Final critique of my #artschool BFA experience: “Asian Eyes” Installation view. 6 panels of screenprinted chiffon and organza in varying skin tones. #kiammarcelojunio #art #work #werq #modelminority #SAIC #chicago #asian #eyes #ethnography #racism #critique (at Sharp Building)

New work, silkscreen on satin. #modelminority #art #orientalism #racism #satire #asian #screenprinting #glitch #gender #queer #workinprogress #jerryblossom

sinidentidades:

• 70 Percent of Anti-LGBT Murder Victims Are People of Color
• While people of color make up about 30 percent of the United States’ population, they account for 60 percent of those imprisoned. 
• Report: Immigration Status aRace Affect Domestic Workers’ Pay
• Once convicted, black offenders receive longer sentences compared to white offenders. The U.S. Sentencing Commission stated that in the federal system black offenders receive sentences that are 10 percent longer than white offenders for the same crimes.
• Marijuana Prohibition Turns 75, Blacks Three Times More Likely to be Arrested Than Whites
• According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime.
• A number of states have bans on people with certain convictions working in domestic health-service industries such as nursing, child care, and home health care—areas in which many poor women and women of color are disproportionately concentrated.
• African Americans were twice as likely to be arrested and almost four times as likely to experience the use of force during encounters with the police.
• The prison population grew by 700 percent from 1970 to 2005, a rate that is outpacing crime and population rates. The incarceration rates disproportionately impact men of color: 1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.
• [TW: Rape] Canadian police accused of abusing native women
• CNN breaks down the numbers: > Nearly nine out of 10 people “stopped and frisked” under a controversial New York Police Department policy in 2011 were African-American or Hispanic.
• The War on Drugs Is Really a War on Minorities
• Martin Luther King assassinated by US government: MLK civil trial decision

Cheryl Cole - “Ghetto Baby”

This is problematic as FUUUUUUUCK.

this-is-not-native:

Chescaleigh of “Shit White Girls Say… to Black Girls!” fame brings the laughs to an otherwise serious conversation. Check it out!

asiansnotstudying:

It was obvious to me from my first erotic dream at the tender age of seven. From that first secret and shameful stirring deep within my lower body, I knew that I was destined to be an easy lay. And it must have been obvious, though perhaps a little later, to my peers as well. I was fourteen years old the first time one of my classmates called me a “gay cocksucking [sic] whore.” This would become a trend amongst my friends and acquaintances over the next half-decade: from the barrage of anonymous internet insults in the tenth grade to the random man last week who grabbed my ass and attempted to pull me into an alley, it seems that my sexual availability is common knowledge to the wide world.

So if I am such a slut – if this Asian, transgendered, feminine body of mine is such an easy mark – why is it so dang hard to get laid in this town?

There is no shortage, of course, of men on the streets, in clubs, bars, and grocery stores, who, alerted by the swish of my skirt or the sheen of my lipstick that I am “that kind of boy,” catcall from their cars at night and leer at my legs as I pass by. On any given weekend, I can don a tank top and tight jeans, go to Unity, and shimmy my hips for a few hours until a white man approaches me and says, “Ni hao, I love Chinese boys, and by the way are you a bottom?” But if what I am looking for is a liaison of the flesh that also respects my mind, body, and choices, I had better prepare my heart for a long and lonely hunt.

For most of my life, I did not know the difference between sexual objectification and sexual intimacy. I believed that being valued or loved meant the same thing as being fuckable, and as an Asian boy-child who wanted to be a girl, I knew that my body was less lovable by far than those of the beautiful white men I fantasized about. (How many times have I heard those fateful words: “I’m sorry, I’m just not into Asians?”  How many Craigslist ads and dating site profiles proclaim: “No femmes, no fats, no Asians or Blacks?”)

Yet these men who move so easily and fearlessly through the sexual realm are not sluts. Their bodies – white, cisgendered, born with all the physical abilities that society favours, masculine, valued above all things – are not construed as something constructed for the pleasure of others, that can be bought and sold, summoned, or dismissed at a whim. No, the body of the slut is feminized and racialized; the slut’s face is the face that dares to gaze back without deference at the judgement of a world that deems it ugly, unlovable, devalued below all things.

Marginalized peoples are not meant to have access to sexual capital – we are not allowed to take pleasure in other people’s bodies, or in our own. If we are of colour, then we had better not presume to make love to whites – except to please them. If we are queer, we dare not desire straight bodies. And if we are women, we should not want to make love at all. In being combinations of these identities, our access to sexual pleasure, to that blurry line between objectification and intimacy, diminishes ever more.

