| WStallion |
| Underrepresented Villains in Video Games |
| 2011.08.22 16:44:25 | |
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These guys have killed more innocent people than the Yakuza, Viet Cong, People's Liberation Army and N Korean military combined. Yet, why are there no games where they are the villains? 1) Mafia 2) Irish Republican Army 3) Taliban 4) Nazis 5) Somalian Pirates 6) Mexican Drug Cartels 7) Iraqi Republican Guard Tags:
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| AsianAmericanTiger |
| "Kimchee-scented Kleenex Fiction" |
| 2011.04.18 19:13:51 | |
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by AsianAmericanTiger
When the novel, Please Look After Mom, an emotionally charged story about seemingly outdated unconditional love and sacrifice of motherhood against the backdrop of narcissistic modern society, by Korean author, Kyung-Sook Shin, made a sensation in America, as well as in Korea earlier, it did so enough to reach the #21 spot on the hardcover fiction category of the New York Times Best Sellers list, only five days after its English version, published by Knopf, officially went on sale in the U.S. on April 5 until April 9, when the list for April 24, 2011, publication was completed.1 However, its "unofficial" initial copies released prior to April 5 by Knopf had already been selected by Amazon, Barnes&Noble, and Oprah for their recommended reading lists.2 Notable among the rave reviews by many literary critics and readers of Shin's novel is that by the Pulitzer Prize-winner, Geraldine Brooks, who wrote: “Here is a wonderful, original new voice, by turns plangent and piquant. Please Look After Mom takes us on a dual journey, to the unfamiliar corners of a foreign culture and into the shadowy recesses of the heart. In spare, exquisite prose, Kyung-sook Shin penetrates the very essence of what it means to be a family, and a human being.”2 Unfortunately, its phenomenal sales and rave reviews notwithstanding, Shin's novel was, nevertheless, subjected to a scathing, culturally insensitive criticism by the resident book reviewer for NPR's Fresh Air and a professor of English at Georgetown University, Maureen Corrigan, who is also well known for her ultra-feminist values and specializes in critiquing literary works about empowerment of women.3 On the same day of the novel's official U.S. sales, Corrigan aired her critique that described it derisively as "guilt trip", "anti-city", "anti-modernist", and "anti-feminist", among others.4 Her strong contempt for the novel and resentment towards its popularity is evidenced by her comment, “If there's a literary genre in Korean that translates into "manipulative sob sister melodrama," Please Look After Mom is surely its reigning queen. I'm mystified as to why this guilt-laden morality tale has become such a sensation in Korea and why a literary house like Knopf would embrace it. (Although, as women are the biggest audience for literary fiction, Please Look After Mom must be anticipated to be a book club hit in this country.) But, why wallow in cross-cultural self-pity, ladies?"4 Corrigan ended her review with now infamous label, "the cheap consolations of kimchee-scented Kleenex fiction", that has instantly been incorporated into the titles of articles on her review, by major news media, blogs, and forums in Korea and elsewhere. It goes without saying that neither Maureen Corrigan nor anyone else is obligated to write a favorable review of Shin's novel. Whether the main theme of Shin's novel is traditional Asian values versus modern American values, as Corrigan implies, is still left up to much perspectives and serious debates among its readers, both in and outside of academia. But, in an age when globalism and multiculturalism has become the norm with the aid of digital revolution, it is particularly disturbing to see that she, as a long-time professor at a major, urban university, with students and employees from broad ethnic and cultural backgrounds, located in the capital of arguably the most ethnically and culturally diverse nation on Earth, has, nevertheless, resorted to such culturally insensitive and slighting style to criticize a work by an Asian writer which she apparently views as antithetical to her own social beliefs and values. Would Corrigan dared to describe the novel as a "watermelon-scented Kleenex fiction" if the author was African or African-American, or as a "bean-scented Kleenex fiction" if the author was a Latina? If not, have Asians become the new, politically acceptable, ethnic group to be stereotyped or picked on? Does her behavior reflect a growing uneasiness or fear towards Chinese and other Asians by the European-Americans, due to the increasing loss of economic, political, and cultural powers by the U.S. to Asia? Or, is it simply as a result of ethnocentric bigotry by at least some Westerners that has always been there, but only thinly veiled under superficial political correctness? Maybe one should not over-react, but, rather, whenever something happens, in supposedly colorblind America, that has a negative racial or ethnic overtone particularly against the disadvantaged or marginalized minorities in America, that one should simply dismiss it as just another "isolated" incident and assure himself or herself that racial relations are much better than as it appears on the surface. And, as such, must one, then, dismiss Corrigan's review as yet another isolated incident, as well, and simply move on? 1. http://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/2011-04-24/hardcover-fiction/list.html 2. http://www.korea.net/news.do?mode=detail&guid=54370 3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maureen_Corrigan 4. http://www.npr.org/2011/04/05/135120998/please-look-after-mom-a-guilt-trip-to-the-big-city
Tags: korea | globalism | multiculturalism | racial relations | bigotry | culturally insensitive | Asian-Americans | Asians | Knopf | Discover New Great Writers | Barnes & Noble | Oprah’s Book Club | Amazon Best Books of the Month | Georgetown University | New York Times Best Sellers | Fresh Air | NPR | Kyung-Sook Shin | Korean author | Korean novel | Please Look After Mom
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| AsianAmericanTiger |
| Unions & Racism: An Age-Old, Institutional Problem Continues Unabated |
| 2011.04.17 20:44:02 | |
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It is rather ironic that, last week, union bosses used the anniversary Rev. Martin Luther King’s assassination to try to drum up support for the union cause. You see, even after all these years, racism and discrimination within the walls of the House of Labor is still very real. As noted by UnionFacts.com, since 2000, there have been over 4,200 complaints filed against unions for racial discrimination with the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission. In some cities, it is a bigger problem than in others. However, the one area where union racism seems to rear its ugly head the most often is with the construction trade unions, where African Americans are often excluded from work. Systemic racism in the building trades has been built into the construction industry as Harry Alford, President & CEO of the National Black Chamber of Commerce, has noted
This exclusionary racial system is still prevalent today and has been the subject of much controversy in the City of Brotherly Love, Philadelphia.
