An episode of The Colbert Report last Wednesday used the words “ching-chong ding-dong” in an attempt to satirize / skewer Washington dunderhead Dan Synder. When the show’s Twitter account tweeted the joke the next day without context — “I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever” — a bit of hell broke loose on social media, resulting in Korean-American Twitter activist Suey Park starting the hashtag #CancelColbert. It reeked of so much faux outrage and willful ignorance that I did all I could to ignore it.

Something strange happened though: the story became about more than Colbert, Synder, Park, or hashtag activism. How do Asians fit within the scheme of liberal / white privilege? Are Asians and white Americans so intricately linked, socially and economically, that one could adopt the joke of the other without crossing the red line of race? Having lived abroad as long as I have, I don’t have a good answer anymore; in so many ways, this is purely an American question, reserved for those living in America. (Can you imagine what a good liberal in America would say if they found out that Chinese people in China call themselves “yellow-skinned”? Or this.) If I had ventured a comment over the weekend though, I suspect I would have sounded like I did last October when Asian Americans feigned anger at Jimmy Kimmel over a joke about “killing Chinese people.”

I’ll point out here that the two stories you should read, if you’re interested in this #CancelColbert story and haven’t already read, is “Gooks Don’t Get Redskins Joke,” written by Deadspin’s Tommy Craggs and Kyle Wagner, and “The Campaign to ‘Cancel’ Colbert,” written by Jay Caspian Kang for The New Yorker. Craggs and Wagner, who are both Korean-Americans like Park, assert that Park’s reading of Colbert’s joke is “problematic; it flattens out all meaning and pretends, in effect, that there is no ironic distance between Jonathan Swift’s satire and actual cannibalism, not to mention that it’s tighter-assed than life itself, as a funny white man once said.” Kang, generous nearly to the point of his own argument’s destitution, writes sympathetically of Park’s hashtag campaign:

#CancelColbert may have been silly and dumb and wrong in spirit, but it’s worth asking if those of us who find it distasteful know as much about the intentions of the hashtag activists as we think we do. If we take #CancelColbert at face value, we can easily dismiss it as shrill, misguided, and frivolous. But after speaking to Park about what she hoped to accomplish with all this (a paternalistic question if there ever was one), I wonder if we might be witnessing the development of a more compelling—and sometimes annoying and infuriating—form of protest, by a new group of Merry Pranksters, who are once again freaking out the squares in our always over reacting, always polarized online public sphere.

And all this is a longwinded way of introducing the below, which is Colbert breaking kayfabe on Tuesday’s The Colbert Report to tell his audience that he is, in fact, a satirist. Hopefully this is the last time we write about this story. It won’t be, I suspect, the last time we talk about racism, specifically what constitutes it.

Via Gawker:

“That ends that controversy,” Colbert concluded. “I just pray that no one tweets about the time I said that Rosa Parks was overrated, Hitler had some good ideas, or ran a cartoon during Black History Month showing President Obama teaming up with the Ku Klux Klan because, man, that sounds pretty bad out of context.”

People on twitter had words to say:

I used to watch @HowIMetMother but I now refuse to and hope they apologize for yellowface. #HowIMetYourRacism
— Suey Park (@suey_park) January 15, 2014

@CBS #Yellowface doesn’t get you better ratings, it just makes people want to boycott your network #HowIMetYourRacism

— JH Seouljaboy Park (@SeouljaboyPark) January 15, 2014

Really, #HIMYM?? You couldn’t even bring yourself to hire Asian actors for this? http://t.co/oUdTXneCe6 #HowIMetYourRacism @CBS — šīrīn ✺ šəfīʿ (@shereenTshafi) January 15, 2014

(Tweets from Buzzfeed’s article)

I don’t think it deserved all the vitriol. First of all, let me first say that as a person of color (half-Asian), I cannot be racist. It’s a fact. Now that that’s done, let me lay out a few reasons why I think the critiques of HIMYM are a little too venomous.

Context is everything
One of the reasons that blackface/yellowface is an important issue is practical — having white actors portray Asians is a way to disenfranchise these performers in the media. Time writer Kai Ma said this precisely:

“What has always been so disturbing about yellowface, blackface, brownface, and redface, is how far the industry is willing to go to not employ people of color. Instead of hiring an Asian-American actor to portray an experience written by an Asian American writer — an experience that can certainly include a penchant for kung fu — television has historically, aggressively, employed white artists to write about and portray non-white people.”

Which is true, and if you didn’t watch the episode, is a totally reasonable claim to make. But the whole conceit of the slap training montage in question was that it was made up. The roles were played by the show’s protagonists because they were supposed to be the show’s protagonists, and they carried their personalities and in-show stories with them. The actual Asian people in the episode (and there were a number) all acquitted themselves perfectly well.

What is yellowface here?
So we’ve established that the roles the “yellowface” characters were playing weren’t those of Asian people. But what exactly did they do that got people so fired up?

Okay, so she’s wearing a kimono. But that seems to be it? Hmm…

Okay, well this is a bit easier. Her face isn’t yellow, but she’s got those chopstick things AND a kimono.

FU MANCHU! I FOUND IT. EXTRA CRISPY RACISM! What…who is Fu Manchu? Oh wait, you didn’t grow up watching Boris Karloff’s performance in The Mask of Fu Manchu? Oh well, you know it’s this funny beard thing that means something.

