Nitsuh Abebe has written a great exposé on the insult “white” when used to refer to non-white people, specifically in the context of seemingly “white” band Vampire Weekend.
Mostly The Game (of race) just uses non-white people as cudgels for Americans to outmaneuver one another on the subject of who’s too bourgeois. In order for The Game to criticize bourgeois “whiteness” as privileged, over-educated, too polite, and too clever, it needs various non-white people to go on representing some kind of “realness” — plus, accidentally, poverty, lack of education, and vulgarity. Better cudgels, you know?
Brilliant. Thanks, Douglas, for bringing this to my attention.
The scene: I’m watching TV with three French women. The mega-hit nighttime soap opera we’re watching is called “Plus Belle La Vie,” and features a diverse cast of people living in Marseille, including a female Japanese tourist who is astonishingly not too bad a stereotype. I’d give her a 3 on a scale of 1-10 for stupid racist characters. It’s actually the French women who decry her as being such a cliché as to be a major distraction from the narrative. They say the comic relief she’s supposed to provide goes so far as to interrupt the show’s flow completely. I’m prematurely proud of my friends for their disgust with such a mild stereotype.
Then, one of the women says, “she’s nothing like that Mongoloid-looking Asian actress on Grey’s Anatomy,” and continues, ”What were they thinking when they cast her? She’s so ugly!” The rest of the women agree. They turn to me and wait for a response.
I’m speechless. Now. My quandary: Do I explain that beauty is the sometimes in the slanted eye of the beholder? Or do I ignore the situation completely because it’s going to take a lifetime to explain this shit to some of my best friends?
In today’s NY Times Op-Ed: James Bradley traces roots of Japan’s attack on Peal Harbor to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1900s Russo-Japanese diplomacy and not F.D. Roosevelt’s 1930s Asia policy.
(T.) Roosevelt knew that Japan coveted the Korean Peninsula as a springboard to its Asian expansion. Back in 1900, when he was still vice president, Roosevelt had written, “I should like to see Japan have Korea.” When, in February 1904, Japan broke off relations with Russia, President Roosevelt said publicly that he would “maintain the strictest neutrality,” but privately he wrote, “The sympathies of the United States are entirely on Japan’s side.”
There’s an interesting op-ed conversation in the NY Times between David Brooks (the really open-minded republican) and Gail Collins, about the Fall of Westernized Men…vis-à-vis Asians.
If you show Americans a fish tank, they’ll talk about the biggest fish in the tank. If you show Asians a tank they will make, on average, 60 percent more references to the context and the features of the scene. Western parents tend to emphasize nouns and categories when teaching their kids, Korean parents tend to emphasize verbs and relationships. If you show Americans a picture of a chicken, a cow and grass, they will lump the chicken and the cow, because they are both animals. Asians are more likely to lump the cow and the grass because cows eat grass. They have a relationship.
I was asked recently why there isn’t an Asian Al Sharpton. I said “sure there is. Guy Aoki, John Liu, Asian Americans For Equality…” and on and on. But I understood what he was saying. There isn’t one iconic rabble-rouser whenever things go down chez nous. Then I got to thinking: is the problem actually that MSM doesn’t take our problems seriously?
Just thinking out loud.
And by the way, New York is about to have four Asian-American elected officials (once John Liu wins his runoff election for Comptroller… which we all know he will). He’ll be the first elected Asian in a city-wide role.
Vienna, Austria. Birthplace of Mozart, weiner schnitzel, neo-Nazis, and one of only two German-language one-hit wonders that at least I can think of (“Rock Me Amadeus,” by Falco).
Now they’re opening a picturesque park and naming it after…
TORA-SAN from the Japanese movie series Otoko wa Tsuraiyo (Tora-san, That Lovable Tramp).
Yoko Ono is collaborating with Three as Four, a fashion design collective that looks more like a ’shroom-addict collective; in other words their working with Yoko Ono is friggin’ awesome.
Ono is my shero supreme, and it thrills me to no end that she’s finally part of a clothing line, because short of her likeness hanging off a hanger in my closet and shrieking sounds each time I wear her, there’s nothing I’d rather do to pay homage than pay through the “mind hole” for a rag inspired by her…
Clip from Ono’s film “Fly,” unfortunately not available in better quality than this camcorder-recording-of-TV.
