February 19, 1942: Franklin D. Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066.
The order provided for the designation of military areas (to be decided by the Secretary of War and commanders of the U.S. armed forces) from which “any or all persons” could be relocated. No specific ethnic groups or sections of the nation were singled out in the text of the order, but it stated that these new powers would serve as “protection against espionage and against sabotage”. In practice, it resulted in the internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans, nearly two-thirds of whom were American-born citizens; smaller numbers of German- and Italian-Americans were interned as well, but no ethnic group was targeted by the government to the extent that the Japanese were.
Virtually every Japanese-American living on the West Coast was interned, while a small fraction of those living in Hawaii - just over a thousand - suffered the same fate. The justification for the executive order was practical; it was believed that many Japanese, Issei and Sansei alike, could not possibly remain loyal to the United States if it went to war with Japan. It was outwardly practical (the Ni’ihau Incident seemed to prove American suspicions), and it was deeply rooted in racial prejudice. Many white farmers were glad to see their Japanese competition uprooted and displaced; several newspapers printed opinion pieces that supported wholeheartedly the internment based on their own personal feelings toward the Japanese; the American public (including even Theodore Geisel/Dr. Seuss) generally supported the move; and the Supreme Court, the ultimate defender and interpreter of the U.S. Constitution, upheld the constitutionality of the executive order in Korematsu v. U.S. (also see: Hirabayashi v. U.S.). Camps were run by the Wartime Civil Control Administration and the War Relocation Authority; the largest of these by population were Tule Lake and Poston, but the most well-known today is Manzanar.
Some Japanese-Americans escaped internment by volunteering to serve in the U.S. Army, and many of them served in the famous 442nd Infantry Regiment, a unit that fought in Europe after 1944. Ironically, while many of its members’ families remained interned at home based on widespread racism and suspicions of disloyalty, this all-Japanese unit eventually became the most decorated infantry regiment in the history of the U.S. Army: twenty-one of its members were awarded the Medal of Honor.
Executive Order 9066 was eventually rescinded in 1976, and surviving Japanese internees received payments and apologies from the U.S. government in the 1990s. But money paid four decades later could not compensate for the time lost in the camps; the businesses, homes, farms, and other property sold last-minute at ridiculously low prices by their owners or vandalized and destroyed in their absence; and the humiliation and disillusionment at having been denounced by their own countrymen and rounded up by their own government.
Inuit children at boarding school. The sign on the wall behind them reads, “Please do not speak Eskimo.” (1914)
The sex kitten aliens (The Caitians) in Star Trek: Into Darkness that indulge so many patriarchal fantasies are… Asian. I don’t know why I didn’t catch it the first time I watched this, but I’m pretty annoyed now.
Let me tell you a story that explains why this outrages me.
I had the honor of attending the Asian American panel at Dragon*Con with Garett Wang (Ensign Kim from Star Trek: Voyager), Peter Shinkoda (Dai from Falling Skies), and Justin Lin (Director of oh so many Fast and the Furious movies). It was a fascinating panel about the struggles Asian American actors face, even if it was peppered with racial slurs from a lady in the audience who felt she had the right to say them because she had married and Asian man.
But there were something wrong with that panel, and it was because it was only about Asian American actors. Actors. Never once did the subject of actresses come up, nor were there were any other actresses on the panel.
Firstly, I will never say that Asian American actors don’t have a tough time getting representation, but in comparison to the representation that Asian actresses gets, they have it significantly easier.
After all, compared to Sulu, who becomes a bad ass Captain that everyone initially underestimates, the representation of Asian women is low; their only appearance being that of the Caitains.
Asian men are never relegated to sexualized male power fantasies, or pornographically-driven subplots where their existence depends on the white male pleasing them.
And this is exactly why this scene bothers me. Those two sex kitten aliens could have literally been anyone, but they chose Asian twins.
The Asian Twin Fantasy isn’t a new fantasy, and it is always a degrading one in media (one need look no further than Austin Powers for that). It’s not only misogynistic, it’s imperialistic. Why it’s in Star Trek in this day an age only goes to show how little Asian American women representation has really gone, and why more attention needs to be paid to it. It also illustrates how deeply ingrained patriarchal conceptions of Asian women really are.