Oppression is about power and history — yellowface is not blackface
When Dave Chappelle puts on whiteface (real, actual whiteface) and makes fun of white stereotypes, we laugh. A black person can call a white person a “honky” or “cracker”, it is comedic rather than offensive. And yet I cannot even mention the slur a white person would use.

I am not a culture warrior upset about this. I accept that this is the way the world works.

I am try to critically examine the claim that one cannot portray people of other races on film. The common cultural consensus seems to be that one can, as long as it is directed towards privileged people. Can we say that Asian-Americans today speak from the same place of oppression as black Americans or Latinos do? Is it a relative thing? Could a black person do yellowface? Could a Native American? The knots of power and race get very tangled here and make this a complex issue.

Being focused only on racial performance is distracting
If this episode had been tweaked to include Asian actors instead of white ones, I doubt that we’d be hearing flame wars about it. At least it wouldn’t have a catchy #yellowface hashtag. I think that’s a problem. We should be angry about performances that exacerbate racial stereotypes, but by focusing solely on Ted’s Fu Manchu mustache we run the risk of failing to observe racism in its many, many forms.

In the end, I’m inclined to excuse lazy wardrobe choices and give the show’s creator Carter Bay the benefit of the doubt:

With Monday’s episode, we set out to make a silly and unabashedly immature homage to Kung Fu movies, a genre we’ve always loved.

— Carter Bays (@CarterBays) January 15, 2014

So everybody calm down. Let’s back down to yellow alert.

Holland Got Talent judge Gordon Heuckeroth made several racist remarks at a Chinese competitor, singer Xiao Wang, last week. You might have already seen it, but if not, check the above. What’s interesting, however, is the tepid, almost indifferent response from netizens in China, a study in contrast to the outrage expressed after the now-infamous and actually inoffensive skit by Jimmy Kimmel.

“As undoubtedly racist as this is, this is not construed as a racism in China,” writes Sinopathic.

For every “ching chong” slur and “chinky-eye” affair that occurs, there is an equally indifferent wind that does not blow. While overseas Chinese groups are outraged at such egregious displays of ignorance and hate, this doesn’t register with Chinese in the motherland. Because it doesn’t concern the motherland.

Racism in China is anything that has to do with the national interest: namely national sovereignty, national defense, and intangible cultural heritage. The bigger the affair, the more racist it is.

The top comments on chinaSMACK express much the same:

Can’t be helped, the Chinese people [there probably] don’t interact with mainstream society, and must have left this kind of impression [on the judge].

…Just look at it as entertainment. Foreigners’ humor all has a bit of ridicule/mockery in it. Don’t be oversensitive.

That’s incredible. Yet the reason is simple. Satire doesn’t translate, as we’ve noted here before, and the Kimmel story, if translated faithfully, sounds like an American network TV host wants to, you know, kill all Chinese people. No one bothered to footnote the translations with “THIS IS A JOKE,” and besides, who here would’ve understood it?

Judge Gordon’s comments, on the other hand – Can’t be helped. Overseas Chinese just gotta grit and bear it. Don’t be oversensitive. You’ve probably heard that the Chinese are blunt when it comes to race, especially differences in appearances — even if they’re grossly generalized and stereotyped — between ethnicities. They’re not used to the American level of political correctness. Also interestingly, this episode perhaps shows they’re not as monolithic in their defense of “one of their own,” either.

But that doesn’t mean judge Gordon’s not a supreme prick in the above and deserves to be called out. Janet Lie, a Chinese woman who lives in Holland, decided she can’t — in her words — “just let it go.” She emailed the following to us, which she gave us permission to publish:

RTL, the Dutch broadcaster, REFUSES to apologize because “he’s just joking”. Unfortunately, many Dutch people tend to agree and don’t think it was a big deal. That’s why we created this petition, demanding an apology!

Some Dutch people even denied it was racist and said people were “too damn sensitive nowadays”. The Dutch media didn’t pay any attention to this until it made international headlines because American bloggers were reposting the video.

As a Chinese woman living in Holland, I’ve been called “spleetoog” (Dutch for slit eye) all my life. Strangers would come up at me and say “ching chong”. I get ni hao’ed at least once a week. Men asked me if it’s true that Asian women have sideways vaginas a couple times. And even though not intentiontal, my own friends would also make racist jokes about Asians. Everytime I say that’s not right, they call me “oversensitive”. “What’s the big deal? It’s just a joke.”

I am sick and tired. I created a Facebook-page (it’s in Dutch, unfortunately) to create awareness and asking fellow Asian people in Holland to speak up. Unlike in America, Asian support groups here aren’t very vocal. Asian people here stay silent and just try to blend in with everyone. I want them to file a complain with me, but they tell me to”. But I can’t.

So again, sign this petition, if you’re the petitioning type.

Aspiring American brodude outfit Day Above Ground finally got their big break on Thursday morning after cultural provocateur Angry Asian Man, comedian David So and several other influential media personalities shaped what was initially a locus of outrage in the Asian American community on Tuesday afternoon into a viral campaign and international news story.

Following two days of criticism on blogs, national news outlets and social media (and even a change.org petition) for the video that set the landspeed record for crude sexual and racial references toward people of Asian descent, the Los Angeles-based outfit held their ground and did nothing to address their critics aside from offering a slightly less offensive video description, which in turn generated even more outrage for their failure to even make an attempt at being contrite.