While one Philadelphia-area local has had a more than 30-year history of discriminatory practices, in 2007, the controversy erupted again when a hangman’s noose was discovered on Philadelphia’s union-only Comcast construction project. The incident prompted construction workers and city officials to rally in anger, calling for the city’s construction industry to be more racially balanced.
Rather than union bosses addressing the problem of racism, however, the offender continued working, while the victim had to go find other work.
Across the country, in California, the exclusion of minorities has led to the Aboriginal Blackmen United pushing back at the IBEW for solar-panel work. Now, in Las Vagas, it is not necessarily the workers themselves who are creating a ruckus over racist unions, but the minority owners of businesses.
Laborers’ local 872’s business manager, Tommy White, denied the group’s assertions, claiming that the black business owners are playing the race card.
Were the most recent allegations of discrimination in Las Vegas an isolated case, one might possibly believe the union boss out of hand. However, with a history of union racism prevalent among construction trade unions, it is not without reason to believe that the business owners have a legitimate case. Union bosses [most of whom are white] are trying to lay claim to Reverend King’s legacy. Yet, racism is still very prevalent in certain unions. Given this, minorities might want to consider whose interests are really being served by pairing Reverend King with today’s union bosses—and who will ultimately lose if that King’s legacy is given up.
Tags: labor | unions | racism | exclusion | African-American | workers | Pan-Asian Chamber of Commerce | American-Asian Contractors Associat
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| AsianAmericanTiger |
| Diversity defines Silicon Valley, except at town halls |
| 2011.04.17 19:21:48 | |
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Posted: 04/16/2011 11:20:42 PM PDT
Silicon Valley may have the most dynamic, multiracial society on earth, but you wouldn't know it at city hall. With the 2010 census in, minorities now outnumber whites almost 2-to-1 in Santa Clara County. Yet non-Hispanic whites hold the vast majority of local city council seats, as well as every city manager's office in Santa Clara County's 15 towns and cities. "I cried when I saw those numbers," said Ed Sanchez, a veteran community and voting-rights activist in Gilroy. A look at who holds the most powerful positions in municipal governments shows that the political representation of Asians and Latinos -- the largest minority groups in the county -- lags far behind their surging populations. Countywide, three out of four city council members are white. "It's a little bit shocking to me," said James Lai, an associate professor of Asian studies and political science at Santa Clara University. "It's a fair, rational request -- should the pool of elected officials reflect the population?" Especially since minorities together had eclipsed the number of whites in the county a decade ago and in some cities before that. The question of political equality is long-running. San Jose, for example, switched from citywide to district elections in 1981 in part to give minorities a better chance at council seats. Thirty years later, minorities hold half the city's 10 seats, but the level of racial diversity has dipped lower in every other town hall but one. Cupertino's City Council, with three Asian-American members, comes closest to reflecting the population it serves.
A number of forces and reasons, from entrenched incumbents and at-large elections to the diminished power of voting-rights organizations and low voter turnout for some minority groups, have emerged to keep local governments from reflecting the real face of the valley. At the same time, enough minorities have won election to foster some degree of optimism in new political strategies. Countywide, non-Hispanic whites make up 35 percent of the population in the county's 15 cities but hold 76 percent of city council seats. All but three mayors are white. Every city manager, the top administrator appointed by a town's council, is white. The picture of diversity doesn't improve much in the seven cities where Asians, Latinos, blacks and other people of color outnumber whites: Minorities on average hold only a third of city council seats. Moreover, five municipalities -- Santa Clara, Los Altos, Monte Sereno, Los Gatos and Los Altos Hills -- have no minorities on their councils. Terry Christensen, a political scientist at San Jose State, said there is a natural lag time of a generation or so before immigrant communities show some power at the polls. But lag time doesn't explain the dearth of Mexican-American officeholders with deeper roots here. "By 2010, the numbers should be higher," he said. The census results threw some towns into new demographic and political territory as minority-majority towns, or close to it. For the first time, whites became a minority group -- 36 percent -- in Santa Clara, a city of 116,500 blessed with some of the world's largest high-tech companies. While its long-established Latino population grew steadily to 19 percent, the Asian population skyrocketed to 37 percent. Yet the town's all-white power structure remains. Asking why sparks furious arguments here, with many fingers pointing at incumbents for manipulating an at-large voting system to stay in power. As opposed to district voting, where candidates run to represent their neighborhoods, at-large systems force them to run citywide. Around the country, at-large voting has come under attack for allowing voting blocs to keep power long after their populations have plummeted.
