Asian American Empowerment

Interracial Marriage and the Legacy of Colonialization

By Kumiko Nemoto
Excerpted from "Race Still Matters:Popular Discourse of Interracial Marriage and Asian American Experiences"
2003 While both Asian American men and women I interviewed reported encounters with racism in various situations, the Asian American men and white women I interviewed seem to be exposed to more negative sanctions from whites than the Asian American women and white men. Sothy and Emily have not talked with Emily�s father in more than fifteen years. Kevin and Karen reported hostile reactions toward them in public. Tracy Tanaka, a twenty-nine year old waitress, has been married to Kenji Tanaka, a Japanese American musician, for a year. She reported various negative �judgments� from her friends and neighbors on her choice of husband. Tracy�s close friends asked her several unexpected questions that imply stereotypes of Asian American men, such as if �he had a bad temper and drank too much.� Tracy and Kenji also have a white neighbor, who, according to Tracy, �wouldn�t speak to us because we are an interracial couple. He wouldn�t even say �hi�. He wouldn�t even stare at us,� even though they �see each other all the time� and �we say �hi� and �good morning�.� The owner of Tracy�s apartment complex �rented it to me and Kenji because I was white.� But, �he wouldn�t rent to two Asian men� who worked at the same restaurant in which she worked. Tracy worked at Japanese restaurant briefly, where, she describes, she is the only white waitress and �white men come to pick up Asian women.� As a result, Tracy says, Asian/Asian American women who work there tend to �only see the bad side of white people� who sexualize and commodify Asian/ Asian American women. As a result, these Asian American women viewed Tracy as similar to the white men. One Korean American waitress even sarcastically commented on Tracy�s marriage as �some kind of Asian fetish,� asking her �what her problem is.�

Obstruction of Justice Arrest in Robert Wone Murder Case

By Judy Tseng
Special to ModelMinority.com
November 1, 2008 Dylan Ward, 38, was arrested in Dade County, Florida on Thursday, October 30, 2008 on a charge of obstruction of justice in the Robert Wone murder investigation. Wone, a prominent young attorney and president-elect of the Asian Pacific American Bar Association- D.C., was found stabbed to death in a Washington, D.C. rowhouse at 1509 Swann Street, N.W. the night of August 2, 2006. From left: Dylan Ward, Joseph Price, Victor Zaborsky For two years, little to no news had been released about the murder, though suspicion surrounded the occupants of the home: Joseph Price, a law partner at Arent Fox and former general counsel for Equality Virginia who had attended the College of William and Mary with Wone; Victor Zaborsky, a marketing manager for the International Dairy Foods Association and Price�s domestic partner; and Ward, allegedly their �boy toy� and a massage therapist, direct marketing consultant, and former spokesman for Equality Virginia. At the time of arrest, Ward was living in a Miami area home owned by Price and Zaborsky. Price and Zaborsky sold 1509 Swann St. for a little over $1.4 million in June 2008 and moved elsewhere in the D.C. area.

Rejecting the Model in ''Model Minority''

By A.R. Sakaeda
©2008 Chicago Tribune
May 5, 2008 I have a confession to make: I am a lousy model minority. In fact, I'm pretty sure that the majority isn't going to want me as the model for any minority, let alone my own people. Unlike the mythical model minority, I am not quiet and polite. I am often loud, sometimes abrasive and I use the F-word a lot. (My mother doesn't read anything on the Internet, so I don't have to worry about repercussions from that last confession.) My math skills are only average. I do not own a calculator with a graphing function. If I'm a lousy model minority, I'm an even lousier stereotypical Asian woman. The geisha and the "China doll" are deferential, obedient and demure. Me? I don�t own a kimono. I can�t bat my eyes. I cut off all my silky, ink-black hair because I got sick of people touching it. (Don�t touch my HAIR!) I even enjoy drinking beer out of the bottle and listening to loud rock music.

''Crash'' Course on Societal Racism Shortchanges Asian Americans

By Erin Wong
©2006 Hardboiled
March 2006 Though Crash has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Motion Picture, it is difficult to say how the film advances racial tolerance given its vilifying portrayal of Asians. Hailed as an honest and provocative depiction of post-9/11 racism in America, Paul Haggis's directorial debut dares to blatantly display common racial stereotypes, in order to deconstruct them through the reality of race. The film deals with society's perceptions of blacks, whites, Middle Easterners, Latinos, and Asians by depicting racial interactions that boil over, exposing the latent ethnic discrimination within the supposed melting pot of Los Angeles. Yet the film attempts to bridge these ethnic divides through unsettling sequences that dispel preconceived notions about race, advance universal tolerance, and promote understanding of people whose lives are ruled circumstance. Crash brazenly shows skewed prejudices against minorities. Latinos become cheating Mexican gang bangers. Middle Easterners become stubborn and incoherent convenience store owners. Blacks become gun-toting criminals. Asians become greedy smugglers. And whites oversee this chaos with condescending bigotry. The film boldly takes the perspective of intolerant and quick to anger white Los Angelinos, a perspective filled with racial slurs, injustices, and narrow-mindedness, leaving viewers in disbelief.

