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LIVING IN CULTURE
We all belong to a culture. It is what makes us, us. Culture is the collective human behavior, ideas, and customs of a group of people. Everything we know to be a part of our way of life resides in this collective manifestation: family is culture; wearing clothes is culture; going to church is culture; waving âhelloâ is culture. Culture is a part of our learned behavior and provides an omnipresent framework for the way in which we choose to act, think, and participate in our society. America has a culture of individualism, capitalism, economic mobility, and social freedom. This has allowed for great liberties in creating the much pursued âAmerican Dream,â where any individual is granted the opportunity to construct the âdream lifeâ for themselves. But for many of us, the dream life seems to be a distant fantasy.
The culture that we are immersed in today has never been more saturated with information. So infinite is this information in its innovation and growing access that its permeation will only become more pervasive and integral to the human experience. This infinite exposure has made many of us feel as though we are lagging or inconsequential, overwhelming us with the anxiety that the lives we are living are insignificant. Undoubtedly, this feeling has always captured us in the past, but with unfettered globalization and digital connection we must ask ourselves how to cope with such a tool. Perhaps we can begin to do so through changing our approach. Maybe what we need is to garner meaningful, positive intention in the boundless platforms of unregulated content and interaction. Through any channel or medium, the information and visual culture we consume should be viewed with a critical eye. It should be consumed with constant self-reflection.
As we are more vulnerable, gullible, and partial than many likely believe, in opening our minds to the rapid pace of change we must also refuse blind embrace. Accepting this vulnerability will give us the faculty of objectivity that allows us to observe and listen more consciously.
In the digital age, we should not only consider the issues that are brought forth with technology but the extreme privilege that it has brought us. Today, we are more fortunate a society than in any other era. Poverty, disease, world hunger, and religious, racial, and sexual conflict are statistically lower than any other time in history. The global living standard is at an all-time high, leading us to live longer, healthier lives. With this state of burgeoning progress, we all have an opportunity to contribute to this enduring change because, intentionally or not, we all participate in revolutionizing culture through reimagination. But now, try and use your intentions for imagining what kind of world you would like to live in. Envision a realistic version of this imaginary world. How do people interact? How do we live with one another? Is this the kind of world you want your children or grandchildren to live in? Is this the kind of world that you want for future generations to thrive in? If we envision a world we hope for, then we can answer the final question positively and, likely, quite simply. We can all easily envision a rosier version of our world, but we must take reimagination a step further and put it into action. We must remind ourselves of the responsibilities we have in the present, to reshape a future that is more ethically inclined. Through positively reforming our thoughts, we can influence behavior; in changing individual behavior, we can influence communal action; in changing communal action, we can change our collective culture.
This section focuses on committing to this endeavor: to examine and reimagine our current culture. Through subjects as familiar as loving our neighbors, to the grandiosity of gender justice, to the contemporary influence of celebrity and beauty, we will set foot into the pervasive, to confront our reticent inner selves.
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THE RACIALIZATION OF BEAUTY
Do not adorn yourselves outwardly by braiding your hair, and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing; rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is very precious in Godâs sight.
â1 Peter 3:3â4
I grew up worshiping fashion magazines. Without much other available abundant material, out of date, crinkled, read-over fashion publications my parents picked up for free became the first written material to truly influence me in my early adolescence. While I did not realize it then, it was affirming a disturbing reality: there was something the world knew as beautiful and I was not it.
I can recall one of my first times going through a summer edition of an American fashion magazine, becoming wholly entranced at the otherworldly glamour of beautiful white women sprawled across double-page spreads; they smoldered right past me, looking as though they were aware of their bewitched, awed viewer. I developed a paradoxical infatuation with these fair-skinned, big-eyed, long-legged beauties, loving them and hating them and obsessing over them, thinking to myself, âif only I . . . â Like many young girls, these images tuned my barometer of physical beauty. I studied them, comparing them against one another and then myself. I dreamed about the day when I would miraculously wake up as beautiful, discovering my big blue eyes and long blond hair. This dream only exacerbated as I grew into my teens and I descended into an incomprehensible depressive state to indulge my self-loathing. I looked around and didnât see a reflection of myself, and I started to understand that my physical value was merely tangential to my community and in the culture.