As the story went viral late Wednesday and throughout Thursday, the administrator of the band’s Facebook page was active in adjusting photos and editing avatars (but not removing “Asian Girlz”-related content, including promotional materials and shots of the band with Levy Tran, the Vietnamese-American model who has since distanced herself from the project), as if they were sprucing the place up for an inevitable visit from the major labels offering them a record deal.

It wasn’t until the House of Blues announced on Thursday afternoon that the West Hollywood venue was dropping them from a scheduled performance and video screening on August 10 that the band attempted to paint the trainwreck off as misinterpreted satire with a second revision on YouTube.

The video, now with nearly 900,000 views and 13,o00 comments, was initially posted with little fanfare last Saturday.

“This video is intended to be a satirical, provocative, absurd, & even silly work of art,” the band said on Friday morning. “The lyrics, story, and visuals are so completely over-the-top and ridiculous that we thought it’d be impossible to miss the point.”

The defiant statement sarcastically thanked Angry Asian Man for bringing it to the public’s attention and announced that the video will remain public for the next 48 hours so those who haven’t seen it yet can get their yearly fix of stupidity in one potent dose.

And taking a page from the Official Playbook of Racial Insensitivity that dictates how the victims of racism should feel after being assaulted, the band urged those who were offended to “just step back, take a breath and relax.”

While we’re used to batting away the justifications sputtered by the blithe defenders of casual racism every time something like this happens — classic arguments include the “I Am This Race and I’m Not Offended” argument, the “I Have Friends of This Race, So I Cannot Be Racist” argument, the “It Was Only a Joke, So Relax” argument, the “Stereotypes Are Kinda True, So What’s the Big Deal?” argument, the “People of This Race Say This Stuff to To Each Other All the Time, So Why Can’t We?” argument, and the “This Other Person Has Also Done This Racist Thing and People Aren’t Outraged About That” argument — the band took the unusual step of cherry-picking some of these logical contortions made by several knuckle-dragging YouTubers and including them in the aforementioned statement, which is something we’ve never seen before and is a great example of Hanlan’s Razor:

“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

Shortly after the band told TMZ on Friday evening that they were yanking the video on Saturday after receiving threats, a commenter named Bone Shaker appeared on YouTube and offered a plausible alternative (and completely unverified) explanation that appears to mesh with the band’s unapologetic statement and previous behavior:

“The real reason why the band is taking this video down is because they never got signed release forms from the locations they filmed at,” wrote Bone Shaker from a recently registered account with no previous activity. “It wouldn’t have been a problem if no one saw this video, as they probably assumed would happen. But since this blew up, all these locations are now contacting the band and telling them to take those scenes out cause they don’t want their business to be associated with this crap. So don’t be fooled by their ‘noble’ gesture of pulling the video from YouTube.”

Asian American Reactions

Asian American media appeared to be divided on how to address the issue as the story became unavoidable. Some outlets, namely the popular lifestyle magazine Hyphen, openly questioned how to discuss the video without publicizing the band’s toxic message (taking a cue from community activists Jeff Yang and Bao Phi, they opted to post a list of 47 Asian-Pacific American female musicians entitled “Feed the People, Not the Trolls”) while others opted to use the flap to directly dive into a discussion when it comes to the prejudice directed toward people of Asian descent in American society.

“Day Above Ground draws upon a centuries-long white European and American colonial obsession and misrepresentation of Asiatan sexuality, from Marco Polo to Miss Saigon, Full Metal Jacket to the Hangover Part 2,” said Alison Park Roh, a professor of Asian American studies at Hunter College, in a statement that was published on the race-themed pop culture blog Racialicious on Friday.

“Not only are they misrepresenting us in a viral fashion, they are directly contributing to a pervasive history of white supremacist male violence against Asian women. That violence is rooted in the American government going to Asia to extract resources and cheap labor and American men going to Asia to restore their sense of a ‘lost’ masculinity — both at the expense of millions of peoples’ humanity, lives and livelihood, and a legacy that Asian American women have to live with to this day.”

While Asian Americans appear unified in their disgust, some commenters on social media disagreed with the premise of using the video as a launchpad for a soul-searching national discussion.

“This is a faulty way of opening dialogue because the content has propagated so much hype that the only responses are irrational and trite ones coming from outspoken (but not eloquent or critical) participants,” wrote a commenter on the social news website reddit on Friday afternoon in a thread about America’s double standard when it comes to the notion that it’s okay to mock and belittle Asians but not others.

“I think a more constructive approach is to analyze the song as one of a series of examples marking a definitive change in internet culture and social trends,” he continued. “The band is not special for arranging casual racism and sexism in song form, but the work follows a pattern of making generalizing statements under the excuse of satire or proclaiming identity.”

“It’s acceptable to make fun of Asians because nobody is scared of us,” said another. “We are not intimidating or threatening in any way. And we haven’t been wronged by white America like blacks have been wronged, so there’s no reason to tippy toe around us. Those are some common sentiments about this issue, not necessarily mine.”

