Sarah's A-POP Blog

https://asamnews.com/2019/05/25/marvel-to-launch-team-of-asian-superheroes/

This is the first I’m hearing about this, so this is really exciting for me! I’m very vaguely familiar with Amadeus Cho and even less familiar with Cindy Moon, but these other characters are completely unknown to me. I’ll be interested to see what they do with them, character and plot-wise, or if they’ll be tired old stereotypes. Hopefully not the latter, but sometimes it’s hard to tell if Marvel is genuinely doing stuff like this because they want to and think it’s a good idea, or if they’re trying to get “points” for diversity to stave off backlash (like when they made Captain America secretly Hydra/a Nazi a few years ago and then almost immediately backpedaled because everyone was furious).

Going just by the costumes, none of them look particularly stereotypical, which I suppose is probably a good sign? I have a feeling that this team isn’t going to be very popular just because they’re Asian, so hopefully if that does happen Marvel executives don’t use that as an excuse to not include as much diversity in the future and go back to drawing a bunch of white dudes beating the crap out of each other at the slightest provocation.

https://asamnews.com/2019/05/10/chindian-relationships-show-that-there-is-more-to-mixed-relationships-than-just-asian-and-white/

I thought this article was interesting, and it brings up what I think is an important topic right in the first few sentences; media often focuses very heavily on white relations with minorities rather than minorities with each other. I was thinking about it as I read the article, and it made me a little angry, because the more I think about it, the more it feels like white people tend to think of things in terms of white vs other, which not only dehumanizes other races, but makes them feel interchangeable. There’s no point in defining interracial relationships as anything other than Asian and white, or black and white, or “Mexican” (Latinx) and white, because they’re all minorities and therefore all interchangeable, right? It’s like when they call all Asians with the C-slur because they assume they’re all Chinese, or don’t care whether or not they’re actually Chinese because they don’t consider them human anyway.

Also, the end of this article is hopeful and positive, and serves to remind readers that relationships should be about love, not about what race you are. I feel like many people don’t understand or care about whether there’s actually love involved, and I think that tends to hurt society as a whole.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/5-asian-american-political-trailblazers-who-changed-united-states-n994606

My first thought upon reading this article was “oh, neat! I didn’t know anything about any of these people”! This thought prompted me to think about why that might be, which made me examine the article more closely. There is only one woman listed in this article compared to 4 men, two of whom are of Japanese descent. I know that women tend to be excluded from politics even now, but I wonder how much of this article is because there weren’t a lot of influential women in politics and how much is a male bias showing.

I also noticed that the only two people on this list are who are still alive are the two Japanese men. Could they not find any more recent people who were more influential? The list doesn’t say anything about who brought the “most” change, so why didn’t they include anyone who did things more recently? Is it because there hasn’t been enough time for newer people to do something really notable, or because it hasn’t been long enough to see if their work actually changed anything? Or is the person who wrote the article biased and just chose people who were talked about the most? Since I’ve never heard of any of these people before, it’s difficult to say.

All that being said, I also noticed that all of their political accomplishments listed in this essay have to do with equality and fighting discrimination. I wonder if that’s because they’ve all faced discrimination in one way or another and all used that to inform their political views, or if it’s a coincidence, or even if the author specifically chose them because of this.

Actor Ryan Potter of Big Hero 6 Fame Thrills Students at UC Riverside

First of all, I had no idea who the guy who played Hiro in Big Hero 6 was before finding this article, let alone that he was Japanese-and-Jewish American, so that’s really neat!

I like that he talks about representation and diversity, because it is so important for self-esteem and mental health to see yourself represented when you’re a kid. At first I was confused when he said that he was hesitant to audition for a role because Nickelodeon wasn’t very diverse, but then I thought about the shows I watched on that channel growing up and realized that, yeah, it was mostly white people. Any other ethnicities were either sidekicks, minor characters, or practically nonexistent. And when I was a kid, I didn’t pay any attention to that kind of thing, let alone whether those characters were played by the same ethnicity actors or not. It’s only when I got older that I realized how important it was.

I did notice, however, that the roles he had taken up until playing Beast Boy seem to fit into stereotypes about Japanese people; first he plays a ninja who’s good at martial arts, then he plays a super-smart prodigy kid who builds robots. I probably wouldn’t say that Hiro is a completely stereotypical character, but there’s definitely elements of those stereotypes involved in his characterization. Regardless, this feels like another example of Asian people being locked into playing certain types of characters, but maybe for him playing Beast Boy will break him out of that and prompt writers to give him different types of characters? I haven’t seen the Titans series that he’s in, so I don’t know how the writers treat Beast Boy in it, but hopefully they didn’t add racist stereotypes to his character just because the actor is Asian.

https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/59vka8/mia-yamamoto-lawyer-transgender-history?fbclid=IwAR1mB5lFA2_UHe9v6SuuyX0U5gibFhHF0oIidVQk2GfwncuJfRNyhlfDyTs

I thought this was an interesting and inspiring article. At first glance it seems to be mostly about her experience as a trans woman rather than as a Japanese woman, but then she mentions that she was born in the internment camps and suddenly you can see how it informs both her need for bringing justice and her compassion for marginalized groups such as homeless trans youth as well as other ethnic groups. There was one point in the article that I was a little leery about at first, where she says “I am Muslim, I am a Jew, I’m Black…”, but I think she meant it as a “I relate to their struggles because of my own experiences and I stand by them in the face of adversity” rather than that she is literally part of those groups because she interacted with and assisted members of those groups in the past.

I was surprised when she was describing her experience with coming out as trans to her colleagues and clients, because she says she didn’t have many issues and most people were fine with it. At first I assumed that she must have had people who were awful about it and just wanted to forget or gloss over how bad it was, but I think part of the reason I thought that is because the narrative around coming out as trans always involves lots of resistance and hatred. While such hatred might unfortunately still be common, it isn’t the only reaction possible, and I think it’s important to remember that.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-uncomfortable-truth-about-affirmative-action-and-asian-americans

It kind of bothered me a little bit that the author didn’t actually clearly define affirmative action anywhere that I could see, but I also noticed that it kind of seemed like they were saying that having a disproportionate number of Asian people is bad because there isn’t enough diversity, but having a mostly white people is fine because they’re the majority demographic in America. That part didn’t really make sense to me.

Also, I’d rather admissions people would choose people based on merit rather than saying “We have to have a certain number of these demographics but the rest can be white!”, which is what I think the author is saying seems to happen, which doesn’t seem fair to anybody. My understanding of affirmative action is that it’s meant to prevent admissions people from discriminating against people of color and favoring white people, but it seems like in practice it’s more like the way the author describes, where they’re just meeting a quota and paying lip service to the fact that they’re “diverse”.