Racial Preferences in the Dating World

By Steve Penner
©2007 Seacoast Media Group
May 11, 2007 One of the more delicate areas I dealt with while running a dating service for more than two decades was the issue of race, and more specifically racial stereotyping by prospective members. Stereotyping in itself is a volatile issue, and at some point during intake interviews, I often repeated the phrase �While there is some truth to all stereotypes, there are certainly many exceptions to every single one.� However, when one is dealing with a sample of more than 20,000 single, divorced, and widowed men and women, I feel confident and comfortable making certain statements in a column titled The Truth about Dating. Yet I was still hesitant to write this column, until a reader sent me an article from The New York Times, in which the author, John Tierney, published a story about racial preferences in the dating world. Moreover, the article cited a study titled Racial Preferences in Dating that documented the preferences of more than 400 participants in speed dating sessions at Columbia University. A quick reading of both the Times article and the Columbia study seemed to support my own anecdotal findings.

Dad: Virginia Tech Treated Suicidal Son Like 'Joke'

© 2008 CNN
April 15, 2008 RESTON, Virginia -- William Kim still calls the cell phone of his son, a 21-year-old senior at Virginia Tech, just to hear his voice. He feels cheated out of a chance to save his only boy. Daniel Kim, 21, was a senior at Virginia Tech who had fallen into a deep depression after last year's massacre. His son, Daniel Kim, wasn't a victim of last year's massacre that left 32 students and professors dead. His son committed suicide eight months later, after falling into a deep depression. A Korean-American, Kim feared that classmates might mistake him for shooter Seung-Hui Cho.

Satire as Racial Backlash Against Asian Americans

By Sharon S. Lee
© 2008 Inside Higher Ed
February 28, 2008 Imagine for a minute if student leaders at elite college campuses devoted themselves to mocking black people or Jewish people or gay people. I�m not talking about drunk students posting pictures of their offensive parties on Facebook, but student newspaper editors � thought of as being both smart and progressive � giving space over for the sole purpose of making fun of people because of their background. It�s hard to imagine. And yet recently this phenomenon of racial caricatures as �satire� has emerged with Asian Americans as the object of the jokes. Why Asian Americans? After all, Asian American college students tend to make headlines as super students, attending prestigious private and public colleges at rates way above their state demographics (hence they are �over-represented") and as excelling academically above and beyond any other racial group, whites included. This �model minority� image is not new and has been around since at least the late 1960s, with Asian Americans often embraced as symbols of the merits of hard work and individual effort, all undertaken without complaint or political agitation. So ... shouldn�t that mean that Asian Americans would be seen as well integrated � academic and otherwise � with white students?

Students Show Up to Multicultural Fair Solely for the Food

Editor's note: BoUNCe Magazine is a satirical online humor magazine published by students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. By Sarah Wolper
© 2007 BoUNCe Magazine
September 2007 The 9th annual Multicultural Awareness Fair, held last week in the Student Union, was deemed a great success by all in attendance, despite the fact that next to no multicultural awareness actually resulted from the event. Much delicious food, however, was consumed. �Mmph. Oh god, these are soooo good,� said sophomore Janice Corrigan, as she devoured a samosa at the Indian Student Association table. �I don�t know what�s in these or how you people make them, but wow.� Corrigan did not take a pamphlet on the upcoming Indian cultural festivals on campus, although she did take a fourth samosa and a plate of saffron rice.

What It Means to Be Asian American

Excerpted from "Asian Pride or Ambiguous Identities? Context and Racial Group Consciousness among Asian Americans"©2007 By Jane Junn and Natalie Masuoka
To appear, Perspectives on Politics Given our contention that Asian American racial identity may be constructed differently than that for African Americans, we first began our study by conducting semi-structured interviews with Asian American youth in California. We selected a number of racial group consciousness and political participation questions that have been asked in previous public opinion surveys. Through these interviews we observed how Asian American respondents answered these questions, which informed the development of survey items and analysis in the following section. We also used the in-depth interviews to provide a sense of the words and ways in which respondents describe their racial identities and how they feel their identities are related to politics. While the data are exploratory inasmuch as they do not emanate from a randomly selected sample of the populations in the locales in question, the responses from these Asian Americans provide a clear window into the power of that identity. Despite the complexities and the hesitations respondents often express in claiming a racial group identity as Asian American, a sense of racial consciousness clearly exists.

What Was That? Researchers Explore Below-the-Radar Racism

By Jessica Troiano
©2007 The Columbia Journalist
December 3, 2007 Carl Bell was waiting his turn to check in at his hotel. A well-regarded psychiatrist and academic, he was traveling for a television appearance. The TV station had flown him first-class and sent a chauffeur-driven car to pick him up at the airport. But just before he stepped up to speak with the hotel clerk, a white man marched in and cut him off. Bell, who is black, was indignant.

�Do you think I�m waiting for a bus?� He demanded. �I�m standing right here!�

The man claimed he simply hadn�t seen him.