Angry Asian Man, which ignited the firestorm, hasn’t followed up with a blog post on “Asian Girlz” since its original post on Tuesday afternoon. The blog has, however, written about stuff that’s more infinitely more deserving of your attention, like Take Your Shot, a contest for aspiring Asian filmmakers, and the music video for Kesna, a collaboration between vocalist Esna and hip hop MC and producer Kero One.

We reached out to Day Above Ground singer Joe Anselm on Friday afternoon — the guy with the frosted tips who we referred to as a “dead-eyed sociopath” in our original post — to ask him what everyone is dying to know: “What? Why? How? Gah!”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Anselm ignored all of our questions — namely “What the hell were you thinking?” — and simply said, “It’s not racist” and, “It is a work of art that, if you are an artist, you stand behind.”

We will undoubtedly find more to write about this trainwreck of supernova proportions as the saga continues. Stay tuned.

Pete DeMola is a writer and creative consultant in Hong Kong. He tweets @pmdemola.

UPDATE, 8/5, 2:37 am: Despite saying they’re removing the video and duping media into writing headlines that imply the video has already been removed, Asian Girlz remains readily viewable on YouTube, 1.3 million hits and counting (4,257 likes, 29,516 dislikes).

UPDATE, 8/5, 11:33 pm: The video is gone

UPDATE, 8/6, 1:31 pm: One final update. From band member Joe Anselmi:

I just wanted to clarify some things about the inspiration for our new song/video “American Dream” & the immediate action we took to get it out to the people, was to basically dispel the myth that we are racists, sexists, or just bad people. We are a rock band that made a raunchy, satirical song. That is all. And we want to continue down the road making music we like to make, no matter what comes out. We are also embarking on a 10 week promotional campaign for “American Dream” to allow the people to make up there mind on how they want to see Day Above Ground.

How many deep-rooted Asian stereotypes can you cram into a five-minute music video? Dozens if you’re the American boy band Day Above Ground, the Los Angelenos who galvanized the Asian American community on Tuesday afternoon after blogger and cultural critic Angry Asian Man blasted the video for their song “Asian Girlz” in a scathing post.

While we’d love to offer a frame-by-frame analysis of everything questionable about the most racist music video we’ve ever seen, doing so would give us ebola. Our shortlist, however, includes:

√ those stereotypical Asian-style singsong chimes;

√ the Chinatown-style font;

√ the tacky anime-style animations;

√ the sexy office worker trope;

√ the notion of Asian people as mysterious with magical powers;

√ the conflation of all Asian countries and cultures;

√ the shout outs to Los Angeles County communities with high Asian populations by white people and confused-looking Asian Americans wearing the band’s T-shirt;

√ the list of words and phrases (“Toyota! Sailor Moon! Fried Lice! Tibet!”) traded back and forth between a dead-eyed sociopath with frosted tips and his heavily-tattooed turdbro;

√ Fa ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra

and

√ the steady stream of racist lyrics that sound like something your grandpap may have muttered in a fugue state during the Korean War, like “I love your sticky rice/Buttfucking all night/Korean barbecue/Bitch I love you” and “I love your creamy yellow thighs/Ooh your slanted eyes/It’s the Year of the Dragon/Ninja pussy I’m stabbin’.”

Oh dear.

The outrage is paired with a sense of disbelief that not a single person in the band’s entourage, recording studio, or film production crew — or even the outfit’s bassist, Marcello Lalopua, the guy with the permaderp face who the band used as a shield in their now-removed video description that said there’s no way they could be racist because he’s Indonesian — posited that overt racism doesn’t fly in racially-charged America and a video like this is a surefire way to torpedo a fledgling career in the entertainment biz.

As expected, the response from the Asian American community was swift and uniform in its condemnation, much of which was directed at Levy Tran, the Vietnamese-American pin-up girl who appeared in the video as the shrunken fivesome’s scantily-clad puppetmaster, stripping in front of the caged band before pleasuring herself with them in the bathtub.

“She’s a misguided individual with no respect for the suffering that her grandparents and countrymen experienced at the hands of American soldiers less than half a century ago,” wrote one commenter on the band’s Facebook page. “Your cheesy fliers confirm your lack of taste, skill and artistic vision. I hope you guys spend the rest of your lives serving coffee to the very Asians that you’ve disrespected.”

Another:

“The reason why lyrics and music like this isn’t good and is considered racist is because some ignorant 14-year-old asshole could listen to this song and start using it as a way to degrade Asian women. That bully at school who loves to pick on Asian girls will start spewing out words like ‘get dat ninja pussy over here’ or say she only has money because her mom does his mom’s nails.”

Another:

“I understand you need to make a living, but have some fucking standards. As a Vietnamese-American female, you and your Tila Tequila sisters are making us look like gutter trash.”

Another:

“Never have I ever seen this many racist references in so little time, and that includes neo-Confederate anti-black songs. I hope this band learns the lesson that making this stupid of a mistake can kill whatever chance they have of making it.”

Another:

“While I’m disappointed in how [Levy Tran] is reinforcing racist stereotypes, I can also sympathize with the possibility that she wasn’t aware of these stereotypes and actually grew up playing into them to gain popularity and make friends as a way of raising her social status.”

Another:

“Remember that Asian girl in the political ad that featured Asians of indeterminate ethnicity in rice paddies talking in broken English? Yeah, I wonder that every time. I’ve noticed Asians especially are more likely to take roles that make fun of their race or in which their race is a punchline. I attribute that to Western media’s dislike of Asians in media; how many successful Asian actors have YOU seen in Hollywood films? There’s like less than five well-known Asian actors and they’re always in kung-fu/martial arts movies, nothing else.”