It is in the wanting that we become sluts. It is our desire, even our capacity for desire – that secret-shameful stirring deep in our bodies – that threatens the hierarchy that keeps our bodies enslaved in sex. In surviving rape, in showing pride in our beauty, in wanting to be lovable and fuckable and everything in between, we challenge the domination of those who hold the keys to sexual power. And so we are insulted, assaulted, leered at on the streets and dragged into alleyways. Beaten down that we might submit once more.

I can be only what I am destined to be: an Asian man who dresses and has sex like a woman. Who wants sex, fears it, who still searches long and lonely nights for that hook-up, affair, relationship, in which I can be whole. It isn’t easy. It never is. Still, I want it. Still, I search.

Ryan Thom’s Memoirs of a Gaysian is a column about life, love, and intersectional oppression. Ryan is a writer, performance artist, and lifelong slut.  Contact them at memoirsofagaysion@mcgilldaily.com.

Source: (McGill Daily)

I find it disturbing when people say “Yes, I’m a racist, and I’m gonna keep being that way.”

This rant, though perhaps well-cited, is full of holes and assumptions based on stereotype, self-loathing, and surrender to the status quo. She also negates the fact that there are Asian-American men who grew up just like her, who want nothing to do with patriarchy and planning for the future. In the end, all she says is that she dates white guys because that’s who has societal power.  She basically wants white privilege by proxy. 

Disgusting.

asiansnotstudying:

This is such bullshit and self-hate. 

It has nothing to do with skin color. It has everything to do with patriarchy. And guess what? More and more “racist”-against-Asian-men Asian women are getting on the white boy bandwagon.

I’m an Asian girl. I don’t date Asian guys. Yep, I’m one of those that date lots and lots of (mostly, but not always) white guys.

Why? It’s simple: I’m a racist.

Yep, I said it.

And guess what? I’m not alone. I’m actually –- shudder to think — part of a trend. Asians are marrying non-Asians at a rate much higher than any other racial group. This summer Pew reported that 37 percent of all recent Asian-American brides wedded a non-Asian groom. In an earlier study of the couples who married in 2008, 9 percent of whites, 16 percent of blacks and 26 percent of Hispanics did so with someone of a different race or ethnicity. Thirty-one percent of Asians did.

This trend has nothing to do with skin color. It has everything to do with patriarchy and cultural sexism and a lifestyle I grew up with and want nothing to do with anymore.

It would be easy to say that what I’m looking for culturally doesn’t come in an Asian package.

Wesley Yang wrote about it in New York magazine last year and made my heart beat faster with the recognition of his rage against my cultural heritage machine. “Let me summarize my feelings toward Asian values: Fuck filial piety. Fuck grade grubbing. Fuck Ivy League mania. Fuck deference to authority. Fuck humility and hard work. Fuck harmonious relations. Fuck sacrificing for the future. Fuck earnest, striving middle-class servility,” he says.

And. Fuck. Yes. To. This.

My mother (born and raised in China) is obsessed with career “steps” and “paths” and working for this magical future that I doubt exists. It’s like New Age self-help for middle-class strivers. She can’t fathom that I’m a freelancer by choice and constantly laments “that economy.”

The physical attributes of my ideal man? If we’re being stereotypical about it, well, I like geeky, scrawny and without muscles. I like effeminate. Also, did I mention that Daniel Liu is fucking HOT?

And if we’re talking about this, plenty of white guys have tiny penises. And I’m sure not all Asian guys have tiny penises. (Though, I’d have to sleep with some to find out for sure.) So really, not a physical thing.

But there’s more than that.

Even if a charming, funny, intellectually curious, in so many words perfect man who has untied himself from the chains of Asian virtues came down my way — even you, Daniel Liu whose hotness is practically a law of physics — I would probably pass.

Partly, it’s because I can date non-Asian dudes. More of me and other “racist”-against-other-Asian-men Asian women live in communities with people of other races. More of us attend those bastions of liberal thought mingling with other young, upwardly mobile types of colleges. More of us are in well-paying jobs, which expose us to people outside our ethnic enclaves.

But it’s also because we still see ourselves as minorities, immigrants, outsiders. And we want the same thing new residents of America have wanted for hundreds of years: To be true Americans. Even among American-born people of Asian descent, only 28 percent describe themselves as “Americans.”

I was born in Beijing to Chinese parents and emigrated to the U.S. when I was three. I don’t have an accent. Aside from my very Midwestern one. My Italian cooking skills are far superior to my Chinese ones. My Spanish is better than my Chinese. My closet is filled with J. Crew and a healthy dash of Tommy Hilfiger and Ralph Lauren.

My pale, white-bread boyfriend jokes that I’m one of the whitest people he’s ever met. And that’s probably not by accident.

