Racebending.com

crossedwires: niqaeli: I admit, I don’t know Cho that well, so...

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:15:21 -0700

niqaeli:

I admit, I don’t know Cho that well, so I am glad there are other readings to be had!
And if he is just calling it out simply because he’s tired of it and he feels comfortable doing so even on his own films now, I think that’s fantastic. There’s certainly plenty for him to be calling out.

Heh. Well, I don’t know John Cho either. But he has talked about race & representation before* (and not in a ‘we’re all human, it doesn’t matter’ way), so it’s not completely ‘out of character’ for him to bring it up. I think it probably would be easier on him if he didn’t say anything, but I’m glad he does.

*Re Harold & Kumar (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHEkLBZI1IM 4:07 mark): If you have a Korean and an Indian guy as your leads, you must address race at some point in the movie. You must, because the audience is noting it, really. The other thing is, I think, comedy at its best, treads in taboo waters a little bit. It has to have that transgressive quality to it, and race is the biggest taboo in America. I mean, people are very reluctant to talk about race and yet when you do jokes about race, uh, that work, people are very happy to release tension and laugh about it. But it has been interesting. I’ll make an observation. During the first tour for the first movie, we were talking about race all the time with journalists. It was almost like a process— looking back, the first movie was more concerned with race, but we talked about it so much, I felt that it was in a way…a way of justifying our presence in a motion picture.

And from an interview in 2009 http://www.asiaarts.ucla.edu/090703/article.asp?parentID=110145>:

JC: I recall from the Harold and Kumar movies is my struggle with the advertisers.

APA: What happened there?

JC: There was all this racial humor in the movie, and the advertising department wanted to say “Starring the Asian guy in American Pie, and the Indian guy from Van Wilder…” and they did go with that, and they submitted that to me for approval, and I said, “I don’t like it.” They asked me why, and I explain it to them, and that was tricky because it’s difficult explaining to my own representatives, why that didn’t jibe with me, because everyone kind of felt like it was keeping in tone with the movie. And I said, “I don’t like it. We’re poking fun at racism in the movie all the time, but it puts the audience on the wrong side of the racism joke.” So they were playing with the wording a little bit in the edits, and they kept coming up with versions to make me happy, but they were essentially the same thing, and I finally said, “you are not going to make me happy. You’re dancing around it, and you’re clearly attached to this idea, and I want you to know that no version of this idea will make me happy. And if you’re afraid that I won’t show up to do promotion because of this bitterness, you can rest assured that that’s not true. I consider promoting a movie part of my duties, and I will show up nevertheless. But you can either use this campaign and know that I’m unhappy, or you can change it and know that I’m happy. That’s it. Stop trying.” And eventually they went with it, and it’s one of those things where I look back and I’ve very proud of the movie, but that’s the thing I remember.

APA: Last question…for Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, Viva La Union recorded a song for the soundtrack with the line, “I want my own Chinese baby” — what’s that about?

JC: When I was thinking about it, I thought of a literal baby. There’s a kind of lack that children fill, that’s just the dark side of being a parent, I think. And there’s an accessory quality to Chinese babies in America, and I just think it’s funny. I just liked it. And you know, I would know people who would fawn over Asian babies more, and it got me to thinking, there’s this belief that Asian babies are really cute, and it got me thinking that our whole race is infantilized to some degree, and it manifests itself in different ways. You infantilize a woman, and she becomes eroticized. You infantilize a man, and he becomes emasculated. You infantilize a baby [laughs] — and it’s possible, it appears that you can infantilize a baby even more. [laughs] The babies need to be cuter than white babies. And it’s just a weird thing that I felt like said something about mainstream America’s relationship to Asians in general. So that’s where it came from.

Also this interview: http://blog.angryasianman.com/2008/04/q-with-john-cho.html

“And yes, I do feel a responsibility, and always have, and it’s been an odd burden for me. Even when I started and no one gave a shit, I was trying to avoid doing roles—and it’s no accident that I’ve never done something with a chop suey accent. It’s no accident that I’ve never played those parts. I strongly believe there are a lot of Asian American actors who think that that’s the price to pay before you get to wherever you’re going. And I take real issue with that. Because you have to maintain integrity from the start, and on a personal level, you have to not do something that’s going to make you sick to your stomach.