Some at-large systems are tougher for nonwhite candidates than others. In cities such as Campbell, all the candidates run in a pool, and the top vote-getters fill the number of council seats that are open. But in Santa Clara, candidates must run for specific seats -- a system that diffuses the influence of newcomers. The successful candidates in Santa Clara often are members of political families with a network of connections: council members Lisa Gillmor and Patricia Mahan are the offspring of former city councilmen, and city clerk Rod Diridon Jr. is the son of a longtime county supervisor. "Santa Clara is the place with the most entrenched old-boy and old-girl network," Christensen said. Nine years ago, Mike Rod- riguez seemed to have everything going for him when he ran for Santa Clara City Council. The Latino candidate had grown up in town, gone to college and paid his dues on the city's Planning Commission. But when the incumbents didn't back him, Rodriguez said it was game over. "Even though I never had a chance after that," he recalled, "I still felt I was the best-qualified candidate." Mayor Jamie Matthews rejected any notion of racial politics. "We don't select people here by race or ethnicity," Matthews said. He pointed instead to weak Latino political activism in town, and he said he expects a more energized Indo-American community to produce a winning candidate soon. One interested outsider has the proven ability to turn Santa Clara politics inside out. Voting-rights attorney Joaquin Avila, who once lived in Fremont, won a prestigious "genius award" from the MacArthur Foundation for forcing cities with "racially polarized" at-large elections to adopt district voting. He has been watching Santa Clara from his perch at Seattle University. "Santa Clara is vulnerable" to a voting rights lawsuit, he said. Avila's observation raises a question: Where have the Latino and Asian political watchdogs been? One of them, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, closed its Bay Area office several years ago. Alberto Carrillo, a member of the League of United Latin American Citizens, said Latino politicos became complacent after winning the battle in San Jose for district elections. "We need to take responsibility ourselves, too," Carrillo said. Meanwhile, the Asian Law Alliance in San Jose concentrated on redrawing the lines for state and congressional offices. At the same time, the county's Asian population was becoming more diverse, with many newcomers arriving from India and parts of Southeast Asia. SCU's Lai says Asians increasingly arrive and settle in new "21st-century gateway cities," where they tend to fan out as opposed to clustering in enclaves as they once did. That also makes it more difficult to build Asian political power. Consequently, Asian and Latino officeholders in some gateway cities don't see district voting as the answer. They see what state Assemblyman Paul Fong, D-Mountain View, calls "pipeline development." One believer is Otto Lee, a Chinese-American and the only minority on the Sunnyvale City Council. The at-large system in Sunnyvale has been more open in practice than Santa Clara's. He and another Asian were elected in 2003, three short years after Sunnyvale became a minority-majority city. Lee said he believes district elections might get one Latino elected, but he'd rather recruit and groom minority candidates on local boards and commissions -- a pipeline to the City Council -- where they can learn how to appeal to all voters, not just minorities. That would deliver racial parity at City Hall sooner, Lee said. In another seismic result from the 2010 census, Milpitas joined Cupertino as the only cities in the county with clear Asian majorities. Both have become more than 60 percent Asian, but with very different town hall complexions. According to Lai, Cupertino's first Asian council members succeeded in feeding a pipeline to the council, which now has an Asian majority. However, Milpitas' elected minorities failed to groom successors. Today, non-Hispanic whites make up only 15 percent of Milpitas residents but have a majority on the council. Meanwhile, in South County, Gilroy became the only town with a Latino majority -- 58 percent. However, only two Latinos sit on the mostly white seven-member council. Next door in Morgan Hill, the Latino population grew to 34 percent, but there are no Latinos on the council. The city does have a black council member. Ed Sanchez, the semiretired founder of the Gilroy Citizenship Educational Program, said Gilroy Latinos should look for a model nearby in Salinas, a Monterey County town that elected a majority of Latinos to its City Council in 2004 after adopting district elections. But Sanchez says the Latino community also has to help itself, by persuading Mexican immigrants to become citizens and getting more Latinos to the polls. For a host of reasons, many of them socioeconomic, Latinos tend to turn out on election day in smaller percentages than whites, and white-controlled town halls won't fix that on their own, Sanchez said. "It has to come from the Latino leadership. It has to come from the heart." Contact Joe Rodriguez at 408-920-5767.
Tags: asian-american | asian | Latino | minorities | politics | Silicone Valley | Santa Clara | California | diversity | city council | representation
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| AsianAmericanTiger |
| Competitive disadvantage |
| 2011.04.17 18:28:07 | |
High-achieving Asian-American students are being shut out of top schools around the country. Is this what diversity looks like now?By Jon Marcus April 17, 2011
Grace Wong has felt the sting of intolerance quite literally, in the rocks thrown at her in Australia, where she pursued a PhD after leaving her native China. In the Boston area, where she’s lived since 1996, she recalls a fellow customer at the deli counter in a Chestnut Hill supermarket telling her to go back to her own country. When Wong’s younger son was born, she took a drastic measure to help protect him, at least on paper, from discrimination: She changed his last name to one that doesn’t sound Asian. Wong had these worries in mind last month as she waited to hear whether her older son, a good student in his senior year at a top suburban high school, would be accepted to the 11 colleges he had applied to, which she had listed neatly on a color-coded spreadsheet. The odds, strangely, were stacked against him. After all the attention given to the stereotype that Asian-American parents put enormous pressure on their children to succeed – provoked over the winter by Amy Chua’s controversial Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother – came the indisputable reality this spring that, even if Asian-American students work hard, the doors of top schools were still being slammed shut in many faces. And parents aren’t happy about it. “The entry barriers are higher for us than for everybody else,” says Chi Chi Wu, one of the organizers of the Brookline Asian American Family Network. “There’s a form of redlining or holding Asian-American students to higher standards than any other group.” Although Asian-Americans represent less than 5 percent of the US population (and slightly more than 5 percent in Massachusetts), they make up as much as 20 percent of students at many highly selective private