And to make things worse, you know what that species is SUPPOSED to look like?
Like, come ON. If you think “alien cat person” and the first actors that come to your mind are Asian women, youuuuu need to take a step back and realize what you just did…
I want to thank you for bringing up that point. I couldn’t find the words to express it properly, so I’m glad you jumped in with exactly the right ones :)
Someone articulated it.
this is my favorite video of all time bar none
I cannot stop laughing.
how have I gone this long without seeing this video
gotta bring this back lol
legendary
Feminine MinoritiesMy last concept piece of the school year. It about 4 methodologies of art. I choose feminism.
Donald Glover talking about the comments he received during his campaign to be the next Spider-Man (x)
“I was talking about it with Dan Eckman, who directed my Bonfire video. Can you imagine that trailer? That would be dope. Like it makes sense… a poor black kid in Queens. Like it just fits.”
The White Savior Industrial Complex by Teju Cole [The Atlantic]
If Americans want to care about Africa, maybe they should consider evaluating American foreign policy, which they already play a direct role in through elections, before they impose themselves on Africa itself.
There’s no point in quoting the entire piece, just read it.
I really admire Teju Cole. Somebody needs to keep it real.
“But there’s a place in the political sphere for direct speech and, in the past few years in the U.S., there has been a chilling effect on a certain kind of direct speech pertaining to rights. The president is wary of being seen as the “angry black man.” People of color, women, and gays — who now have greater access to the centers of influence that ever before — are under pressure to be well-behaved when talking about their struggles. There is an expectation that we can talk about sins but no one must be identified as a sinner: newspapers love to describe words or deeds as “racially charged” even in those cases when it would be more honest to say “racist”; we agree that there is rampant misogyny, but misogynists are nowhere to be found; homophobia is a problem but no one is homophobic. One cumulative effect of this policed language is that when someone dares to point out something as obvious as white privilege, it is seen as unduly provocative. Marginalized voices in America have fewer and fewer avenues to speak plainly about what they suffer; the effect of this enforced civility is that those voices are falsified or blocked entirely from the discourse.”
—Teju Cole
Okay so for real go read the rest.
Perfection.
“Lilo and Stitch” 2002
Deleted Scene
Lilo plays a trick on the tourists.
IF YOU LIVED HERE YOU’D UNDERSTAND
I desperately need to understand
WHY
WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY
Was this scene cut from the movie??!!
Fucking christ, do you know what this would have done? What this would have meant to SO MANY people?? The truth of this is devastating. And to think it almost found it’s way into a DISNEY film??
The inclusion of this scene alone would have made it the greatest animated feature the company ever produced. Easily. And if you think that’s hyperbolic clearly you don’t understand.
No, really, if anyone knows why this was cut PLEASE let me know.
oh man WHY WOULD they cut this, this is so great, holy MOLY
It was clearly something the crew was very reluctant to get rid of if it made it all the way to rough-clean (and in a few scenes clean!), fully inbetweened animation. That is like, thousands and thousands of dollars and weeks (months?!) of labour. Maybe a reluctant producer decided they would alienate their white middle-class American audiences by making them feel “too guilty” and pressed them to drop it? It’s unfortunate, it’s one of the most honest accounts of racism in a Disney movie (which is why it’s believable that someone got uncomfortable and made a case to get it chopped)
Designing entertainment by committee for maximum marketability is probably the most heartbreaking process in Hollywood.
September 25, 1957: Little Rock Central High School is integrated.
In 1954, the Supreme Court ruled in the monumental case Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal facilities are “inherently unequal”, setting down the legal foundation for the end of de jure segregation. The actual integration of schools, however, would not be achieved by a simple court ruling.
Three years after the Brown v. Board decision, nine black students (a group known as the Little Rock Nine) attempted to enroll in Central High after the Little Rock School District completed its plan for the integration of its schools. Although the school board of Little Rock agreed to comply with the decisions of the federal courts, Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus, reportedly a moderate who adopted a more hardline position to win the support of staunch segregationists, ordered the state National Guard to block the students from entering the high school; they were accompanied by crowds of protesters, who jeered the students as they attempted to attend school. Elizabeth Eckford (pictured in the bottom photograph in one of many iconic images of the Civil Rights movement), who was fifteen at the time, describes a moment as she walked through the chaos:
I tried to see a friendly face somewhere in the crowd—someone who maybe could help. I looked into the face of an old woman and it seemed a kind face, but when I looked at her again, she spat on me.