But on a political level, how are things supposed to ever change if there’s someone willing to do it? I can tell you now, having worked in the business, that you can gather an army of people to hold picket signs and stand outside the studio, and say, “we destest this portrayal”… but it doesn’t matter if there’s a guy—who they know, a peer—who’s willing to do it, who stands in front of the crew and does the buck-tooth accent. If he or she is willing to do it, it makes the protestors look like extremists. It makes this guy look like the normal guy. Because we all work in the same industry. So the willingness of one actor negates a thousand protestors and a thousand angry letters.”

(So I can see why Butawhiteman Cantbekhan playing Khan would be deeply upsetting to him, even if Cho wasn’t in this movie.)

ikkinthekitsune: This is a really interesting interview with...

Thu, 23 May 2013 20:08:17 -0700

ikkinthekitsune:

This is a really interesting interview with Yoo Jae-myung, who’s an animation director for both A:tLA and LoK. There’s quite a bit of new behind-the-scenes information from both series, and he gets to tell his personal story about getting involved in animation, too.

The most relevant thing for Korra fans now, I think, is that he pretty much confirmed that the Studio Pierrot rumors were true at one point (because Studio Mir wanted to take a breather by working on The Boondocks instead), but Book 2 ended up being animated by Studio Mir anyway because that particular partnership didn’t work out.

Also interesting (if terribly depressing) is that Nickelodeon actually suspended production of Korra when Book 1 was being planned because they didn’t like Korra being a female protagonist… but after seeing the first episode completed, they went all in for four books. They apparently see LoK as their premiere show, which is really awesome. =D (Now just make us some proper merchandise, Nick!)

There’s certainly a lot more in the video, though, so I’d definitely suggest watching it. (Though I will warn that they use finale clips in the background that… really shouldn’t be used as background for an interview? I mean, I don’t want to see the boat scene when I’m watching an interview =( )

"The idea for East West is to be vital and relevant in terms of subject matter and community. The..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:15:42 -0700

“The idea for East West is to be vital and relevant in terms of subject matter and community. The community is very diverse now and we need to start evolving and opening up, because you know, Asians don’t live in a vacuum. That’s why I’m very happy with this particular cast. Some people might be shocked, like, “I can’t see an African American as a Russian,” so hopefully this can be an eye-opening thing for them. Or at least it’ll open up the conversation in terms of color-blind casting. You see Shakespeare being done diverse now. Why not something like Chess?”

- From my friend Renee Camus’ article on East West Players’ performance of the original version of Chess (not the watered-down rewrite - I like my Chess without happy endings, thank you).

I need to figure out how to see this show.

And yes, obviously Anatoly can be played by an African-American actor.

(Also, total fun fact? East West Players shows up in theater history texts in discussions of colorblind casting, using two contrasting examples of golden hair: in East West’s Into The Woods, Rapunzel is played by a woman of color but her hair is left “golden” because of the play’s fairytale setting, but in Sweeney Todd Johanna is given raven hair - and Sondheim approved the lyric change - because they wanted to cast an Asian actress and the play took place in a realistic setting. This is how to do it, theatres.)

khaleesiboadicea: lady-stoneheart: irresistible-revolution: fe...

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:55:29 -0700

khaleesiboadicea:

lady-stoneheart:

irresistible-revolution:

feministdisney:

xelamanrique:

look who’s finally joined!

look who got pushed to the side

reason no. 12326543742624743 why i wasn’t super outraged about the Merida redesign

every single POC princess is shoved to the end of the line. Mulan is basically unrecognizable.

LMAO I was looking at this image, and I was like… did Snow White get stuck at the end because someone thought she was a poc?

I’m laughing to keep from crying.

True story…when I was a kid, I used to want to be Snow White. There were no princesses of color and she was the only one who even came close to looking like me because she had black hair. (Kind of sad, because my skin was never going to be white. But I wanted it to be.)

Any other PoCs have the same experience?

-M

This is all I'm going to say:

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:45:31 -0700

feministdisney:

canonita:

doggedlyjohn:

thedisneydifference:

Pocahontas is complete fiction. I get it. It is a Disney fairy tale. Not an actual interpretation of what happened in real life. That was never what it was meant to be. Read the original interpretation of ANY Disney fairy tale. NONE of them follow the original story. Pocahontas is a Disney fairy tale like the rest. That is all.

It is a beautiful story with a beautiful message and it is told artfully. I don’t understand why people can’t just let it be that.

