8 Asians

CBS2 investigative reporter David Goldstein broke a story about The City of Los Angeles Department of Public Works producing a controversial video depicting Asians with taxpayer money. The video, shot at the Japanese Garden at the Tillman Water Reclamation Plant in Van Nuys, showed a non-Asian man dressed as a geisha girl who talked with a mock Japanese accent. “The Japanese water park is a beautiful, beautiful site, with blooming, blooming lotus and water lilies,” [...] Continue »

The topic of speaking with an accent (or without one) isn’t new to 8Asians). I talked about my own experiences of how others had their own preconceptions of who I was based on how I spoke in this 8Asians article. PRI (Public Radio International), recently tackled a similar topic, with regard to how convincing an actor could make a fake accent, and whether they could do it well enough to convince a native they too [...] Continue »

So, if you haven’t read Joz’s post about the UC Irvine frat debacle, Lambda Theta Delta at UC Irvine, an Asian American Fraternity, has suspended its own status as a UC Irvine organization for one year, until fall 2014 because of the racist blackface video made to promote one of its school events. Clearly, those kids need to take responsibility for their egregiously stupid actions. However, I’m going to stretch this one and blame it [...] Continue »

When was the first time you became aware of a distinction between Asians born and raised in the States and Asians who are recent immigrants from Asia? Or, per the terminology I learned, when did you first realize you were either an ABC or a FOB? Where I grew up, there weren’t enough Asians to make distinctions between Asians. We were all in it together, so even when we may have noted differences, we did not have the mindset [...] Continue »

On April 16, 2013, fraternity Lambda Theta Delta (LTD), UC Irvine’s first and largest Asian American interest fraternity, posted a video which showed one of the members appearing in blackface (around the 0:55 mark). Julianne Hing of Colorlines says, “the video includes four Asian-American men dancing to Justin Timberlake’s Suit and Tie to promote the spring induction of the fraternity’s new recruits. One man in blackface plays the part of Jay-Z. It is the very [...] Continue »

Chiura Obata had only planned to stop by in America before going to going on to Paris to continue his career as an artist. He ended up settling permanently in San Francisco, California. His list of accomplishments as an Asian American follow that great Old West tradition of trailblazing. He drew some of the few onsite sketches of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. He also co-founded the first Japanese American baseball team on the mainland [...] Continue »

Vietnamese Americans dominate the manicure business (thanks, Tippi Hedren!) and one nail salon owner in Fairview, Texas is letting her customers know that she’s not one of them. According to Steve Stoler of WFAA.com, Diana Casey, the owner of the St. Tropez Nail Spa posted a sign declaring her shop “American Owned, American Staffed,” which has caused controversy because of its racist undertones. Casey says that she is simply being “patriotic.” Ed Thayer said he [...] Continue »

One of the things I enjoy about the Internet and Democracy is that you have the opportunity to engage in dialogues and see different points of view. One of the things I don’t like is that often, people have already decided that the only logic that works is self-serving logic, the only dialogue worth paying attention to is the sound of their own voice, and the best perspective is their own. Thankfully, that’s not how [...] Continue »

This story and report came out last December, but I’ve only had time to get to this now. Asian Americans and Asian non-citizens 50.1% (versus 40.7 White, 4.2% Hispanic, 2.3% African American,  and 2.7% other) of the San Francisco Bay Area technology-related workforce (“Silicon Valley” for the sake of simplicity). According to the San Jose Mercury News’ analysis of the latest Census Bureau data:  ”An analysis of the Census data shows that among tech jobs [...] Continue »

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell unveiled his first 2014 re-election campaign ad and in it, his wife, former Labor Secretary Elaine Chao, is featured front and center. In the ad, she references attack ads from the “far left” which recently negatively referenced her Chinese-American ethnicity. What she is talking about is less of an “attack ad,” so much as a racist tweet (which has since been deleted). The offending tweet drew a connection between Chinese-American [...] Continue »

In the past few months, there has been a lot of discussion about college admissions at “elite” universities, especially after The Myth of American Meritocracy – How corrupt are Ivy League admissions? was published in The American Conservative and a follow-up by the New York Times on Statistics Indicate an Ivy League Asian Quota. The Cornell Daily Sun had a recent piece discussing the issue: “A.T. Miller, vice provost for academic diversity, said that in [...] Continue »

By Ken Narasaki On March 6, a guest op-ed column by Ta-Nehisi Coates appeared in the New York Times entitled The Good, Racist People, which addresses “the idea that racism is not merely the property of the morally deformed.” I live in a neighborhood that gentrified crazily over the past 15-20 years, and it’s a tight-knit, nice block where people look out for each other. Part of this shows up in crime watch postings where [...] Continue »