Another:

“I really really hope you get run over by an 18 wheeler.”

While it’s easy to write this video off as a PR stunt to generate viral interest for a mediocre band in a highly competitive industry — or even a sick joke, which is what LA Weekly’s Dennis Romero would like to believe — the unsigned outfit’s digital trail, juvenile antics (the highlight of their summer was apparently throwing fortune cookies at concertgoers) and response to the criticism doesn’t appear to indicate a very high level of cognitive functioning.

Sometimes a spade is just a spade and “Asian Girlz” appears to be a textbook example of what happens when five uneducated and ignorant brosephs churn out what they genuinely think is a fun and cute summer jam. The result, however, is an unfortunate reminder of the blind spots that continue to exist when it comes to the perception that it’s okay to attack certain ethnic groups in the country but not others.

Shortly after Angry Asian Man drew attention to the video on Tuesday afternoon (it was actually premiered, and evidently ignored, last week at an LA venue), the band pulled the video from Facebook, reposted the video on YouTube with a revised description and nuked all user comments from orbit:

“We appreciate all the criticism and support,” read the statement. “Our song ‘Asian Girlz’ was not written with any malicious, hateful, or hurtful intent. We know it is racy and does push the boundaries further than other songs out there. Understand that we do not promote or support racism or violence. We love everyone no matter what race, religion, or sexual orientation. Please respect our decision to delete any violent, insensitive, or hurtful comment and also one that supports racism. We hope that we can continue with our lives with much love and peace.”

Days Above Ground singer Joe Anselm told Beijing Cream in an email on Wednesday morning that the band “doesn’t really have an official statement” and “we stand behind our art.”

After being bombed with negative feedback on her social media portals, Tran shuttered her Instagram account on Wednesday afternoon and issued a statement on Twitter immediately afterwards:

“I sincerely apologize to all who feels that I set Asian women back 50 yrs,” she wrote. “I know I lost respect from a lot of ppl. It wasn’t my intention. It was meant to be light hearted and fun. Satirical. They are sweet boys and not at all racist. That is all I will say. I’m sorry once again.”

As the video continues to rack up negative press and dislikes on YouTube at a steady clip (it’s currently at 82,000 views with a 15-to-1 dislike-to-like ratio), Team Oblivious is set to move forward with a gig on Saturday, August 10 at the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, a bill that will see the video beamed on a giant outdoor projection screen to a city with the highest concentration of Asian Americans in the country.

Movements are underway on social media to urge the House of Blues to drop the band from their lineup and cancel the screening.

We’ll have more on this perfect storm of racism, ineptitude and outrage if anything else happens.

Pete DeMola is a writer and creative consultant in Hong Kong. He tweets @pmdemola.

UPDATE, 8/2, 11 am: House of Blues announced Thursday afternoon that they have yanked Day Above Ground from the lineup for the gig on August 10. Despite the story going national on Thursday, the band remains mum and haven’t yet issued an official response.

UPDATE, 8/3, 11:48 am: The band tells Pete Demola, “It’s not racist… it is a work of art that, if you are an artist, you stand behind.”

A Bay Area anchor who works for Fox affiliate KTVU announced on Friday, out loud and on-air, that the names of the four pilots of Asiana 214 were Captain Sum Ting Wong, Wi Tu Lo, Ho Lee Fuk, and Bang Ding Ow.

Uh. Wow.

The anchor said the names were confirmed by the National Transportation Safety Board, which… yeah, Ho Lee Fuk, indeed.

NTSB, you guys okay over there?

It released this statement that blamed the names on an intern.

Earlier today, in response to an inquiry from a media outlet, a summer intern acted outside the scope of his authority when he erroneously confirmed the names of the flight crew on the aircraft.

The NTSB does not release or confirm the names of crewmembers or people involved in transportation accidents to the media. We work hard to ensure that only appropriate factual information regarding an investigation is released and deeply regret today’s incident.

One more look:

Anyway, there’s been a bit of confusion recently about our Asiana posts, with some thinking I had “demanded” an apology from the Chicago Sun-Times for its “Fright 214” headline, and again after a Korean news presenter expressed relief that the two who died on the flight were not Korean.

Far from demanding anything from the Sun-Times or Channel A, I was merely predicting apologies would come. And I was right, but of course you knew that already, since the Sun-Times operates in a country where political correctness is valued, for better or for worse, and Channel A’s presenter let slip a pretty stupid utterance.

We’ll go ahead and make it three for three in apology predictions here. KTVU will be expressing its regret, and maybe throwing the NTSB under a huge-ass truck.

UPDATE, 3:54 pm: KTVU and its station have already apologized, which makes sense. They’re calling it a “hoax.” From Politico’s writeup:

KTVU apologized during its 6 p.m. newscast.

“First of all, we never read the names out loud, phonetically sounding them out,” anchor Frank Somerville said, adding that the station also didn’t ask the position of the person within the NTSB giving them the ultimately erroneous information.

The station also issued an apology on its website Friday evening.