Look, Pocahontas is a great movie, but that doesn’t mean it’s not problematic. The two aren’t mutually exclusive. And it’s a little inappropriate to compare fairy tales to real history—-like, the relationship between European settlers and Native Americans was not a fairy tale, it’s history. So Disney can change it and make a great story or whatever—-“It is a beautiful story with a beautiful message and it is told artfully” Yes! True, but: “I don’t understand why people can’t just let it be that”. Because it’s not just that? It’s also many other things? Anyone with a questioning mind should be able to look into the things they loved in their childhood and see the flaws?

I agree with Cannon. And there is no pop up indication that reminds movie watchers that this is not the true story. This retelling is not a retelling in the way beauty and the beast is. Not only was that always a fictional tale, but the changes of Pocahontas as specifically rooted in a colonized way of viewing native cultures (see here and here2 for more details on specific problemtic cultural and historical problems).

I think it’s too blasse to go say “read a book and learn the truth” etc. If it’s a movie about a historical event, the truth should not be so hidden so as to be almost the complete opposite of the movie portrayal. People cannot be expected- and should not be expected- to google the historical context of every movie they see. Would it be nice if they did? Probably. Would it be great if schools spent more time examining the non-white, POC history of American experiences, before and after the American Revolution? Certainly.

But in examining how movies like this operate in real life, as opposed to idealized US Americana, Disney’s Pocahontas IS the dominant understanding of how that moment in history went down. That IS what happens when you tell a story about a culture that is often ignored except to be denigrated or used as visual props- you end up being the accepted narrative, because all others have been systematically silenced. And, again, given how this movie feeds into historical white washing and native erasure and presumptions and stereotypes of native cultures, this is very troubling.

It’s not just a movie… it was never just a movie

Talkin' 'Bout Star Trek: Into Darkness:

Wed, 22 May 2013 16:15:27 -0700

icanbebadifiwant:

Part 1

The abysmal representation and treatment of female characters in the AbramsVerse:

Read More

beau-tifulfailure: themelonlordapproves: swan2swan: racebendin...

Tue, 21 May 2013 20:20:53 -0700

beau-tifulfailure:

themelonlordapproves:

swan2swan:

racebending:

Just finished reading the preview version of this Free Comic Book Day comic about Mai by Gene Yang. It’s a good stand alone story that may change how you view the character, now that she is independent and no longer beholden to either Azula or Zuko.

Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday; to pick up your free copy head over to your local comic book store. The Avatar comic will be on the back side of the free Star Wars and Captain Midnight issue and most comic book stores will probably just display the Star Wars cover, so make sure to grab the stack and flip them over to show off Avatar cover! It’s exciting to see that the Avatar franchise is choosing to depict one of the series’ female characters, rather than say, Aang or Zuko.

This is promising. *envies forever*

I will not lie, I’m basically getting off work at 6 am and going to sit outside my local comic book store immediately and just waiting there until they open at 10 because I NEED THIS. IMMEDIATELY.

I’m from Europe, can someone scan this and upload this when it comes out? Would be great!!

Heads up! This comic is now available for free download through Dark Horse Digital. (This link shows the Star Wars cover, but the Mai comic is included in the issue.)

"When I was a kid, you know I immigrated to the States in 1978, and I’m six years old and watching TV..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 18:45:42 -0700

“When I was a kid, you know I immigrated to the States in 1978, and I’m six years old and watching TV and I didn’t see any Asians on television. And you turn on Star Trek and there’s this Asian guy not chopping anybody up. He’s honorable, a helmsman of a spaceship, and it was a big, big deal for me to see that and have a role model.”

- John Cho (x)

The only Asians I remember seeing on mainstream TV when I was a kid were Sulu on Star Trek, nameless Asians loading trucks in the background or dying on MASH (which was all about funny lovable white US Americans waging war on Asians), and the “ancient Chinese secret” Calgon laundry detergent commercial.

(via zuky)

Was the same when I was a kid. That moment of seeing George Takei not being overly-stereotyped when I was a kid was a powerful one. I think the only place I had really seen other Asians on the screen was finding the rare (because I was a kid in mountains, far from the rest of the community) movie that had Asians in it. Unfortunately, a lot of those were the “white guy learns martial arts, beats up Asians because ‘Merika” type movies. Which, of course was not TV. They were still the “Asian other” just as in MASH backdrops. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that Sulu always has a special place in my heart. Star Trek helped me get through some bad emotional spaces as a kid, and I think part of what made it welcoming was having POC, especially George Takei ( since I’m JA too, and the other Asian American actors who came later), represented on screen in positive and whole characters, with names instead of “Solider #1, Henchman #4, Ninja #18”.