research universities – the kind of schools that make it into top 50 national rankings. But, critics charge, Asian-American students would constitute an even larger share if many weren’t being filtered out during the admissions process. Since the University of California system moved to a race-blind system 14 years ago, the percentage of Asian-American students in some competitive schools there has reached 40, even 50 percent. On these campuses, the so-called “model minority” is becoming the majority. High-achieving Asian-Americans may be running into obstacles precisely because they work so hard. Mitchell Chang, an Asian-American studies professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, suggests that the attention given Chua’s book will only make things worse. “Her characterization can further tax Asian-American college applicants by reducing the chances that they will be viewed as self-starters, risk takers, and independent thinkers – attributes that are often favored by admissions officers but rarely associated with Asian-American applicants,” Chang wrote in a January Op-Ed in The Sacramento Bee. Even though the Supreme Court ruled in 2003 that universities can continue to consider race in admissions in the interest of diversity, admissions officers deny they’re screening out Asian-Americans. However, in researching their 2009 book No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal, Princeton sociologist Thomas Espenshade and researcher Alexandria Walton Radford examined data on students applying to college in 1997 and found what looks like different standards for different racial groups. They calculated that Asian-Americans needed nearly perfect SAT scores of 1550 to have the same chance of being accepted at a top private university as whites who scored 1410 and African-Americans who got 1100. Whites were three times, Hispanics six times, and blacks more than 15 times as likely to be accepted at a US university as Asian-Americans. What about the argument that, in relation to the general population, Asian-Americans are already overrepresented at universities? “It’s both true that Asians are overrepresented and that they’re being discriminated against,” says Stephen Hsu, a professor of physics at the University of Oregon who speaks out against discrimination he says Asian-Americans face in university admissions. Both things can happen at the same time, he says. Hsu and others allege that universities are more concerned about boosting black and Hispanic enrollment than admitting qualified Asian-Americans, and that old-fashioned xenophobia comes into play as well. “My personal perspective is that if institutions are using race to keep Asian-American students out, it’s based on a fear [among non-minorities] that these ‘other’ students are taking over our institutions or taking ‘our spots’ at the best institutions,” says Sam Museus, a professor in the Asian-American studies program at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. At Harvard, the overall acceptance rate for the incoming class of 2015 was 6.2 percent, a record low. William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid, says that among different racial groups, there are “not radical differences” in the proportions of students who got in. “We’re looking for excellence, first and foremost. And there’s excellence in every community in America and certainly lots of excellence within each one of the minority communities,” Fitzsimmons says. “We would not be doing our jobs if we were not looking for the best applicants from a wide variety of backgrounds.” Asian-Americans represent 17.8 percent, or 383, of the students admitted to Harvard last month, which is up from 14.1 percent a decade ago. During the last five years, however, the proportion there and at other Ivies has remained relatively flat or increased only slightly, even after an Asian-American student at Yale filed a federal complaint in 2006 against Princeton, where he applied but was not accepted, alleging it discriminated against him because of his race. Despite perfect SAT scores and nine Advanced Placement courses, the student said he was also rejected by Harvard, Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT. (That complaint has not been resolved, a US Department of Education spokesman says.) By contrast, at California’s competitive – and race-blind – state schools, Asian-Americans are much better represented: 52 percent of the student population at the University of California at Irvine, 40 percent at Berkeley, and 37 percent at UCLA. (The ban on admissions committees considering race was upheld by a federal judge in December.) The difference suggests that, where considering race is allowed, elite universities may be handicapping Asian-American applicants. “They just all sort of magically end up with under 20 percent Asian students,” Hsu says. One Princeton lecturer has asked if that number represents the “Asian ceiling.” This issue has gotten some recent attention in the United States, but much more across the border in Canada, where it stirred a national controversy in the fall when students in a Maclean’s article asked whether Canadian universities were becoming, as the headline put it, “Too Asian?” With spiraling Asian enrollments, the magazine reported, Canadian universities were becoming “so academically focused that some [non-Asian] students feel they can no longer compete or have fun.” Some white students told Maclean’s they wouldn’t choose the University of Toronto because it has so many Asians. “You can’t really overestimate the power of stereotypes,” Museus says. (A university spokeswoman reports it hasn’t seen a backlash.) In the end, Wong’s son got into most of the colleges he applied to, including Boston University, UMass-Amherst, Ithaca College, and Drexel University. But other Asian-American high school seniors in this singularly competitive corner of the country – not only the children of middle- and upper-income parents in Brookline and other expensive suburbs, but also sons and daughters of low-income families such as Southeast Asian refugees in cities including Lowell – have had a traumatic spring. “These kids are getting pretty immense pressure from their families, because there is some truth to the idea that Asian families value education highly as a way of progress and success,” says Museus. “Then they’re getting pressure from this competitive environment that exists around Boston. On top of that, they’re getting pressure from this stereotype, which sets up the expectation that they always have to be the best. The pressure does facilitate success, up to a certain point. But it also gets to a point where it makes them feel that they can’t do anything right.” Brookline organizer Chi Chi Wu, who is a lawyer and the mother of an 11-year-old, says it may be time to fight back, using a legal theory called disparate impact. “In other areas of civil rights law, when you have statistical disparities, you can often make a case. You don’t have to prove the university is saying, ‘We don’t want all these Asians,’ but just having those statistics and being able to point to disparities is enough.” She adds, “If we Asian-Americans don’t organize, there’s no amount of piano practicing that will help us.” Send comments to
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.
