this Illegal Alien costume being sold by Walgreens and Target (though word on [...]

Though the word Namaste has been a South Asian greeting for centuries, now every yoga student, celebrity (check out Al Gore’s picture in the wiki entry) and creepy guy trying to hit on an Indian woman thinks it’s fine to use it as a way of saying “hey” or “I’m so in touch with what [...]

By Guest Contributor Angry Asian Man, originally published at Angry Asian Man

This is a video clip of Mark Dacascos and his partner dancing the cha cha cha this week on Dancing With The Stars. Longtime readers know that I can’t stand the song “Kung Fu Fighting” — and I loathe any movie trailer, scene or [...]

Compiled by Special Correspondent Thea Lim, with Guest Contributors Robin Akimbo, Alaska B, Michelle Cho and Elisha Lim
…continued from Part 1!

Vogue Evolution is all about getting folks to recognise that queer culture is responsible for sooo much of contemporary dance.  So it’s a radical history lesson – what’s VE’s relationship to Paris is Burning?

Michelle: I [...]

By Thea Lim
First the Cleveland Indians and Atlanta Braves refuse to move forward into ahem, postracial America and change their team names, and now The National Collector’s Mint is cheerfully moving backwards.

The National Collector’s Mint announces the private reproduction minting of the last $5 Indian Head Gold Piece ever minted by the U.S. [...]