(via reallifedocumentarian)

(Proper) representation matters.

(via angryasiangirlsunited)

sourcedumal: thedarkchocolatedandy: heirofmedusa: thecometretu...

Tue, 21 May 2013 17:30:52 -0700

sourcedumal:

thedarkchocolatedandy:

heirofmedusa:

thecometreturns:

marrymejasonsegel:

feministdisney:

xelamanrique:

look who’s finally joined!

look who got pushed to the side

#make way for white princesses

Didn’t even have to read te comment to notice..

Right? LMFAO.

Like…wouldn’t it make sense to organize them by the years their films were released?

Because they smooth stuck all the WOC princesses at the end.

I love how they tossed Snow in back there to try and throw us off.

I’m not fucking surprised at all.

Same old bullshit.

And I guarantee you we won’t ever get WOC princesses ever again.

Completely consistent with how this franchise has treated women of color up to this point. Whether it’s limiting how they can be drawn or the merchandise they can be on—more in the disney princess tag on the Racebending tumblr.

"I’m not J.J. Abrams, who’s ultimately responsible. I’m just his Asian puppet. Which, by the way, is..."

Tue, 21 May 2013 16:16:09 -0700

“I’m not J.J. Abrams, who’s ultimately responsible. I’m just his Asian puppet. Which, by the way, is also the title of my autobiography.”

- John Cho (x)

yo my heart is racing at the guts it takes to say something like this knowing full well what could happen. damn!!!!

(via strugglingtobeheard)

WELL GODDAMN!!!!

John Cho has become my favorite fucking actor ever……

(via sourcedumal)

John has been growing bolder and bolder as of late. I’m loving the fuck out of this man as of late!

(via contentkiller)

But can you imagine? This may be the result of all the fuckass racist bullshit he’s had to put up with in the industry and especially probably while filming the movie.

And don’t think he probably ain’t catch that segment of Zoe’s mess saying “color doesn’t exist” and that “people are pink”. I bet he side-eyed the fuck out of that too.

(via heirofmedusa)

John Cho snarks more about Star Trek Into Darkness

So my husband and I were discussing Khan and Abrams's insistence the villain wouldn't be Khan. Considering Del Toro was originally rumored to be cast, but dropped out, I wonder if Abrams cast a white actor as one more attempt at misdirection to "trick" and "surprise" his audience at the reveal that Khan -was- the villain all along. Do you think that might have been partially responsible for the casting?

Tue, 21 May 2013 14:51:20 -0700

Getting a lot of questions similar to this…”Well maybe they did that because of XYZ” or “Maybe they did that because of ABC”….

…nobody is psychic. There are so many different ways to speculate about someone’s intentions behind a casting. There are so many different ways people can lie to other people or —even to themselves—about their motivations when it comes to defending something with a discriminatory impact.

When looking at acts that reinforce systemic discrimination, focus on the impact, not the intent.

Six Actors Who Could Have Played Khan Noonien Singh: Shahrukh...

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:30:46 -0700

Six Actors Who Could Have Played Khan Noonien Singh:

Shahrukh Khan

Sendhil Ramamurthy

Hrithik Roshan

Naveen Andrews

Ajay Devgan

Aamir Khan

"The casting of Cumberbatch was a mistake on the part of the producers. I am not being critical of..."

Sun, 19 May 2013 17:27:28 -0700

“The casting of Cumberbatch was a mistake on the part of the producers. I am not being critical of the actor or his talent, just the casting”

- Star Trek actor Garrett Wang is coolly generating a discussion with his fans on the whitewashing in Star Trek Into Darkness on his twitter page.

Any response to saying since Benicio Del Toro dropped the Khan role, casting was pressed for time and they had to go with Cumberbatch? (I'm wary of that, but curious about your response to such a thing.)

Sun, 19 May 2013 12:28:34 -0700

It smells. Nobody forced Abrams to go with Cumberbatch. Abrams has worked with South Asian actors before. There are scores of famous South Asian actors who could have been cast for this role (big box office money in India, too.) Perhaps if Abrams has tried to cast South Asian actors in the first place, he wouldn’t have even had this time crunch.

It is ridiculous to blame Del Toro for the role being whitewashed. Abrams has always had a choice. For all we know, Del Toro dropped the role because he felt it wouldn’t be right for him to play a South Asian character.

Think Progress’s article on women in film: The Number Of...