Tags: asian-american | model minority | academia | schools | colleges | universities | admission | discrimination | students
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| carlwebb |
| The Mocked Minority |
| 2011.03.22 19:26:54 | |
The Mocked MinorityMarch 22, 2011
When a University of California at Los Angeles student, in a video she posted online, used a mock foreign language to imitate Asian students talking loudly in the library, she probably didn’t think twice about it. But for many, that moment -- along with others in the video -- was yet another illustration of students’ willingness to openly criticize their Asian peers. And while UCLA Chancellor Gene D. Block acted swiftly by issuing a statement and video saying the young woman’s speech “has no place at UCLA,” the reality is that it’s commonplace. The reputation of Asian Americans as a “model minority” has long plagued students of that ethnicity. They have said that professors hold them to higher standards. Affirmative action debates often touch on the fear that without the policy, students of Asian descent would replace other minority populations on campuses. And satirical articles in student newspapers have mocked studious Asians in very public fashion. (The student newspaper at the University of Colorado at Boulder suspended its opinion section and pledged to undergo sensitivity and diversity training three years ago, after it published an anti-Asian satire.) "Incidents of bigotry and racism against Asians are too often overlooked and dismissed," Robert T. Teranishi, author of Asians in the Ivory Tower: Dilemmas of Racial Inequality in American Higher Education, wrote in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed. "I would like to see the university provide the space and resources for the campus community to come together to talk about and find solutions for this incident, rather than having this conflict just play out in the media." Students and others who take issue with the video have posted hundreds of comments on Facebook, Twitter and news articles. The video's creator, a white student named Alexandra Wallace, last week issued a statement to the UCLA student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, apologizing for the "inappropriate" video. "I cannot explain what possessed me to approach the subject as I did, and if I could undo it, I would," she said. One commenter on the Bruin website wrote, "As a recent alumnus, this story really is embarrassing.... I do not wish to see Ms. Wallace's academic future end prematurely, but UCLA must protect its reputation by setting an example." Block is also getting an earful on his Facebook page. One student wrote, "I'm applying to colleges next year and I was a little nervous to apply to UCLA. But knowing that you guys accepted the brilliant mind that is Alexandra Wallace, I'm not that nervous anymore!" A Japanese student trying to transfer to UCLA echoed the comments of many other Asian students, though: "The video did make me mad when I first saw it," she wrote. "But let's grow up here. She is just very ignorant and everybody makes mistakes." UCLA said last week that Wallace would not be disciplined because her actions did not violate the student code of conduct, but the next day she announced in a letter to the newspaper that she would withdraw from the university, saying she had received death threats and her family had been harassed, as well. "In an attempt to produce a humorous YouTube video, I have offended the UCLA community and the entire Asian culture," Wallace wrote, adding that her "mistake" has led to her being "ostracized from an entire community." Experts acknowledge that many students feel more comfortable mocking their Asian peers because they are billed as overachievers, and their success in college may make it seem like they haven’t faced the historical oppression that black students have. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Asians and Pacific Islanders tied with Hispanics for the fastest rates of growth in undergraduate fall enrollment from 1976-2008. And in 2008, about 52 percent of Asian and Pacific Islander adults had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared to 33 percent of white adults. Those outcomes are relatively well-known. But for those same experts, this video illustrated the other, less talked-about stereotypes that cling to Asian students – and make their white classmates comfortable documenting insults of an entire ethnic group, for the whole world to see. For Joe R. Feagin, a sociology professor at Texas A&M University and co-author of The Myth of the Model Minority: Asian Americans Facing Racism, Wallace made a blatant statement that Asian students are separate from -- and less important than -- white students. “A key part of the stereotyping of Asians and Asian Americans is their foreignness,” Feagin said. “She makes the point that not only are Asians and Asian-Americans stereotyped and evaluated from the old, white vs. others -- you know, racial framing -- but they also face this dimension of not being American. That is, foreign vs. American.” Warren J. Blumenfeld, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction at Iowa State University and faculty director of Iowa State's Dialogues on Diversity program, said this xenophobia stems from daily public discourse surrounding the same issues. "What I saw in the video itself was a frustration that I've been seeing within the society in general," Blumenfeld said. "There's a lot, really, that's going on in that two-minute video that is deeply troubling, but unfortunately reflects what we're being taught by the larger culture, to call into question anything that seems to be different -- quote unquote, foreign." As examples, Blumenfeld pointed to immigration debates in the Southwest, where Hispanics -- many of whom are legal American citizens -- are often painted as criminals. These questions come up in the top echelons of politics, too: the presidential contender Mike Huckabee was criticized this month when he mistakenly proclaimed that President Obama's world views had been shaped by his childhood in Kenya. (Obama first visited Kenya when he was in his twenties.) And predictions that China already is or is becoming the dominant world economic powerhouse are scaring many people -- including young men and women preparing to enter the job market -- into believing Americans from abroad are forcing them out of college or a career. "In higher education, I see this -- the targeting of Asian students as being basically a privileged group, a group that is taking over the university system. So I don't think it was a coincidence that she was specifically targeting Asian students and no other specific group," Blumenfeld said. He described a recent interaction with a student on the bus who said Iowa State is accepting too many Asian students, that they're everywhere on campus (despite the fact that Iowa State's student body is 80 percent white). "I see these kinds of, not just frustrations but reactions, against international students all the time," he said. In the video, Wallace says, "Ohhhhh, ching chong ling long ting tong, ohhhhh," when imitating students on cell phones in the library, and repeatedly uses terms like “hordes” that are often affiliated with immigrant movement. She tells students to “use American manners,” and tells them, “Hi. In America, we do not talk on our cell phones in the library.” These kinds of messages not only reinforce stereotypes that are ingrained in people from a young age through media and social interactions, but they also deeply affect the Asian students who are targeted, said Rosalind S. Chou, co-author of Myth of the Model Minority and a Duke University postdoctoral fellow in the Center for the Study of Race, Ethnicity and Gender in the Social Sciences. Chou works with Asian students at Duke and has spoken to them and others many times about these issues. “They suffer from this,” she said. “While we can be looking at this young lady as an individual actor, we really need to ask about the larger structure and how racism and racist notions are embedded. Because she’s not alone in her thinking.” Media portrayals of Asians as “people to be laughed at” (think "American Idol" hopeful William Hung) contribute to the other major misconception exhibited by Wallace’s decision to record and post her video: the idea that Asians are docile and passive, and that people can treat the population as inferior with no repercussions. “Many Asians [face] this open racist taunting that goes on without the fear that they are dangerous minorities, or violent, where that’s associated with other racial groups,” Chou said. She noted the recent case of a student who was verbally harassed in the library, as well as an article in the student newspaper that made fun of Asian students, saying they were the only ones who didn’t hear about a campus scandal because they were all in the library. “A newspaper at Duke would never run something like that about African Americans, for fear that there’s an active history of resistance.” (Teranishi, associate professor of higher education at New York University, said the video "reinforces the need for colleges and universities to address issues of race and diversity beyond the dominant black/white paradigm.") When students approach Chou for advice on how to respond to such taunts, she tells them all they can do is try to defy the stereotypes. That might involve something as simple as calling out the assailant as a racist. UCLA can do its part too, Blumenfeld said. Wallace did not see Asian students as human beings, he said. "She saw them as the other, as even less than human," he said. "She saw herself as dominant." By hosting diversity awareness lectures and events, requiring students to take multicultural courses, and having precise and visible anti-discrimination policies that are enforced on campus, students and administrators can gain from this incident rather than dwell on it, Blumenfeld said. "When we see people as fully dimensional human beings, it's harder to put them in that box," he said. "In that way, we will learn from them, they will learn from us."