“We sincerely regret the error and took immediate action to apologize, both in the newscast where the mistake occurred, as well as on our website and social media sites,” Tom Raponi, the station’s vice president and general manager, said in a statement. A full explanation of how the station acquired the names is not yet available, although the station is now calling it a hoax.

KTVU erroneously names Asiana crash pilots as "Sum Ting Wong" (something wrong) and "Ho Lee Fuk" (holy fuck) – pic.twitter.com/OKUtx6IoDM

— Matthew Keys (@MatthewKeysLive) July 12, 2013

(H/T Kevin Collier)

Okay, this looks bad — replacing an L with an R in a story about a flight from Asia in which two Chinese teenagers died. But no editor could have possibly done this intentionally, right? Make an L-R confusion joke amid a tragedy, I mean. Spoonerisms really aren’t even very clever.

In any case, expect an apology soon. We’ll give the Sun-Times the benefit of the doubt and call “Fright 214” an error in carelessness, but it’s an error they’ll regret nonetheless.

You’re Kidding Me, Right? Check Out This Headline in Chicago Sun Times. ht/ @jfdulac (AsAm News)

UPDATE, 7/9, 7:37 pm: Via Kotaku:

Sun-Times Publisher and Editor-in-Chief Jim Kirk told the Asian American Journalist Association that his staff didn’t even think about how the headline could be perceived as insensitive.

“There was nothing intentional on our part to play off any stereotypes. …If anybody was offended by that, we are sorry,” Kirk told AAJA. “We were trying to convey the obviously frightening situation of that landing.”

Dr. Monica Stephens, a professor at Humboldt State University, has created a series of maps that illustrate which areas of the United States are most likely to send tweets with certain hateful words. It’s called Geography of Hate, and here’s how it works:

The data behind this map is based on every geocoded tweet in the United States from June 2012 – April 2013 containing one of the ‘hate words’. This equated to over 150,000 tweets and was drawn from the DOLLY project based at the University of Kentucky. Because algorithmic sentiment analysis would automatically classify any tweet containing ‘hate words’ as “negative,” this project relied upon the HSU students to read the entirety of tweet and classify it as positive, neutral or negative based on a predefined rubric. Only those tweets that were identified by human readers as negative were used in this analysis.

To produce the map all tweets containing each ‘hate word’ were aggregated to the county level and normalized by the total twitter traffic in each county.

The heat map we’ve highlighted above tracks “chink” tweets. Users are able to zoom in, where they’ll discover, among other things, that a disproportionate number of “chink” tweets originate from central Virginia. What’s up with that?

Play around and see if you find any other trends.

(Geography of Hate, h/t 8Asians)

In an otherwise pretty decent ad for the Chevy Trax, GM has been forced to go on the defensive for using a song that includes the phrase “ching-chong, chop suey.”

As South China Morning Post notes:

The television spot for the Chevrolet Trax SUV, which had been running in Canada since early April and was posted to Chevrolet’s European website, disappeared from Canadian TV screens about a week ago, and was replaced with a new edit of the ad without lyrics.

In response to queries from the South China Morning Post, GM Canada communications director Faye Roberts said the commercial “received some negative feedback regarding the lyrics in the commercial’s soundtrack.”

The ad is called “After Midnight,” and different versions of it in different countries treated the potentially offensive line differently. “The UK version muffled the ‘Fu Manchu’ lyrics while the Italian version, for instance, did not. Roberts said that to her knowledge the offending version had not hit TV screens outside Canada,” according to SCMP. So GM was obviously aware of the problem, i.e. “ching-chong” is a problem. In our digital age, there’s really no such thing as a “regional advert.”

QZ has helpfully identified the tune as “Oriental Swing” from the album Lil Hardin Armstrong & Her Swing Orchestra: 1936-1940. They obviously weren’t as politically correct back in that day, which is a shame because it’s a catchy tune:

Exclusive: General Motors pulls ‘racist’ Chevrolet ad over ‘ching-ching, chop suey’ song (SCMP)

“Golfer from China.” “Chinese golfer.” “Asian.” Hell, just stick with “14-year-old.”

“Chinaman”?

“Dude, Chinaman is not the preferred nomenclature,” notes Timothy Burke of Deadspin, who pulled the above clip from a newscast in Lafayette, Louisiana.

Apology forthcoming in 3… 2….

Guang Tianlang, by the way, finished his debut Masters tournament at 12-over, alone in 58th place. Of the 61 players who made the cut, he’s the only one who will make no money, due to his amateur status. It’s pretty safe to say he’ll be back, and will take home boatloads of money in the future.

Louisiana TV Station Refers To Guan Tianlang As A “Chinaman” (Deadspin)

Its most controversial days are likely behind it, but we have one more update on Beijing Snacks, which some have taken to calling “the most racist restaurant in Beijing” thanks to its owner pasting a “no dog… no Japanese et al.” sign on the front window. RFH recently visited with friends, including a Japanese man named Tomo (initial plans to bring a dog were scrapped). Here’s what he had to say about the place in a piece for That’s Beijing:

The restaurant serves, as mentioned, northern capital delicacies. These usually have a strong smell and taste, and can be found by following the trail of pungent whiffs: one notorious local dish is simply called ‘stinky tofu.’ Our arts editor, James, describes the style as “hearty and heavy. It’s difficult to grow things up here, so there really isn’t much of a varied diet.” Young Beijinger Jinqing says it is “mostly based on Shandong cuisine and quite salty… As the former capital of Qing Dynasty China, it also combines features of Mongolian food (grilled beef and lamb [i.e. chuanr]) and Manchurian confections.”

