This Cracked article isn’t very funny, but I think for the most part it is pretty insightful: 4 Things the Jeremy Lin Story Reveals About Modern Racism. Actually I think the title is pretty misleading. It is really pretty focused on anti-Asian American racism, and I don’t think most of it is highlighted by the Lin story, but it’s still an interesting perspective from someone who grew up facing this crap.
Here’s one of my favorite paragraphs from it:
[I]f someone called me a "gook," for example, my immediate gut reaction, before even thinking "racism," would be "THAT'S NOT EVEN THE RIGHT RACE." I know that critiquing the accuracy of a racist joke seems sort of like criticizing the construction quality of a cross being burned on someone's lawn, but in a weird way, someone not even being informed enough about you to use the right slur is a sting in its own right.
You want to annoy a Chinese-American? Make some sushi jokes, or kimchi jokes, or maybe even some sweet and sour pork jokes. Apparently not a lot of people know this, but there's a number of dishes that Chinese people really don't eat a lot of, and they're mainly for appeasing the mostly white clientele of many Chinese restaurants. Sweet and sour pork is one of them.
If you want to do a "This is what Chinese people be like" joke, you probably want to talk about how they can't get enough of the tapioca tea or something. That'll hit a little closer to home.
There is some nits to pick. For instance in modern taxonomy, the Vietnamese are not a separate race from other Asians, but only a separate ethnicity—although it is worth noting that about a hundred years ago, what we call ethnicities they called “races.” So they believed there was a “French” race, an “English” race and so on.
And talking about the piece as a whole one of the big things she leaves out is the “perpetual foreigner” stereotype, that somehow Asian-Americans, however long they live in America, are assumed to be FOB (Fresh Off the Boat). And it’s a really big oversight in her article. For instance, she talks about how sentiment against Asian countries often bleeds into sentiment against Asian Americans. Which is obviously true, but you can’t really convince people to stop disliking China or something like that. I mean it is a dictatorship after all, so while this is really pretty clumsy...
…you can’t exactly take criticism of China off the table. What really has to be done is an uncoupling in our minds between an American and their “mother country.” I mean I am almost 50% German, and none of my family spent a day in an internment camp. If memory serves a few Germans and Italians were rounded up, but it was extremely selective, based on things like individualized suspicion and evidence. You know as opposed to our policy with the Japanese, which was to say “frak it” and round up every man, woman and child. With Germans and Italians it was generally assumed that they had broken ties with the “mother country” that indeed now America was their “mother country.” On the other hand, it was assumed that Japanese Americans were still ready to go all kamikaze for their Emperor-God.
