THE LOVE LIFE OF AN ASIAN GUY

As a person of color, I've learned to expect a certain level of whitewashing from Hollywood. Jake Gyllenhaal as The Prince of Persia? Dude, wtf? Random white dude as Goku -- wow, WOW, take it easy, buddy!

And yet, Hollywood execs surprised us with yet another bottle of fuckery by casting Emma Stone as Allison Ng, a character described as a quarter Hawaiian and a quarter Chinese. Let me lean in closer so I can say that again:

Emma Stone, a blonde haired, blue eyed WHITE WOMAN, was chosen to portray an ASIAN-HAWAIIAN PERSON with an Asian last name. I don't approve of whitewashing, especially when Asian characters get swapped with white ones (see: Ghost in the Shell), but this is a new level of lazy bullshit. How can you go 80% of the way, write a script ABOUT AN ASIAN PERSON but not cast an Asian actress? That's like making a movie about the Jackson 5 set in the 1960s but casting Honey Boo Boo as Tito and a ham sandwich as Michael -- did you even try, bro?!

Hollywood continues to whitewash because white folks don't see ethnicity as an IDENTITY. They don't believe race and ethnicity can effect your opportunities and personality in real life, or in a fictional movie. Instead, race is treated like a COSTUME you steal from one person and give to another. In fact, white culture has ALWAYS taken ethnic labels and slapped them onto white products.

We needed more R&B artists so we slapped a label on Justin Timberlake. We lacked diversity in the workplace so we made a category called "White Latinos."

And yet, when they do consider our ethnicity it's used in a way to exploit us: to paint us as uneducated thugs, awkward math nerds, and illegal immigrants. They never meet us half-way and write a script about normal ass POCs, acting as if we're either born into our designated stereotype or we're colorblind.

If you wanna know how white folks feel truly feel about us, take a look at ANY Hollywood movie and observe the POC characters. When white men were at their peak of Black male intimidation, they made 'Mandingo' and 'Birth of a Nation.' When they were afraid of Asians, they filmed 'Fu Manchu' and 'The Interview.'

If we can accept the writings of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston as expressions of Black thought, why aren't we accepting racist Hollywood films as expressions of white ones?

I have a favor to ask. A very big, demanding favor that I have never asked before and I hope I will never have to ask in the future:

I want you to, for just a moment, read what I'm about to write WITHOUT thinking about race. Okay? Cool.

Over the past three years since the death of Trayvon Martin, there has been no shortage of racist tweets. Racial slurs here, deflection there - it's a complete and utter mess. But what really strikes me as peculiar are the sheer numbers of folks who are ELATED by the notion of someone being shot to death.

"Trayvon deserved to die! That's one less thug on our streets!" "Mike Brown was a typical n****r and I'm glad he got shot!"

Now think about it. REALLY, truly visualize what that means when someone says that. This isn't a random thing you say during small chit-chat by the water cooler. I mean this is a dark, sadistic, and evil thing to say. Quite frankly, most people would be scared to say it out loud. Shit, you wouldn't even feel safe writing it in your personal diary for fear of someone finding it and accusing you of malicious thoughts.

And yet, there are so many white people saying this exact same thing: Black people are dying... and I don't care.

Let's be explicit: we are talking about death. We are talking about internal bleeding, suffocation, and cold-blooded murder. We are discussing humans, laying on the concrete, blood gushing from out their mouth, trickling down their eyeballs, taking in their final breath and you wanna say that you're GLAD? You're happy about someone dying? When is it EVER okay to be happy when someone dies? When is it EVER okay to LITERALLY wish death upon someone and feel overjoyed when it happens?

Sure, we say things like, "omg, you ate my hot pocket! I'm gonna kill you!" but this is NOT the same. There is no humor or sarcasm when people say that Mike Brown deserved to be murdered. And so now, I start to wonder: if we take off our racism goggles for just a second and look at it from the simple perspective of human death, murder and the value of life... you start to see things in a much more grim and macabre fashion.

When I do this, I imagine a group of 17 year old white kids hovering over a bloody black body, spitting on the corpse saying, "good... you deserved it" and I can't help but feel disgusted. Why aren't we addressing this? Why aren't we throwing these kids in an asylum for saying this shit?

This doesn't sit well with me...