Flipping through these magazines, which had not the slightest representation of Asian Americans, left a profound imprint on me. It informed me as to what beauty looked like, what people wanted to see as a result, and what existed as the unquestionable representational norm of life. It has imparted a manipulated self-image and paved the way for what I now know as the westernization of beauty.
Today, as a middle-aged woman, I rarely read magazines anymore, but when I do, I am both aggravated and bored by how beauty has remained largely stagnant in its representation. Of course, the fashion, beauty, and advertising landscape has revolutionized and craned towards the safe politically correct agenda, but the change feels as though they are merely representing âunconventionalâ bodies as a moralistic token. The âstandards of beautyâ have mirrored globalized and modern revelations. The advertisements, runway shots, cover girls, and photo stories all try to convey the standards of beauty that their audience is urged to follow and aspire towards. The standards are still largely influenced by the Eurocentric history of luxury fashion, and the contemporary North American version aligns with such antiquated paradigms. The beauty ideal is fueled by the unattainable majority of âaspirationalâ advertising, which is biased toward the fairness of skin and sample-sized bodies. Advertisements support the Euro-American male appetite for feminine beauty, created in Paris, Milan, London, and New York City.
In more recent times, the appropriation of Black features and culture has been absorbed into the mainstream. Many of us non-Black public figures are able to see the exploitation and appropriation of Black physicality, culture, diction, and lexicon. Characteristics such as full lips, Black hair styles, and augmented bottoms, hips, and breasts are all qualities that African American women have been judged harshly upon in the past and are now exploited and reproduced by dominant white society for its new trendy, sexualized appeal.
When you think about the first time you ever viewed someone as beautiful, who comes to mind? Was this individual someone who fit into this standard? Were they a part of the standard? Did they look like you? While the issue is complicated, we largely tend to judge our own beauty according to the people we find attractive. When I think of the first time I ever thought of someone as beautiful, it was my second-grade school teacher. She was a white woman with long, sleek black hair, dark brown eyes, and translucent pale skin. I thought she was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. And in some ways, I was partial to her look because I could see something of myself in her darker features. As an Asian American woman without âwhite skin,â light hair, and large round eyes, there was no oneâeven in my own Asian communityâwho told me I was attractive.
I grew up with young Korean girls who deeply internalized that being beautiful meant to look white. Asians today still revere whiteness as the pinnacle of beauty. I had many girlfriends who wished they had bigger eyes, so they would carve out slivers of scotch tape and adhere it to their eyelids to attain the infamous âdouble eyelid,â the fold on the lid of an eye that creates a folded crease and adds depth to the eye socket.
This is the same story that Julie Chen shared as a co-host of the television program The Talk. Her boss told her that her eyes âlook disinterestedâ and she could never become an anchor on the news channel with her appearance. To even get a chance at being on TV, she underwent double-eyelid surgery, a common cosmetic procedure done by East-Asian women. It is not an isolated story, but an extremely common one of Asian women who internalize the notion that their natural, classic Asian features will withhold them from success in their careers and relationships. We have changed our faces to subtly assimilate into a more Western appearance. This plays out in various cultures through numerous changes in idealization of beauty in Asia. Be it in China, India, Malaysia, or Korea, white skin, large eyes, a high nose bridge and a smaller face is the ultimate indication of beautyâfeatures that conflict with more typical Asian features of wider facial structures, flatter noses, narrow eyes, and diverse skin tones. While some Asians will purport that these Asian beauty standards are not in acquiescence to white beauty, the correlated disposition to these characteristics does not seem to be a mere coincidence.
