Asian Americans and the Media

Media and Minorities

Kent A. Ono, Vincent N. Pham

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509543618
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

Asian Americans and the Media provides a concise, thoughtful, critical and cultural studies analysis of U.S. media representations of Asian Americans. The book also explores ways Asian Americans have resisted, responded to, and conceptualized the terrain of challenge and resistance to those representations, often through their own media productions.

In this engaging and accessible book, Ono and Pham summarize key scholarship on Asian American media, as well as lay theoretical groundwork to help students, scholars and other interested readers understand historical and contemporary media representations of Asian Americans in traditional media, including print, film, music, radio, and television, as well as in newer media, primarily internet-situated. Since Asian Americans had little control over their representation in early U.S. media, historically dominant white society largely constructed Asian American media representations. In this context, the book draws attention to recurring patterns in media representation, as well as responses by Asian America. Today, Asian Americans are creating complex, sophisticated, and imaginative self-portraits within U.S. media, often equipped with powerful information and education about Asian Americans. Throughout, the book suggests media representations are best understood within historical, cultural, political, and social contexts, and envisions an even more active role in media for Asian Americans in the future.

Asian Americans and the Media will be an ideal text for all students taking courses on Asian American Studies, Minorities and the Media and Race and Ethic Studies.

CHAPTER 01
Introduction

DURING the week of January 17, 2005, the Miss Jones in the Morning Show (New York City, WQHT, 97.1, “Hot 97”) played a song for four days straight called “USA for Indonesia” (later simply known as “The Tsunami Song”). The song used humor to comment on the devastating December 2005 tsunami that ravaged Asia, killing hundreds of thousands. In the form of parody, and against the backdrop of “We are the World,”¹ the song referred to people who died in the tsunami as “chinks,” made light of children rendered parentless by the disaster, and referenced Michael Jackson as a possible molester of children orphaned as a result of the tsunami. One segment of the song described what it might have been like to witness the tsunami: “And all at once you could hear the screaming chinks and no one was safe from the wave. There were Africans drowning, little Chinamen swept away. You could hear God laughing, ‘Swim you bitches swim.’” The following segment is the song’s chorus and comments on what the fate of those affected by the tsunami might be: “So now you’re screwed. It’s the tsunami. You better run or kiss your ass away. Go find your mommy. I just saw her float by, a tree went through her head, and now your children will be sold in child slavery.”

On January 28, a multiracial coalition of activists, including politicians, assembled outside of the Hot 97 studio to protest the station’s airing of the song. Later, figures such as iconic hip-hop artist Afrika Bambaataa participated in another rally challenging the station’s misuse of hip-hop. As a result of the protests, Hot 97 apologized, and several employees lost their salaries; Emmis Communications, the parent organization for the station, gave $1 million for tsunami relief; and radio personality Miss Jones provided an on-air apology. The rest of the workers on the show, including Miss Jones, were suspended for two weeks. Additionally, one of the morning show hosts, Todd Lynn, and the producer of the show, Rick Delgado, were fired.

This example invites us to ask some serious questions about Asians and Asian Americans and the media, such as: If we are indeed in a “post-racist” society, how does one explain the presence of this kind of offensive communication targeting Asians and Asian Americans on the airwaves? If Asian Americans had more political power and presence in the media industry, would songs like this be made and aired? Is there something students and professors in universities and the broader public can do to change society so that these kinds of songs are unthinkable, and so that ones that portray Asians and Asian Americans in more respectful ways find their way on air?

Asian Americans and the Media seeks to provide a critical way to approach contemporary media, in part to help us answer such questions about Asian and Asian American representation and presence in the media. Part textbook and part monograph, it surveys work in Asian American studies, communication arts and sciences, and media and film studies, and it provides an overview of representations of Asians and Asian Americans in the media in order to find the various ways in which they are constrained by historical and contemporary dominant representations and also how they challenge the dominant media through protest, the production of creative, independent media, and the creation of independent Asian American organizations. The book surveys the broad media; thus, it examines film, TV, radio, music, the Internet, and the like in an attempt to draw attention to the collective effects of media on Asian Americans. By looking across media contexts, at what Douglas Kellner (1995) calls “media culture,” we argue that a critical intervention into media is possible. The book addresses examples such as “The Tsunami Song,” but does not devote entire chapters to individual case studies. Instead, by addressing multiple smaller examples in each chapter, it demonstrates that theoretical and critical tools can be used to analyze media and simultaneously to make evident the broad historical and contemporary field of representations in which Asian Americans find themselves.

We argue that historical representations of Asians and Asian Americans have residual effects that continue to this day. While the field of representation has changed, especially after the protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s, historical representations of Asians and Asian Americans have set the parameters. Until major shifts in the structure of production occur, the residual effects of these historical strategies will continue to shape and structure the representation of Asians and Asian Americans into the future. We also argue that, in order to understand Asian Americans and the media, and in order to understand how changes in the larger representational field occur now and may continue in the future, an examination of independent Asian American media is needed. A wide array of complex anti-racist Asian American media works already exist for analysis. But we also suggest that, in looking at such independent work, a critical perspective is needed.

This introduction does six things to help readers understand the topics of media and Asian Americans we study in the book: (1) introduce prefatory theoretical assumptions; (2) define terms; (3) state our intellectual and disciplinary perspective; (4) lay out the scope of the book; (5) review relevant literature; and (6) provide a synopsis of the chapters in the book.

Theoretical Assumptions

We make several assumptions right from the start that function to support the way we study Asian Americans and the media throughout the book.