Ah, but you don’t care about the food, do you? You just want to know how the manager reacted when he found out he had unwittingly served a Japanese customer. Disgruntled, for one…

But overall, the food would fall flat to any experienced Beijing snacker. It turns out that notorious ex-sign was one of the main things going for the place. On that subject, we tried to lure Boss Wang to our table to discuss the matter a number of times, but he was churlishly holed up in the corner, answering our comments with non-committal, monotone grunts. I think he was onto us from the beginning, really. Eventually, while paying the bill, we mentioned how much Tomo, our sushi-guzzling Japanese friend, had enjoyed the food. The frown faded from his face, swiftly replaced by a scowl. All eye contact vanished. I’ve never before seen anyone go so rapidly from grumpy to grumpier. Admittedly, the remark was a touch provocative. But all we’d said was that he’d enjoyed the meal: we didn’t tell him they “serve a much better lu zhu huo shao on the Senkakus” or anything. Still, I guess if you are a serious racist, learning that you just served a grinning devil your own House Special has to hurt in a Special way.

As we said our goodbyes outside, some of the staff gathered at the window to stare at us. This is a non-traditional Beijing goodbye – it says approximately something like “Don’t ever come back here again, you running dogs.” One of them glared balefully through the spot where the sign had once proudly hung on the glass. I gave him my warmest smile and pedaled off.

Invited to comment on the story, PKU Professor of Japanese Studies Wang Jian told Beijing Cream’s editor-at-large that she thought the restaurant’s behavior was “terrible.”

She explained that “that’s how Chinese people were treated during the Anti-Japanese War. But it doesn’t mean they can simply use it now against the Japanese. That’s not what civilized people do. There are surveys in Japan about their attitudes towards Chinese and 70 percent of them don’t like Chinese. But they’d never do that.”

If readers know of any xenophobic sushi bars in Okinawa, though, you be sure to let us know!

‘No Japanese or… dog’: A meal at Beijing’s most racist restaurant (That’s Beijing)

The Beijing restaurant manager, a man surnamed Wang, who doesn’t want to serve customers from countries engaged in maritime disputes with China has removed this fairly racist sign from his Houhai establishment. He took it down Thursday by his own volition, according to AFP, but has “refused to apologise.”

“I don’t have any regrets,” he told AFP. “I was just getting too many phone calls about it.”

Well, that makes sense. This, however, does not:

“Maybe people misunderstood our meaning… it only said we would not serve customers from those countries,” he said.

Um. Good clarification.

Meanwhile, we’ve learned that the restaurant serves “soup made with pork offal and gravy-soaked biscuits.” So there. Another reason not to visit. (But we’ll let you know if we do.) UPDATE, 3/6, 10:05 am: Like this.

Beijing restaurant removes ‘racist’ sign after fury (AFP)

So, it seems that some people have yet to fully understand why racism is a bad thing. With tensions in the South China Sea remaining high, we’re still being treated to bizarre examples of unhealthy nationalism.

The latest can be found here in Beijing: the proprietors of a snack shop in Houhai called Beijing Snacks [百年卤者] have put up a notice refusing customers from countries engaged in maritime disputes with China. 

The bilingual sign above, via Rose Tang, reads: “本店不接待日本人菲律宾人越南人和狗 — This shop does not receive the Japanese, the Philippines, the Vietnamese, and dog.”

This kind of sign would result in a hefty fine in most places and instant removal, but here, it’s more likely that a restaurant gets in trouble for “hurting the feelings of Chinese people” by referring to sensitive history. About a year ago, a restaurant in Shanghai was fined 47,500 yuan for mentioning the “French Concession” in an ad. Love for country in the form of overt discrimination? No problem!

(H/T @badcanto and Rose Tang)

UPDATE, 2/28, 12:44 am: Apparently the Philippine government is aware of this sign. Via ABS-CBNnews:

Meantime, the Philippine government on Wednesday said it is treating as an isolated incident a Beijing restaurant’s refusal to serve Filipinos and other customers from countries locked in maritime territorial disputes with China.

In a press conference, Foreign Affairs Spokesman Raul Hernandez said the Philippine government is aware of the photos posted on social networking sites of the restaurant in Beijing.

Asked about the controversy, Hernandez said: “We think the notice that was posted on that shop in Beijing is a private view about the whole situation that is happening between the Philippines and China.”

“We hope it is not state policy not to allow Filipinos in restaurants in Beijing,” he added.

Meanwhile:

A report by Radio Free Asia earlier quoted the Beijing restaurant’s owner as saying that he put up the sign out of patriotism. “Chinese customers support me,” the owner, identified as Wang, told BBC News.

UPDATE, 3/2, 3:45 pm: The owner reportedly removed the sign on Thursday, but remains defiant about it.

Anne Ishii, writer/translator in New York, writing in Slate:

Martin Luther King Jr. said…

Please stop.

…we should be judged by the content of our character and not the color of our skin, but no one said anything about what’s in our pants.

Oh fuck.

There is an unspeakable fallacy that all Asian-American men must decide early in their adulthood to acknowledge or not, one that concerns their manhood. Call it the elephant in the men’s room. An Asian elephant that America believes has a small penis.