Sat, 18 May 2013 23:18:11 -0700

Think Progress’s article on women in film: The Number Of Women In Top-Grossing Movies Hits Five-Year Low. What Are Women For In Hollywood?

Women are eye-candy, particularly if they’re young. 31.6 percent of the 4,475 characters with speaking parts who appeared in the 100 highest-grossing movies in 2012 who appeared in “sexualized attire.” 56.6 percent of characters aged 13-20 appeared on-screen in such clothing, as did 39.9 percent of characters aged 21 to 39, and that number fell to 16.4 percent for characters aged 40-64. It’s no surprise that Hollywood has a particularly distasteful attitude towards middle-aged women—as Vulture revealed in a startling analysis, leading men tend to get older, but their female love interests stay in a similar age range, shutting middle-aged actresses out of a huge range of parts where they’d be paired against men their own ages. But it is actually remarkable that teenaged characters are actually portrayed more sexually than characters aged 21-39, who might be expected to have more sex and sexual autonomy.

Read the full article at ThinkProgress

i think the thing with microaggressions

Sat, 18 May 2013 18:45:42 -0700

biyuti:

is that they are like water

slowly and inexorably

eroding

your confidence

sense of self

you

ikenbot: Star Trek: Into Whiteness If there’s one thing that...

Sat, 18 May 2013 17:30:38 -0700

ikenbot:

Star Trek: Into Whiteness

If there’s one thing that most fans of Star Trek will agree on, it’s the fact that Gene Roddenberry’s vision for the show — and, more optimistically, for human society — was predicated on the idea that all life is valuable, and that the worth of a person should not be judged by their appearance. Much of this was done through the old sci-fi trope of using aliens to stand in for oppressed groups, but Star Trek didn’t rely on the metaphor; it had characters who were part of the ensemble, important and beloved members of the Enterprise crew, who were people of colour. It had background characters who were people of colour. And, here and there, it had anti-heroes and villains who were people of colour … one of whom, Khan Noonian Singh, became well-nigh iconic.

Image 1: “Who is your favorite villain?” ; Actor John Cho (Lt Sulu) answers.

Image 2: TOS Khan looking at a watercolor of himself. Yes, he’s wearing a dastar (Sikh turban)

Image 3: Cumberbatch and Montalbán (as Khan)

And who is now being played by white actor Benedict Cumberbatch in the new JJ Abrams reboot movie, Star Trek: Into Darkness.

We’re all cynical and jaded enough to know the standard dismissal when it comes to matters of media representation: Paramount Pictures and most film studios are not interested in diversity or visibility, they only care about the bottom dollar. Star Trek as a franchise is too much of a juggernaut to affect with boycotts. There are too many people who love it, who love those characters and that world, and will go to see the movie. And for some of these people, this devotion to the idea of a future where even South and East Asian men get to pilot a starship and love swashbuckling, where Black women make Lieutenant on the Enterprise and actually get the boy, will be trivialized and eroded and whitewashed when the most formidable and complex Star Trek baddie becomes a white man named Khan.

It wasn’t perfect in the 60s when Ricardo Montalbán was cast to play Khan (a character explicitly described in the episode script of Space Seed as being Sikh, from the Northern regions of India). But considering all of the barriers to representation that Roddenberry faced from the television networks, having a brown-skinned man play a brown character was a hard-won victory. It’s disappointing and demoralizing that with the commercial power of Star Trek in his hands, JJ Abrams chose not to honour the original spirit of the show, or the symbolic heft of the Khan character, but to wield the whitewash brush for … what? The hopes that casting Benedict Cumberbatch would draw in a few more box office returns? It’s doubly disappointing when you consider that Abrams was a creator of the television show Lost, which had so many well-rounded and beloved characters of colour in it.

Add to this the secrecy prior to release around Cumberbatch’s role in the film, and what seems like a casting move that would typically be defended by cries of “best actor for the job, not racism” becomes something more cunning, more malicious. Yes, the obfuscation creates intrigue around and interest in the role, but it also prevents advocacy groups like Racebending.com from building campaigns to protest the whitewashing. This happened with the character of the Mandarin in Iron Man 3, as well as ‘Miranda Tate’ in The Dark Knight Rises, who ended up being Talia al Ghul but played by French actress Marion Cotillard. This practice is well in effect in Hollywood; and after the negative press that was generated by angry anti-oppression activists and fans when Paramount had The Last Airbender in the works, studios are wising up. They don’t want their racist practices to be called out, pointed at, and exposed before their movies are released — Airbender proved that these protests create enough bad feeling to affect their bottom line.