It makes sense to begin by stating that significant transformations in media technology, in global economic conditions and forces, and in modern and neoliberal environments render it necessary to study media carefully. A fresh examination of media such as we provide in this book is needed, in part because the world has changed. Communication technologies have changed. And these changes may significantly affect the way members of communities interrelate with one another. We now live in a hyper-information society. Media play an increasingly significant educational and social networking role and are noteworthy because they help people make sense of themselves and their relationships with others.

Marshall McLuhan imagined media (radio and television for him) would bring us closer and closer together across geographical boundaries to create one, big “global village” (McLuhan and Fiore, 1967, 63). But, as Benedict Anderson (1983) has suggested, media create the illusion of proximity, the illusion of being one large “imagined community.” Because we can send an e-mail message to someone in another country, and that person’s response can be received as if it had just been sent, this gives us the sense that the world is not so big after all, that we are all close together.

While we might imagine we have become closer together because of our increasing ability to communicate quickly and across vast distances worldwide, when our differences in, among other things, belief, religion, and experience emerge, we may suddenly seem further apart rather than closer together. The illusion of close proximity may mask our actual lack of contextual knowledge and understanding of our material relationships with others. Communication can, in these cases, hyper-accentuate our differences rather than draw attention to our commonalities. After all, even as we may be able to communicate quickly in a way that may simulate face-to-face dialogue, we know that even access to “instant messaging” does not replace face-to-face bodily interaction, where we can see, touch, hear, feel, and even smell humans in our presence. Indeed, transnational films, global television, multilingual websites, and cross-cultural exchanges of information via e-mail have the potential to “exoticize” those outside the mainstream United States media, make them appear intriguing, but also curious, strange, and alien to us, and, thus, underscore differences not similarities.

Because media provide so much information, and do so quickly – perhaps creating the illusion that we have access to all of the information we could ever possibly want – we may be lured into believing we know other people, know what they feel, understand what matters to them, and therefore can imagine how they live. Additionally, because what we see is what we remember, what we do not see, the part that is edited out or simply not captured in media, does not become part of our memory. What does not appear on television or on the Internet is equally, if not more important than, what is seen/heard/read. That quirky movement, that unique facial expression, that perfectly phrased comment, that moment of care that is not represented, especially an accumulation of such moments, may make all of the difference in the world; it may be that one image or expression of humanity that would completely alter our evaluation and assessment of a person that is missing. What is made available to us in media may be either a distortion or a highly subjective snapshot of a broader life or experience. In this context, a book like this is needed, in part, to dispel the misconception that media represent Asian Americans accurately, to cut through the misinformation presented daily in mainstream media, and to gesture toward that part of Asian American lives, identities, and experiences that are not available, at least in mainstream media. This book does this by offering complex ways to view Asian and Asian American images, as well as by countering misinformation, and by drawing attention to independent media produced by Asian Americans.

Because media create the illusion of closeness, and because we know that media representations provide us with only a limited snapshot of people, and a subjective one at that, it is important to understand a significant context that influences the way in which media represent people of color. Many societies have experienced colonialism, and, while it is not as often overtly practiced today, institutional structures and remnants of colonial societies (and, as we suggest in this book, the way in which colonial relations continue to be taught regularly in media) as well as belittling media representations, continue to help to justify oppression – oppression that first materialized as a result of colonialism and colonial expansion. For instance, media representations of the colonizer and the colonized continue to play a significant role in the continuation of colonial rule and colonial relations. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam suggest that “The dominant media constantly devalorize the lives of people of color while regarding Euro-American life as sacrosanct…. The same regime that devalorizes life then projects this devalorization on to those whose lives it has devalorized” (1994, 24). Thus, derogatory representations signify a continuing psychological trauma and the perpetuation of past oppressions. The specters of earlier eras of US history continue to haunt our psyche and reside importantly, if not primarily, in our mass-mediated imagery. What does one do with such disparaging images and representations of Asian Americans today as the Milwaukee Magazine’s reference to a Filipino child in a restaurant as a “rambunctious little monkey?”² Such representations consolidate desires for continued racial, sexual, and gendered power, and perhaps, relatedly, for continued racial, sexual, and gendered oppression, including even violence.

Our overall theory about how media operate with regard to Asian Americans is that, because of a lack of systemic power within mainstream media production, they typically appear in ways that comport with colonial representations and thus do not represent a true lived experience. Within the media, Asian Americans are often at the sidelines, feeling the effects of dominant media representation but hardly ever appearing in the spotlight. The subjugation, invalidation, and persecution on screen of those without power should be taken seriously. Such images (e.g., the woeful representation of Mickey Rooney’s character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), and the equally problematic representation of character Tracey Tzu in Year of the Dragon (1985), both of which we discuss in more detail later in the book) are not only incendiary but also have a mass psychosocial effect within US society; more importantly, these images are part of a history of image-making and story-production linked to historical and continuing systems of oppression.

Because these images are remnants of colonial times and exist as part of earlier ideologies, remaining institutions, and continuing social and cultural relations, derogatory representations of Asians and Asian Americans are pervasive and exist both historically and contemporarily. The fact that such representations occur frequently, if unpredictably, and across wide-ranging and varied media contexts, suggests that there continues to exist a lack of information, perhaps a willful ignorance, about, and a (sometimes) unspoken hostility toward, Asians and Asian Americans.

The airing of “The Tsunami Song” on a popular big city radio station, and the response by protestors, is only one example, but it suggests a pattern of disturbing discourse about Asians and Asian Americans that is expressed publicly but then is also protested by Asian Americans and allied groups and organizations. Examples such as this do not generally make the national n...