I date white men because the term “model minority” grosses me out. I date white men because it feels like I’m not ostracizing myself into an Asian ghetto and antiquated ideas of Asian unity. I still see myself as a minority. And with that, pretty soon comes connotations of “outsider.” And I don’t like that.

Dating white men means acceptance into American culture. White culture.

I realize my thinking is fucked up. I get that. But as long as men tell me over dinner, “I’ve always wanted to be with an Asian girl” and then still think they’re getting laid, and as long as during beauty countdowns white girls are called “beauties” and Asian girls are called “exotic beauties” — well, then white will still be the societal standard.

And yes, I am Asian, but I’m drinking the same Kool-Aid as everyone else. Junot Diaz describes it as white supremacy. The idea that white is still tops, SAT scores, corporate jobs and fancy degrees be damned.

In the Boston Review, Diaz says: “And yet here’s the rub: if a critique of white supremacy doesn’t first flow through you, doesn’t first implicate you, then you have missed the mark; you have, in fact, almost guaranteed its survival and reproduction. There’s that old saying: the devil’s greatest trick is that he convinced people that he doesn’t exist. Well, white supremacy’s greatest trick is that it has convinced people that, if it exists at all, it exists always in other people, never in us.”

So here it is: I am racist. I’d rather not be. I’d much rather be swept up into that beautiful land of racially ambiguous beauties. But for now, I will not and will never date one of my “people.”

Source: (XOJane)

fuckyeahtoronto:

The Bank of Canada purged the image of an Asian-looking woman from its new $100 banknotes after focus groups raised questions about her ethnicity.

The original image intended for the reverse of the plastic polymer banknotes, which began circulating last November, showed an Asian-looking woman scientist peering into a microscope.

The image, alongside a bottle of insulin, was meant to celebrate Canada’s medical innovations.

But eight focus groups consulted about the proposed images for the new $5, $10, $20, $50 and $100 banknote series were especially critical of the choice of an Asian for the largest denomination.

“Some have concerns that the researcher appears to be Asian,” says a 2009 report commissioned by the bank from The Strategic Counsel, obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act.

“Some believe that it presents a stereotype of Asians excelling in technology and/or the sciences. Others feel that an Asian should not be the only ethnicity represented on the banknotes. Other ethnicities should also be shown.”

A few even said the yellow-brown colour of the $100 banknote reinforced the perception the woman was Asian, and “racialized” the note.

The bank immediately ordered the image redrawn, imposing a “neutral” ethnicity for the woman scientist who, now stripped of her “Asian” features, appears on the circulating note. Her light features appear to be Caucasian.

“The original image was not designed or intended to be a person of a particular ethnic origin,” bank spokesman Jeremy Harrison said in an interview, citing policy that eschews depictions of ethnic groups on banknotes.

“But obviously when we got into focus groups, there was some thought the image appeared to represent a particular ethnic group, so modifications were made.”

Harrison declined to provide a copy of the original image, produced by a design team led by Jorge Peral of the Canadian Bank Note Co.

Nor would he indicate what specific changes were made to the woman researcher’s image to give her a so-called “neutral,” non-ethnic look. He said the images were “composites” rather than depicting any specific individual. 

The Strategic Counsel conducted the October 2009 focus groups in Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and Fredericton, at a cost of $53,000.

The Toronto groups were positive about the image of an Asian woman because “it is seen to represent diversity or multiculturalism.”

In Quebec, however, “the inclusion of an Asian without representing any other ethnicities was seen to be contentious.”

One person in Fredericton commented: “The person on it appears to be of Asian descent which doesn’t rep(resent) Canada. It is fairly ugly.”

Mu-Qing Huang, a Chinese-Canadian who has peered into microscopes for biology courses at the University of Toronto, called the bank’s decision a “huge step back.”

“The fact that an Asian woman’s features were introduced to the bill … I think itself is a huge step forward in achieving true multiculturalism in Canada,” Huang, 24, said in an interview in Ottawa.

“But the fact that the proposal was rejected represents a huge step back.”

She said the “overly sensitive” decision to remove the Asian features suggests prejudice against visible minorities persists in Canada.

“If Canada is truly multicultural and thinks that all cultural groups are equal, then any visible minority should be good enough to represent a country, including (someone with) Asian features.”

WHAT THE FUCK, CANADA?

microaggressions:

I’m among a group of Chinese Americans at a Chinese restaurant for my mother’s birthday dinner. Seated next to us are a group of white couples. The Chinese waiter ask them if they would like “forks” but because of his accent, it sounds like the f-word. They burst out laughing in his face and don’t…