Tags: Mocked | Minority | Model | asian
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| sir_humpslot |
| Australia's RED DAWN: or how they got it right |
| 2011.03.22 05:02:26 | |
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I never realized that I had a thing for Australian movies until I read the latest article from the "youoffendmeyouoffendmyfamily" crew. There was JAPANESE STORY and then there is MAO's LAST DANCER where not only does the AM romance the ladies, but they're shown as fully realized characters and not stock caricatures to make racist mockery out of. Of course, there are a few other indie movies (THE DISH) that had some substance and thought rather than US haolewood's mindless lowest denominator drivel. So what brings me to write this blog entry is that I just saw the Aussie version of RED DAWN called "TOMORROW, WHEN THE WAR BEGAN" and have to give it three thumbs up, if I had polydactyly.
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scorpy
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| YT's diversity hypocrisy: A YT diary |
| 2011.03.21 07:45:25 | |
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Dear diversity diary, today I had such wonderful diversity day. This morning, Miguel the Mexican gardener came first to do my lawn. Then came Rosario my El Salvadorian housekeepers to clean my house. Then I was off to work. But first I needed breakfast, so I went to 7-11 and got my donuts and coffee from Rajou the Indian. After that, I realized I was low on gas, so I went to Chevron and paid Mohammad the Yemeni cashier some gas money. At lunch I had sushi, served by Kuni the Japanese waiter. Then after work, I stopped by my local liquor store to stock up on my wine bar; there was Hyun the Korean storekeeper. But my day was just getting started; first I had dinner at Chow’s Chinese food, my favorite chief Chow the Chinese cook was there to make my favorite dishes. After that I went to the Hoops Arena to check out a basketball game, where Leroy the black basketball point guard was going to break the franchise record for scoring the most points. Then I went home, but not before that I stopped by an Asian massage parlor to get my happy ending from Nuygen the Vietnamese massager. Here comes the kicks. I work for the government. So, all the people I mentioned above actually pay me, indirectly, through taxation. Isn’t diversity grand?
But you see, I can’t fall asleep at night. What keep me up every night are their kids. The people I named above. It’s not that they are throwing keg parties and playing loud heavy metal music way past midnight like my kids. These people of color actually live miles away, probably at another town. But what worry me, in the morning hours, is their children who are all going, or will be going, to college and some day they will take “my job” away from my children. But the point is we already have enough diversity out there, why should we have diversity at “my workplace” with this equal opportunity nonsense? Why can’t their kids leave “my job” along for my kids and keep on doing what their parents do? I mean my kids will be the most qualified people to do my job, right?
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| nickkunthai |
| (U.S.) gov...should've just used nucs and taken every living thing out (of Vietnam) |
| 2011.03.19 09:03:59 | |
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I was so raged when I came across this man's (Henry Eroh) reply to a news article about poor pregant Vietnamese surrogate mothers who were recently caught in Thailand.
Henry Eroh writes:
just what we need more vitmamese- isn't it bad enough they killed over 59,000 service people and for what a war we had no reason to be in- it is to bad our gov sent troops in there instead should have just used nucs and taken every living thing out-plus now how many of them that are here walking our streets that have killed some of our troops.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/news/regions/asia-pacific/thailand/110310/thailand-surrogacy-human-trafficking
Care to be friends with him?
Henry Eroh's Facebook Page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000281082043
Please feel free to distribute this post. Tags:
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| WStallion |
| "Pearl Harbor Karma" |
| 2011.03.17 18:43:27 | |
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There have been numerous Facebook and Twitter messages about how the Japanese earthquake/tsunami is payback/karma for Pearl Harbor and killing whales and dolphins. Do these retards even know what karma is? So a Hindu god created an earthquake killing 100,000 people for something that happened 70 years ago which they had nothing to do with? I seriously believe these people's knowledge of Pearl Harbor came from watching that 2001 Disney movie because if they had paid attention in history class, the US dropping the atomic bombs (which were the only 2 atomic bombs used in history) was payback for Pearl Harbor and that they rounded up innocent Japanese-Americans into internment camps (and that is why Arab-Americans aren't treated the same way today). As for the killing of whales and dolphins, I don't agree with it and just because a private Japanese company is involved in killing whales, it is stupid to assume that all Japanese enjoy hunting and eating whale. Similarly, these people's knowledge of this must have come from watching The Cove. Only a very small percentage of Japanese people have even ate dolphin. If a Hindu god created a tsunami killing 100,000 people for hunting whales and dolphins, what is going to happen to the US for all the cows and chickens they have slaughtered? Some of the Twitterers are even Asians talking about how the Japanese deserved the tragedy for how they treated their grandparents during WWII. Even though I am Chinese, I kind of wish the Japanese had killed whoever conceived them, that is if their parents even lived during that time period. Some are questioning why the US is sending aid to Japan when Japan has never helped out the US in similar situations. A quick search on the Internet shows that Japan had donated money for relief efforts after Hurricane Katrina. If a 9.1 earthquake ever hits the US or Al-Qaeda pulls off another terrorist attack, don't expect me to show any sympathy. Pearl Harbor Karma-what is that, a Miss Hawaii contestant? Tags:
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| WStallion |
| Biggest Plotholes in Hollywood |
| 2011.02.18 18:59:50 | |
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1) I would like to know how many crimes in Las Vegas are committed by gay Asian males in real life, yet in the Hangover, the crime lord of that city was a gay AM. 2) China, Japan and S Korea have the strictest gun control laws in the world, to the point where many police officers and airport security do not even carry guns. Yet, there have been numerous movies and video games where a white cop travels to Hong Kong, Shanghai, Tokyo etc armed with various handguns, submachine guns and assault rifles and kill hundreds of Triad or Yakuza members. 3) Harvard 2003. There seems to be no Asian males in the computer science program or the entire school during that time while there are plenty of Victoria Secret model-type Asian women. We also know that without Asian men, there would be no Asian women, so where the hell are all these AFs coming from? 4) Every prime time crime drama has a Chinatown episode where it is portrayed as a place of illegal operations. In real life, it is a tourist attraction with local business owners working long hours. If you went to any city's Chinatown and ask the people there if they know any gangsters, 98% of them would say no. These shows never seem to have an episode that takes place in inner city neighborhoods. What is their explanation for that, those neighborhoods pay little taxes, so there are no cops there? 5) Single black mother moves from the ghetto to China and her son gets picked on by Chinese kids. I'm sorry, but I just cannot suspend disbelief that these two things could ever happen, not in a million years or even in a parallel universe. I am more likely to believe that a yellow Chevy Camaro can transform into a robot from Cybertron. Adding insult to injury, this movie also tells people that if you train in a martial arts style for 3 weeks, you can beat somebody who has been training in that same style for most of their life. Even if the story is fictional, at least add a little reality to it. It shouldve taken place in the US and the bullies shouldve been white. 6) China has no plans of invading the US. Anybody, or at least any non-Asiaphile, who has went there would realize that. We are also constantly told that the US military is the greatest fighting force in the world, which is hard to argue, so that means no country would be capable, brave or stupid enough to even attempt an invasion. What the hell kind of crappy military does the US have in the movies where China can actually successfully invade? Unlike people who hate wrestling, I dont not watch movies just because they are fake. There is nothing wrong with fiction, but many elements are added to the plot that are not only racist, but have no basis in logic or reality whatsoever. If you have any other plotholes, feel free to contribute. Tags:
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scorpy
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| Bad Guy Syndrome |
| 2010.12.12 17:59:17 | |
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When I was growing up, being young and naive, I discovered something was wrong with me through Hollywood. I always liked to watch films with Asian actors in them. I’d think to myself, “Cool, some Asians are in it, I should support the film by watching it.” But very often after coming out of the movie theater I felt something was not right inside me. I couldn't figure out what was wrong until the internet age comes along, when I figured out that I wasn't the only one suffering from this syndrome. I shall call this the “bad guy syndrome”. I don’t know what’s wrong with me, but when I watched Rambo, I wished he would get killed by one of the Vietcong. When I watched Blood Sport, I was rooting for Bolo to beat the crap out of Van Damme. Even in G.I. Joes, I wished Cobra Commander would finally rule the world. Why did I always find myself rooting for the bad guys? It’s kind of straightforward that those characters were played by Asians. Does that make me a racist, to root for Asians? I don’t think so because what about G.I. Joes? I guess it’s because most cobras concealed their faces with masks, which made them possible Asians. Then there are shows with Asian female actresses. When I was in New York, I got to pick a Broadway play to impress me with, by the Big Apple’s famous musical and all. I chose to check out Miss Saigon, obviously again, thinking to myself, “There is a show about Asians. I should support it by watching it.” In the end, the hero gets the girl, but how come I wished he hadn’t. Is there something wrong with me, being a bad guy again? Maybe I am just a rebel, or a contrarist? Then there are other countless examples of similar movie that featured a white main character and an Asian female counterpart, and most of them end up in relationships more than just friends. Do they ALL have to be romantic and end up being sexual? So at first I couldn’t figure out why every time I finished watching an Asian film by Hollywood I walked out the theater feeling pissed, as if someone just sucker punched me or insulted me behind my back. Maybe because the bad guys I wanted to win had died a pathetic death, or the bad guy feeling I had because I didn't agree with the constant guy-gets-the girl scenes for the female. Either way I didn't know who the perpetrator was for making me feel that my emotions were not a norm, for everyone finished the movie seemed to have enjoyed it. But now I know, I was never the bad guy. I have discovered what’s wrong with these motion pictures, and who the real bad guy is. It’s Hollywood with its Asian racism propaganda. I now have tools to be able to identify it and be aware of it. I use a 6G checklist or I research the films online with Asian American community before deciding to watch it. Better yet, just boycott them all. It makes me feeling a lot better doing that instead.
