Albert Shen has been appointed by the White House as the Deputy Director of Minority Business Development Agency...
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thesmithian-blog reblogged
asylum-art
So Yoon Lym Hair and Braid Paintings
So Yoon Lym is a Korean New Jersey-based artist who has spent parts of her life also in Kenya, Uganda and France and who works in different mediums. In this post, we want to introduce her ongoing series of realistic acrylic on paper paintings of hair and braid patterns, titled “The Dreamtime“. She started the series in the summer of 2008 and the paintings are based on photos she has taken of students and strangers she came across in Paterson, New Jersey where she has been working for the past 9 years.
[look of the day]
Source: asylum-art
Kathryn Ma…writes with authority about racial politics in San Francisco, a city where, not long ago, “all the Asian lawyers in town fit into five or six tables.” Now Chinatown power players can block or tip a judge’s promotion, and the annual luncheon of the local Asian bar association fills the banquet floor.
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thesmithian-blog reblogged
I’m a mixture…of the classics and the modern. I’m also a mixture of the childish and the very adult, the cultured and the non-cultured, the Japanese and the non-Japanese. I’m also interested in leadership. Leaders will come from the arts and design. I believe in what I call a creative leader…a traditional leader is concerned with being right. The creative leader is more concerned with being real; people who are creative are comfortable being themselves.
John Maeda (via hrdcvrlife)
[look of the hour]
'If you’re a Chinese American child of Chinese American immigrants, then it’s quite likely you spent part of your childhood attending Chinese school. It’s a coming of age ritual of growing up ½ or 1st generation Chinese American. And of course we all hated it when we were going to Chinese school, complained to our parents about it, and if our parents caved we eventually got out of it. It’s also true that once you’re an adult, you realize your parents were right all along, and almost all of us wish we had stuck with it, and learned more in that dreaded Chinese school.'
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Each section opens with lines from children's books that, put in the context of the poems, carry profound, disturbing meaning.
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thesmithian-blog reblogged
I love that you can see Jonny at the edge of the shot grinning.
[look of the hour]
...started with an aversion and disgust at even her name “Karate Hottie” but now I find the name endearing because it embodies the struggle of being what and who she is: a female American martial artist of mixed heritage. Waterson completely fits into the stereotype of The [Submissive] Asian Girl and at the same time doesn’t fit them AT ALL.
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Not only is Russell a total do-gooder-over-achiever (model minority), but he's overweight (unattractive), has a speech impediment (forever foreigner), looks nothing like his voice-over talent Jordan Nagai (invisible) AND ultimately is saved by a white man who acts as a surrogate-substitute father (transracial & international adoption) to replace his absent Asian father (Asian men = emasculated). By contrast, consider some of the other film children of Pixar...
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'A tone-deaf inquiry into an Asian-American’s ethnic origin. Cringe-inducing praise for how articulate a black student is. An unwanted conversation about a Latino’s ability to speak English without an accent...'
...not exactly the language of traditional racism, but in an avalanche of blogs, student discourse, campus theater and academic papers, they all reflect the murky terrain of the social justice word du jour—microaggressions—used to describe the subtle ways that racial, ethnic, gender and other stereotypes can play out painfully in an increasingly diverse culture.
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