Grace Lorch, a white teacher who attempted to protect Eckford from the crowd, later faced bomb threats and harassment because of her actions. Lorch was one of the two white individuals who attempted to help Eckford, the other being Benjamin Fine, a reporter for The New York Times.
Governor Faubus, when asked about the conflict between the state and Federal authorities, replied that he was not defying Federal court orders but merely “carrying out [his] obligation to preserve the peace”. The school remained blocked by troops until the mayor of Little Rock requested assistance from President Eisenhower, who placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and sent Army troops to escort the students to school (Executive Order 10730). On September 25, the Little Rock Nine were admitted to the high school. But even after their admittance, they faced a constant stream of verbal and even physical abuse - one girl had acid thrown in her face; another was expelled after fighting back against her abusers.
Sorry about submitting this story but it’s much to long for ask and I just had to tell someone and this blog seems like the perfect place for it.
This is just another story clearly showing how whitewashing and the whole “white being default” in hollywood and such things is extremely harmful, it’s sort of along the same lines as the which baby doll is prettier thing.
Okay so, I’ve been volunteering at the elementary school that my mother works at to boost my resume in the future and I’ve spent most my time in the art room.
Well the first week in art we did a simple task for the first day back in art class, drawing portraits and this week we painted them in.
We of course put all the basic colors on the table to paint with black, white, red, blue, etc. We also put a few basic skin tone options we had a peach out and a light, medium and a dark brown.
In one class I noticed something strange happening a little white girl giving the brown paint to a little black girl to paint her skin and I saw the black girl refuse it. The little black girl refused to color in her skin and after that I started noticing something very troublesome a lot of the little black children(particularly the little girls) were not painting their skin in, at all. They just left the white paper.
So I started talking to some of the children asking them to color in their skin, they’d always refuse or say they didn’t want to.
I’d tell them things like “but you have such pretty skin, don’t you want to paint it?” and they’d still say they didn’t want to, one girl even responded to me by saying her skin isn’t pretty “not like yours”(me, a white woman) it broke my heart and I tried to tell her it wasn’t true that her skin was beautiful but she wasn’t having it.
It was so sad.
I’d say over half the black children didn’t paint their skin in and the rest of them all chose the lightest brown no matter what shade their skin actually was.
Also another thing that I’m not really sure if it’s problematic or not but I noticed a lot of the little black girls wouldn’t draw their hair in braids(which all the little black girls hair are in some kind of braid) and they’d draw it down and straight, not curly, not wavy, straight as bone.
I asked a few of them why they didn’t draw their hair in braids(or at least curly) and they all said because straight hair is prettier, some of the girls told me because they wanted their hair to be like mine or the teachers(thin and straight) and some of them refereed to it as “good hair” I wasn’t really sure what they meant by that but it obviously meant that they thought straight hair was better then what I’m sure is their naturally curly hair.
That’s just my story, I’m not sure if it’s something you’d actually post but I thought it was something interesting to known and something you could say to all those people who say whitewashing “isn’t a big deal”
Today has been so heart wrenching for me, I of course knew whitewashing was a problem but I have never seen the problem of it being executed so strongly before my very eyes. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever really actually seen an example of it happening in person but now that I have, it’s like I understand it so much better. Really seeing it happen, really hearing these adorable little girls saying they think they think they’re ugly or they they think they’d be prettier if they were white. It’s just so heartbreaking. I didn’t know what to do, I wish there was something I could have said to them to change how they feel but there are just no words, not when they keep saying “I’m wrong” or that “I’m prettier” or that “it looks better the way it is”(not colored in) it was like I was grasping at straws, there was just nothing I could say to change the way they feel and I hated it, I hated that these kindergarteners and first graders already feel this way. It’s so disgusting and how people can ignore the problem is beyond me!