So the studio has now found a way to keep it secret and underhanded. Racebending.com was there for most of the production of The Last Airbender, and were even able to correspond with Paramount Pictures about it. This time, for Star Trek: Into Darkness, their hiding and opaque practices has managed to silence media watchdogs until the movie’s premiere.

As I said, this racist whitewashing of the character of Khan won’t affect how much money this Trek movie makes. And I’m happy that the franchise is popular, still popular enough to warrant not only a big-budget reboot with fantastic actors but also a sequel with that cast. I’m happy that actors I enjoy like Zoë Saldaña and John Cho are playing characters who mean so much to me, and that they, in respect for the groundbreaking contributions by Nichelle Nichols and George Takei in these roles, have paid homage to that past.

But all of that will be marred by having my own skin edited out, rendered worthless and silent and invisible when a South Asian man is portrayed by Benedict Cumberbatch up on that screen. In the original Trek, Khan, with his brown skin, was an Übermensch, intellectually and physically perfect, possessed of such charisma and drive that despite his efforts to gain control of the Enterprise, Captain Kirk (and many of the other officers) felt admiration for him.

And that’s why the role has been taken away from actors of colour and given to a white man. Racebending.com has always pointed out that villains are generally played by people with darker skin, and that’s true … unless the villain is one with intelligence, depth, complexity. One who garners sympathy from the audience, or if not sympathy, then — as from Kirk — grudging admiration. What this new Trek movie tells us, what JJ Abrams is telling us, is that no brown-skinned man can accomplish all that. That only by having Khan played by a white actor can the audience engage with and feel for him, believe that he’s smart and capable and a match for our Enterprise crew.

What an enormous and horribly ironic step backwards. For Star Trek, for media representation, and for the vision of a future where we have transcended systemic, racist erasure.

(via RaceBending)

kieradoe: indiancrownaffair: eat-lay-grub: indiancrownaffair: ...

Sat, 18 May 2013 16:15:31 -0700

kieradoe:

indiancrownaffair:

eat-lay-grub:

indiancrownaffair:

thirstrani:

“you’re khan? are you sure? you look like a baiganbharta cucumberraita to me” - mohini

BAINGANBHARTHA CUCUMBERRAITA IS OFFICIALLY A THING

SABASH

also adding more khans

Aamir Khan would’ve been great as Khan, seriously.

agreed

all I can say is JJ Abrams really lost out with this casting

Man… no disrespect to the rest of the wonderful Khans up there, but I would’ve been here forever if Aamir was cast, to be quite honest. -sigh-

Reflections on Opening Night Action: A Primer on Microaggressions

Fri, 17 May 2013 18:45:29 -0700

bustingbuntyberman:

Over the past few weeks, I have joined with a growing number of Queer South Asian, Asian, Pacific Islander activists, artists, and organizers in protesting the violent transphobia and cultural appropriation and misrepresentation in the new Off-Broadway musical, Bunty Berman Presents. (For a detailed critique of the several problematic components of the musical, see my earlier review)

On Thursday night, I and several other activists gathered outside the Acorn Theatre at Theater Row in Manhattan to hand out informational pamphlets and provide audience members with some context for the musical’s message. We made the choice for our direct action to be a positivity-filled action. We didn’t chant or attack people. We were there to give people information and engage with audience members. While we weren’t expecting an overly receptive crowd, but the amount of hostility and negativity we received in the forms of numerous micro-aggressions really shocked me. Below are a compilation of various microaggressions we experienced:

Read More

that1guydannyb: Chicago theatres celebrate Asian American...

Thu, 16 May 2013 17:30:44 -0700

that1guydannyb:

Chicago theatres celebrate Asian American Heritage Month with all Asian cast of CLOSER by Patrick Marber.

Victory Gardens Resident Theaters Rasaka Theatre and Bailiwick Chicago in cooperation with The League of Chicago Theatres presents Flip The Script, an all Asian American staged reading of Closer by Patrick Marber at Victory Gardens Theater’s Richard Christensen Theater on Monday, May 13, 2013 at 7:30 PM. Flip the Script is an effort to stage a reading of an established play (traditionally cast as predominantly Caucasian) performed by actors of color, and may grow to become a larger series. This event strives to broaden perspectives by showcasing talent that represents the multicultural world we live in. Info/reservations here.