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| hchalice |
| Afro-Caribbean thinking |
| 2010.10.10 02:50:13 | |
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Actual conversation: Tags: China Africa
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| sir_humpslot |
| AA media: appeasing white people; or wanting to have cake and eat it too |
| 2010.10.05 08:30:45 | |
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I just saw a play reading recently and the aphorism of wanting cake and eating it too is blatantly on show with the playwright. It had everything: from the 'Chinatown' episode cliches of sweatshops to the white savior theme are all there. Also problematic is the writer's subtle tactic of divide and conquer one Asian ethnicity against another. It's a play about human trafficking and the 'snakeheads' are Chinese, while the 'victims' are SE Asian. One line from the play goes on about how ruthless the mama-san is at business, she replies to the effect of course she is because she is Chinese. All the AM characters are either somehow deficient or inhumane, and the AF are the hapless victims. Of course, the playwright has the AF marrying white males, including one who rescued them from their sweatshops. At the end all the oppressed AF cheer on how great the US is and how much freedom they've had after marrying "Americans" (which we can assume means YTs). And who do you think is the writer, some SOW who has identity issues? Not at all: Yes, it is an AM playwright that wrote all those pandering to white audience stockholm syndrome auto-racist puerile crap. All the same, various Asian organizations and media outlets have been promoting this tripe and telling Asians to support it. What is there to support besides YT appeasement? That is the problem with Asian-American media in general: trying to appease a white audience, while alienating the socially conscience AM ones but still wanting 'the Asian community' to support them. Perhaps 10 or 20 years ago when the agendas of MM haven't gotten out there on the internet the SOWs can try to get away with pseudo-liberal pandering, but with the internet so prevalent and the truth so obvious it's time for Asians to stop being hop-sings and be brave. Stop pandering, and start to 'keep it real' and call out the real issues that appeals to the sophisticated Asian-American audience rather than pandering to whites and also wanting the support of Asians for financial purposes. Tags:
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| Klondike |
| Gay White Men Dating Asian Women |
| 2010.09.26 21:40:45 | |
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There is a saying it the gay community that an Asian women is the last stop before coming out of the closet. To summarize, it's when a gay white man dates an Asian woman just to pretend he is not gay. The Asian woman knows this but is complacent and goes along with it. This is a blog entry by an Asian female that describes this:
http://bloomabilities.blogspot.com/2007/03/asian-women-and-gay-men-what-would-you.html
Asian women and gay men. What would you have done? Last week after playing darts with coworkers, some of my group started hankering for Karaoke. We decided to go to Lucky Cheng's, which is dubbed "The Drag Queen Capital of the World." I had never been there before, but had heard good things about it. We walk in, and they haven't started Karaoke yet, and as we're waiting in the lobby area, one of the "ladyboy" hostesses looks at my coworker J and says, "You look familiar--don't I know you from somewhere?" which embarrasses him because this is the second time he's been out with coworkers where he's been mistaken as being gay. Then "she" looks at me and says, "Is this your boyfriend?" and we both say NO but she continues and says, "Because you know what they say about men who date Asian women..." and I sigh and nod and say, "Yes, I know what they say, but I find it insulting."
Tags: gay | dating | interracial | asian
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| WStallion |
| Fly Me to Shanghai |
| 2010.09.13 02:52:12 | |
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I just came back from a vacation in Shanghai and here are some observations for the members here who used to live there and those who are interested in going.
-The city is full of white guys who couldnt get laid in the US, so they have to fly their asses over there for a fuck. Life must be imitating art with movies like Shanghai, Shanghai Knights, Shanghai Baby, Shanghai Red, Shanghai Hotel promoting Oriental fantasies -From what I saw on street ads and TV, in China, if you are white, then you are a model or TV host. The few companies that use AMs in ads are Chinese athletic apparel companies like Li Ning, 361, Qiongdan, Anta, etc -I think the club hostesses in Xintiandi are also prostitutes -I was mostly treated with amused indifference for not speaking Mandarin, but nothing downright condescending. IMO, China needs better English teachers and we all know their hiring practices for English teachers -At the World Expo, thousands of unpaid local volunteers worked about 350X harder than white/European guys working their home country's pavilions and were on their laptops or texting friends while getting a six-figure salary and free housing at Expo village -During my time in China, I did not see any single black mothers who moved there from the ghetto. In fact, I dont think I even saw any African Americans there.
Overall, Shanghai is a very good looking city, but without the Expo, it is only worth a 3 day trip. Tags:
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| hchalice |
| Eurasian Logic |
| 2010.09.07 03:43:54 | |
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Kristin Kreuk Does not consider herself Asian or Eurasian but European Stars as a Chinese-Canadian in Edgemont (2001-2005) Stars as a Muslim Indian with fellow Eurasian Jimi Mistry in Partition (2007) Stars as a Chinese undercover agent Chun-Li in Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li (2009) Can someone explain? Tags:
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| WStallion |
| Origin of the Term SOW |
| 2010.08.30 13:40:40 | |
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The term/acronym SOW (Sellout Whore) was coined by a poster on the old forum named minhhung, who posted there briefly in 2006-2007. I liked it, kept using it and it eventually caught on and became AA terminology. While I didn't create the term, I do take credit for making it popular. It is also kind of funny how sow means female pig which is what many SOWs are. minhhung is long gone, but he has left quite a mark on this forum. Tags:
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| WStallion |
| All is Forgiven with Shaq? |
| 2010.08.25 14:54:05 | |
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When Yao Ming first came to the NBA, Shaquille O Neal in an interview with FOX Sports spoke in mock Chinese to make fun of the situation. I hated Shaq's guts for making those remarks, especially since he was in LA at the time where this behavior is encouraged and engaged in by their fans, but deep down, I didnt think he was a racist. He's just not very bright and comes from a society where it is considered acceptable to make fun of Asians. Shaq did issue an apology for what he said, something that Rosie O Donnell, Miley Cyrus and the Spanish Olympic basketball team never did for their similar racist remarks/gestures, and he has tried to make amends with Yao Ming and the Asian community. Shaq has moved on to several teams since then and recently signed with the Boston Celtics. Now, I just hope he can help them win #18. They sure couldve used him in the NBA Finals earlier this year. Tags: Hits: 1389 | Read more... |
| WStallion |
| Rush Hour Sequel Generator |
| 2010.08.13 15:21:24 | |
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1) Select a Number: 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 23, 25, 27, 30, 34, 48, 51
2) Select a City: Miami, Toronto, Tijuana, Bogota, Dublin, Oslo, Helsinki, Stockholm, Ibiza, Rome, Brussels, Berlin, Sydney, Copenhagen, Cape Town
3) Select a Plot: Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker fight Chinese gangsters in (insert selected city), while Chris Tucker tells ching chong jokes
What did you come up with? Tags:
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