This is heartbreaking :( And I feel it’s relevant because we’ve talked about the effects having a narrow idea of body types for women saturating our media has on girls growing up, especially ones that don’t fit that body type. In the same way it’s equally important to note the effects that having a certain skin colour, hair type, etc being held up as the way women need to look to be beautiful has on children of colour.
cont:
Those who know Dunham confirm that she is, in actuality, completely surrounded by nothing but white people at all times and becomes visibly distressed whenever a minority is present. According to those in her inner circle, the exclusion isn’t racism at this point, but an active effort to stay immersed in the all-white reality of “Girls” so she can continue to develop her characters accurately.
“She wants to preserve her integrity as a writer,” says close friend Diane Sherman. “She can’t start hanging out with coloreds now. It would ruin her vision. She needs inspiration for quality television. With every black or brown person Lena includes, the show takes a step away from being a fresh take on young adulthood and a step towards ‘Meet the Browns’ and nobody wants that to happen.”
and I really liked this show :/
this is so bafflingly, unbelievably racist i don’t even know what to say
Study shows watching TV boosts self esteem of White male children, decreases self esteem of Black male and all female children. (x)
Boys making the transition from elementary to middle school are probably exposed to superhero cartoons, Jordan said, adding, ” ‘Superman,’ ‘Batman,’ X-Men.’ The lead characters of these shows tend to be male.”
But Jordan added, “In recent years, creators of children’s programming have worked hard to improve diversity and include strong female characters.”
For white boys, “regardless of what show you’re watching … things in life are pretty good for you,” Martins, an assistant professor of telecommunications at Indiana University Bloomington, said in a statement. “(White males) tend to be in positions of power; you have prestigious occupations, high education, glamorous houses, a beautiful wife, with very little portrayals of how hard you worked to get there.”
But us women and POC who want to discuss the absence of strong characters who look like them really need to focus on “important things” like starving whales in Darfur or something. (I know this because a white man told me to).
“These incidents may appear small, banal and trivial, but we’re beginning to find they assail the mental health of recipients.”
-Sue et. al , 2007
If white people would even admit any of the stuff on this list was racist my life would be easier.http://www.olc.edu/~jolson/socialwork/OnlineLibrary/microaggression%20article.pdf
“We don’t mean to offend you by calling you racist.”
Two slam poets with Brave New Voices deliver this fearless indictment of hipster cultural appropriation and all its collateral damage.
DEAR WHITE HIPSTERS AND OTHER WHITE PEOPLE OF TUMBLR, CLICK PLAY AND LISTEN CLOSELY.Lol seriously though why does this not have more notes?! I can’t even pick my favorite part. It’s amazing, and flawless, and just… yes.
“Acting like you’re down because you say “fuck the system,” but in the same breathe are quick to gentrify the hell out of my hood.”
“Is that racist? Yes, that is. And we don’t mean to offend you by calling you racist; we know that according to you, we’re all part of the universe. But you have a tendency to treat animals better than humans.”
“We don’t need to hear your feelings about our issues. “To be fair, as a white person—-” “Nononono, shut the FUCK up.””
“I don’t see colour” “omgerd I didn’t even know you were black until just now”
tumblr already knows hatred of the whole concept of “colourblindness”, how so many people think choosing to pretend everyone is the same is somehow the same as thinking all people are equal. One day it’ll be possible to realize that people are different from eachother, and fondly embrace that fact that everyone is unique, and not let it affect how you treat them or view them as an equal. It’s actually possible to do these things without appropriating those differences as some sort half-baked attempt to prove your well-meaning, can you believe it?
it might be dangerous for me to speak out about this on tumblr of all places but I guess I’ll take that risk
I have never seen a slam poetry bit where the speakers had to actually pause for cheers and laughter
and these two girls fucking earned it
Mark Reads Revealing Eden, the first part of the Save The Pearls series by Victoria Hoyt.
Trigger warning for racism because RACISM!
what have i done
The world a service, that’s what you’ve done
what in the fricking frick is racist about the term “pearl”, espeially in comparison to “coal”
like i cant even fathom this
pearls are pretty and shiny and valuable, coal is dirty and grimy and gross, making the pearls poor sad oppressed white people and the coals mean oppressive black people doesn’t change the fact that it makes no goddamn sense
