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Andy Gill

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Yellowface: Are Asians Being #WhiteWashedOut (A lesson on perspective)?

Yellowface: Are Asians Being #WhiteWashedOut (A lesson on perspective)?

Last updated on: May 4, 2016 at 12:52 pm by Andy Gill

Yellowface: Are Asians Being #WhiteWashedOut (A lesson on perspective)? 2016-05-04T12:52:21-05:00 Andy Gill

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Media, it matters; it impacts the way we view and perceive life, the way in which we interact with others, and even how we view and perceive our own self. In fact I’d argue that a large portion of media marketing is geared towards making us (the consumers) feel worth less than others if we don’t purchase their product. They create the problem and then sell you the solution (e.g. “You’re ugly so buy this make up;” “you’re not man enough, so buy this truck and drink this beer…”). The problem isn’t you, and the solution isn’t their product; the problem is them, and the solution is to cut them off and out of your life.

#whitewashedOUT means nobody taking our voices seriously. means it is okay to say racist shit to us because who cares? It’s just Asians.

— Ellen Oh (@ElloEllenOh) May 3, 2016

For me, its really become all about perspective. Am I assimilating or am I colonizing? Am I appropriating white culture, or are they appropriating “my” culture? What even is my culture? I’m an American who’s parents are Korean; is enjoying, participating, and accepting aspects of white culture the same thing as me assimilating, or again, am I just re-culturating?

It’s nuanced.

In most recent Hollywood films I don’t see a discriminating mis-appropriation so much as I see, or hear, that people dig Asian stuff. Non-southeastern Asian Americans really only make up 1-2% of the US population. The pickings are slim; it’s not that they are all out to get us.

It’s like the Oscars being so white (#OscarsSoWhite), they are, but I literally don’t care; for me to care would mean that I’ve also been sucked into believing my existence and overall worth is dictated by their award show; it’s not (it helps in that these recent movies that mock Asians do very poorly in the box offices. Remember The Interview, and then the Sony hack, costing them millions? And then Kim Jung Un was like, “if you release this movie in the theaters I’m going to kill you [granted, very uncool of him]”).

But in this video, below, the journalists says, “Dating back to the earliest days of Hollywood have made Asians at best invisible and at worst the butt of a cruel joke.” To be honest, Hollywood hasn’t made me [as an Asian] invisible, or a joke… She’s acknowledging everything negative in which the media has done in the past, as opposed to acknowledging the present day positives in which are happening underneath our noses.

It, many times, feels as if the media is attempting to make me feel oppressed because I’m not white. My mantra I’ve been internally reciting in the past year has been this:

If it’s not empowering or uplifting then it’s probably not worth consuming.

It makes me wonder if articles like this are more oppressively energy sucking then the supposed intentional omission of Asians from Hollywood movies. 90% of the time I’m not sure what I should be offended by and why I’m supposed to be offended by certain things once I find out it’s offensive. It’s imposing upon me a narrative that’s just not true. A narrative that says: I’m worth less than…, I’m under appreciated by a majority of society, and then proceeds to hand me three very passionately detailed supporting points as to why I am definitely an oppressed person that is far “less than…”

This is (partially) why China has banned Twitter and decided to create their own version of the Internet; there is so much negative white-American propaganda that subversively slips into the psyche of us as individuals unnecessarily bringing us down and making us miserable consumers forever hypnotized into believing that buying our way into beauty will eventually hand us love; it doesn’t work like that.

People of Color, we’re on the come up. If you don’t feel like we are, then you’re consuming the wrong material, hanging out with the wrong people, and internalizing the wrong narrative.

If you want to be free then you have to be intentional. You, as an individual, must intentionally pursue freedom; intentionally choose what media you consume and who you surround yourself with. It’s true, we don’t have the privilege of turning the television on and finding a show that is centered on a character that looks like us. But, we do have the ability to find this material, create our own environment, and thrive within what we formerly knew as “white-space.”

[1] Image is a screenshot from this Buzzfeed video.

Hollywood Hates Asians Apparently...

Yellowface

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