There’s your first paragraph in Ishii’s book review of Eddie Huang’s Fresh Off the Boat, full of co-opted ideas that neither satirize nor skewer the idea of an “Asian masculinity fallacy,” but asks us to “attack” it with impudence, mindlessness, and — more specifically — one-night stands. No, seriously: Ishii suggests that Huang’s answer to the “Asian American Problem” is to fuck more girls. Bareback. In public. On a galloping horse of rocket fuel and five-hour energy, cause bros and YOLO.

Ishii summarizes Huang’s childhood as a Floridian delinquent and a drop-out who — the implication is clear — is so insecure about his dick size that he compensates by doing things like “shooting at the Indian kids’ car with a paintball gun.” Huang, who hosts the Vice TV show Fresh Off the Boat with Eddie Huang, eventually goes on the “offensive” (Ishii’s word) and transforms into a “big dick Asian” (Huang’s words), as if we should all aspire, as men, to become testosterone-powered meatheads who power-walk and feed on introversion while victimizing modesty, niceness, and pussy.

Ishii writes the following with no awareness that it encompasses everything that is wrong with the “popular culture” she accuses Huang of seeking:

It is worth noting that Huang’s offensive comes as Asian-American men start to infiltrate a category of manhood that hasn’t been available to them since Bruce Lee. This manhood has accrued the descriptors jock, or meathead. A pejorative when applied to other races, when it concerns the ever-elusive Asian masculinity, the image is almost endearing.

Surely that’s an indictment of American culture, which allows such terms as “jock” and “meathead” ever be terms of endearment, and also these “Asian-American men” who pursue such appellations in order to “endear” themselves to said culture, yes?

Ishii does not address this. Instead, we get this excerpt, an exchange between Huang and his cousin:

And a little later:

By exchanging tropes of the emasculated Asian male and the “dick-swinging” black man, he demonstrates that all stereotypes are volatile and irrelevant.

Ignore that we’ve now begun applying offensive stereotypes to black men…

One could argue though, that he fetishizes the black size myth to neutralize the Asian one. Amid references to hip-hop and gangster rap, the author fantasizes about an America that fears the mentally unstable Asian-American man, just as it fears black male anger.

Ishii believes that the ultimate compliment, at least as it concerns one’s manhood, is to be feared. Success is confidence, not achievement. It means embracing the Napoleon complex at the risk of being a poseur, because style is more important than substance. Because a man’s ability to swindle with charisma is more meaningful in modern American society — never mind how offensive this belief is to America – than his willingness to engage in thoughtful, interesting, or meaningful exchanges.

Let’s skip ahead to Ishii’s final paragraph, published after an editor at Slate, I imagine, said, “Fuck it, I’m not editing this shit”:

For if the unspeakable fallacy is that Asian men have small penises, the crime against Huang’s humanity is that Asian men haven’t been allowed a proper phallus.

Explain?

That phallus is to Asian men what a college education is to the underprivileged, and Fresh Off the Boat is affirmative action into “plates and plates and plates of titty.”

Hmm.

This is about, in other words, a Big Dick Asian suiting up against the status quo and rallying his “chinkstronauts” to venture with him into the great unknown—because this is America.

I…chinkstronauts?

Because in America, it’s not the nice guy who finishes last. It’s the guy who has to believe size doesn’t matter.

The type of people who would nod to either Ishii’s review or Huang’s book are those who watch Jackass believing it earnestly glorifies that aspect of American idiocy. It appeals to the worst of our characters, but it’s offensive not because it dares to be controversial; it’s simply and mind-numbingly stupid.

Here’s Eddie Huang’s show on Vice TV:

“Holy shit! Peep the shitter. Bang! Shower next to the toilet. You could technically take a shit and shower at the same damn time. Future!”

Cool, dude.

In November, Angry Asian Man noticed a very peculiar Android app that was being sold in Google Play: “Make Me Asian.” The program works by superimposing straw hats and fu manchus on user-uploaded pictures, which, um… yeah, don’t do that.

Oh hells no. At the risk of giving this damn thing more attention than it deserves, behold this ridiculously racist Android app… which allows users to make themselves “a Chinese, Japanese, Korean or any other Asians!” No, seriously. This is a real app.

In late-December, pastor Peter Chin from Washington DC posted a petition on Change.org calling for Google to remove both “Make Me Asian” and “Make Me Indian” from Play. (Google does not monitor the third-party apps in its online store.) “This is not what it means to be Asian or Native American – these are nothing less than hateful and offensive stereotypes that are used to this very day to marginalize and humiliate people,” Chin wrote. “They are not funny, and their use highlights a vicious double standard in the treatment of certain minority groups.”

It’s taken nearly a month, but Google has finally capitulated: the apps are gone. As Chin updates:

I’m deeply thankful to the nearly 10,000 who who signed this Change.org petition to take down these apps. I am also grateful for Google, who heard our outrage and pulled the apps. This may seem like a small victory, but it made an important statement: that minorities will not simply accept dated and offensive stereotypes that are wrongly foisted upon them. We stood up, our voices were heard, and something changed. I hope that our society will take notice and realize that previously voiceless communities will not remain silent any longer.

Meanwhile, perhaps you’d like to try Gizoogle?

Also see: stereotyping, casual racism.