Added to these artificial standards of beauty are magazines like People who choose âthe most beautiful person of the year.â The standards of beauty used to make the selection are arbitrary, personal, and based on an established system governed by conventional Western standards. How can any magazine judge the beauty of individuals and determine who the most beautiful person in the world is, when it sees beauty through an exclusively white lens? Is there a way to rank or measure beauty that is unbiased? Are we meant to uphold such merit to those who are seen as beautiful? I detest it when People magazine chooses the âmost beautiful woman of the year.â This pushes a cycle perpetuated by the idea that women have to compete against one another based on their appearance, extending the notion that women have to sustain and fit into a physical criterion to achieve any kind of success, which men have a lesser obligation towards. I am not interested in seeing how the magazine validates its own whiteness as a standard of beauty and aspiration.
However, in 2014 People magazine made the decision to nominate Lupita Nyongâo as the most beautiful person of the year. Nyongâo is a Mexican-born Kenyan actress who is dark skinned. She has been transparent in her own struggle with the darkness of her skin, especially in the context of Black beauty. Colorism is still a highly divisive tool with a powerful history in America. It allows for the assignment of beauty through perceived power, where dark-skinned Blacks are less visible, less celebrated, and less represented than light-skinned Blacks in our culture and media. This is also the result of the white-led media consistently reinforcing the idea that even though people of color are now seen, their beauty is still regulated and monitored under Western convention. However, Nyongâoâs win should keep us pushing for more: we need to ask ourselves, when will more unconventional versions of minority women be on the fronts of magazines in their fullness of being (not conventionally thin, air-brushed, or lightened on covers)? We must make sure the media industry doesnât pat itself on the back for token representations and forget about real change. We need to keep asking for more. We need to challenge and redefine the conventional standards of beauty to include women and men of all colors, shapes, abilities, backgrounds, and appearances. Once dominant society and media truly accept and desire women from all ethnic backgrounds as beautiful, then we can begin to have young girls accept, welcome, and embrace their own dynamic inner beauty.
Reflection
1. Who can be the judge of beauty?
2. How can we dismantle Western racialization of beauty?
3. What are the steps to embrace oneâs inner beauty?
4. If we are all created by God, are we not all beautiful? How do we embrace our inner and outer beauty, which God has given to us?
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THE ASIAN AMERICAN âBUTTERFLYâ
Love does no wrong to a neighbor;
therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.
âRomans 13:10
Asian Americans have been in the United States since the 1800s, but the Asian American experience has been perpetually left out of the historical narrative. Our presence is often overlooked within discourses on race, ethnicity, racism, and prejudice, reflecting a long-spanning sentiment that we are not significant to the countryâs cultural fabric. The long history of Asians as indentured workers, miners, and railroad workers has shaped the growth, expansion, and stability of America, which has been persistently dismissed through our omission in Americaâs history.
To remember the contributions of Asian Americans to the United States, Congress designated the first ten days of May as Asian-Pacific Heritage Week in 1977: a time to remember the long legacy of historic, economic, and social contributions made to the building of America by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Observances continued, in 1992 when Congress passed a law designating May as Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.
While it is exciting to reflect on these national observances during this month, it is also imperative that we address the deepseated racism that is still in affect against many Asian American Pacific Islanders (AAPI), especially women from those cultures. We may be familiar with the story of Giacomo Pucciniâs Madama Butterfly, an operatic narrative that reflects on the reality for many people of color in America. The underlying story is true, based on an autobiographical novel, Madame Chrysanthème by Pierre Loti. The story of Madama Butterfly begins with a U.S. Navy officer named Pinkerton, who wishes to marry a fifteen-year-old Japanese girl, Cio-Cio San (Butterfly), for convenience until he finds an American wife. This story revealed an internal perspective of how AAPI women had been viewed and treated by dominant white society and the ways in which the archetypal perception of Asians and Asian American relationships continues to prevail today.
Shortly after he leaves for the United States, Pinkerton gets married. Butterfly faithfully waits for him and gives birth to their son without him. After three years living partnerless, Butterfly receives news that Pinkerton is coming back to see her. Her heart swoons, but little does she know he has married a white American woman during the time of his absence.
Butterfly was used as a temporary wife in an expedient marriage without her knowledge. Additionally, through this polarizing foreign marriage, she becomes alienated from ...
