please butcher my name. take it apart into its base phonetic components. cut them neatly along the syllable divisions. feel the texture of the sounds and the way they taste. butcher my name, then swallow it whole like the divine thing it is

a firestormthe creator questioning life a nation long-simmering the right to crydid not return their life,births another series of emotions,every person a puzzle at the end,reveal to the world the names of allusing profits to parade agency.

Racialization and stereotypes of Asian Americans fall under three broad categories: that of the perpetual foreigner, yellow peril, and/or model minority. The first paints Asians as strangers in their own homeland, forever foreign regardless of immigration status or how long they have been in the United States. The second characterizes Asians and Asian Americans as threats to American stability and well-being, and this threat is characterized as militaristic, economic, and social. Finally, the model minority myth positions Asians and Asian Americans as being superior to other people of color, particularly in the United States, and suggests that Asians are successful in the United States by means of their work ethic, family values, and intelligence.

These stereotypes and tropes, however, are not unrelated—rather, they are inextricably linked to one another. All of these stereotypes are based on a foundation that racializes Asians and Asian Americans as foreign, and they are all linked to one another in a circular fashion. Each stereotype can in turn draw from the other—the myth of the model minority is nothing more than a positive version of the yellow peril trope, and both rely on the image of the Asian American as a perpetual foreigner. …

[…]

In this paper, I will examine each stereotype in turn. I draw upon Claire Jean Kim’s framework of racial triangulation to describe and demonstrate how they are all linked by their common indexing of Asian as foreign, and are all part of the racialization of Asian Americans as foreigners, as compared to other people of color who have been raced as insiders. I will then examine the roots of all three stereotypes/tropes and show how their origins are in white immigration and labor policy; furthermore, I will show how they are all constructs of white racism toward Asians and Asian Americans.

Media never exists in a vacuum. Even stories that are set in distant science-fictional universes, or stories set in parallel universes that are free of institutionalized oppressions, are still created by people coming from worlds where institutionalized oppressions exist.
Media, then, not only reflects the concerns of its sociohistorical context, but also reinforces and reproduces these concerns: “Films both reflect and feed back into a larger socio-cultural landscape[.]” (Richardson 2010: viii) Given the overwhelming presence of various forms of media in contemporary culture—from television to movies to radio and online forms of all of these mediums, in addition to online-only media—it is not a stretch to say that media has a strong hand in helping us conceptualize our lives by providing us with the images and concepts on which we base our interpretations of our experiences. Richardson (2010) further argues that the America reflected in Hollywood is never a “real” and “accurate” representation of what America actually is, but is instead a representation of how America wishes to present itself and how America wishes to be seen by others.

Just as media can reflect the hopes and dreams of its root culture and provide an escape, media can also be complicit in perpetuating institutional oppressions. In this paper, I will specifically investigate anti-Asian racism, specifically anti-Chinese racism, in United States- based media; in particular, I will be exploring how language use and representation in movies and televisions reflects and reinforces anti-Chinese sentiments.