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Asian American media activism: past, present, and digital futures

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Asian American media activism: past, present, and digital futures

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ASIAN AMERICAN MEDIA ACTIVISM:

PAST, PRESENT, AND DIGITAL FUTURES

by

Lori Kido Lopez

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

August 2012

Copyright 2012 Lori Kido Lopez

ii

To Jason,
and the joy of our shared dream

iii

Acknowledgements

I have been lucky to have had many wonderful friends and advisors over the years
who have supported me throughout the process of completing my dissertation. To my
chair, Sarah Banet-Weiser, thank you for always challenging me and forcing me to make
this project bigger and better. Thanks also to my committee members Henry Jenkins and
Viet Nguyen, who provided much insightful commentary that helped shape the direction of
my work. To Jane Iwamura and Konrad Ng, your belief in my project has been unflagging,
and I will always consider you part of my extended dissertation committee. Thanks to all of
the activists whose heroic work inspired this journey from the start, and who allowed me
to tell their stories: Alex Nogales, Alice Lee, Amy Uyematsu, Anna Xie, Bill Imada, Buck
Wong, Eddie Wong, Evelyn Yoshimura, Darianne Nabor, Guy Aoki, Jeff Mio, Jon Yokogawa,
Karen Narasaki, Kevin Vu, Lorraine Sammy, Marilyn Tokuda, Marissa Lee, Michael Le,
Navin Narayanan, Nita Song, Phil Lee, Phil Yu, and Telly Wong. To my smart, beautiful
partners in crime: Allie Noyes, Beth Boser, and Laurel Felt, for standing beside me and
reminding me that academia is best enjoyed with laughter and wine. Finally, I would like to
thank my parents Sharlene and Doug for always supporting me and for being my proudest
fans. And of course Jason, without whose love, strength, and wisdom I could not be the
person I am today, and who reminds me daily what is most important in life.

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Table of Contents

Dedication ii

Acknowledgements iii

Abstract vi

Introduction: The Role of Asian American Media Activism 1
The Contradiction of Asian American Citizenship 7
Situating Asian American Media Representation 12
The Roots of Asian American Media Activism 17
Expanding Definitions of Activism 23
Research Process 28
Structure of the Dissertation 34

Chapter One: MANAA and the Limits of Traditional Media Advocacy 37
History of Media Activism 39
The Asian American Battle for Representation 44
The Birth of MANAA 48
Focusing on Stereotype Analysis 55
Fighting for Citizenship through Assimilation 60
Neglecting New Media 69

Chapter Two: Leveraging Media Policy for Representational Change 75
Censoring Film 78
Regulating the Airwaves 81
Forming the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition 86
The Plight of the Asian American Show 97
The Ratings Game and Asians on Cable TV 99
Comcast/NBC Universal Merger 104
Asian American Media in the Digital Age 108

Chapter Three: Social Change through the Asian American Market 115
Consumer Culture and Citizenship 120
Defining the Asian American Consumer 127
The Rise of Asian American Advertising Agencies 129
The Politics of Accurate Research 136
Advocacy and Activism Through Advertising 139
Increasing the Market for Film 145

Chapter Four: Asian Americans Celebrities and Participatory 152
Culture Online
Asian Americans and the Internet 157
The Reach of YouTube Celebrities 160
NigaHiga, Wong Fu, and Kollaboration 166
v

Mobilizing Asian American Fans 170
Fan-Activists and The Last Airbender Controversy 181
Using Participatory Culture for Action 185

Conclusion: The Real Politics of Online Media 197

Bibliography 203

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Abstract
Asian American media activists have worked for decades to promote a greater
diversity of roles for Asian Americans and a greater number of Asian Americans both
behind and in front of the camera. In this dissertation I investigate this complicated
interplay between activists and media producers, particularly within the context of
practices that have contributed to these impacts but that might not so readily be identified
as activism, such as the creations of Asian American online videographers and bloggers,
and the work of advertising agencies in Asian American communities. Given that such
efforts rely on the premise that the media representations teach us what it means to be a
citizen and who counts as a citizen, on a broader level this investigation helps us to better
understand how Asian American citizenship in its many different forms has been imagined
and enacted. The relationship between Asian American activists and the media industry is
importantly connected to the idea of the citizen-consumer, or powerful groups of
consumers who articulate their market value as a means for impacting societal change.
Although scholars within Asian American Studies have traditionally been hesitant about
theorizing consumer culture as a site for constituting Asian American subjecthood, this
investigation of media activism offers a new perspective on the relationship between
marketing, consumer culture, and political action within Asian American communities.
Moreover, by exploring this kind of activism through the specific lens of Asian American
cultural citizenship, I argue that transnational identity formations have altogether altered
the way we should theorize Asian American media activism.

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Introduction
The Role of Asian American Media Activism

In fall 2010, NBC premiered a new workplace comedy called “Outsourced.” The
show, which focused on a white American who moves to India to run a call center, was
groundbreaking on many fronts. First, no network TV show had featured a majority Asian
cast since Margaret Cho’s ill-fated sitcom “All American Girl” in 1994. Further,
“Outsourced” did more than feature minority talent on screen—of the 17 credited writers,
four were Indian American. Although this represents only a small percentage of the writing
talent for the show, NBC had hired only eight Asian Pacific Islander writers for their entire
2009-2010 season, so the increase in minority talent reflected a somewhat significant
change. Needless to say, responses to the show were mixed. NBC pre-screened the pilot
with Asian American and South Asian media activists, who praised the show for being
warm and funny. They believed that it brought a desperately needed relatability to the
accented voices on the other end of the telephone and the other side of the world. They
also had words of advice, including a suggestion to be careful not to make the white
protagonist the only star and perhaps to include an Indian American storyline as well. But
when the show premiered, Asian American bloggers and online reporters were not so
generous. In online conversations the show was accused of promoting xenophobia and
racism, and one reporter wrote that the show “managed to singlehandedly piss off every
Indian who made the mistake of thinking that in the 21st century, television may slowly be
phasing out the stereotypes” (Sinha-Roy, 2010).
The creation of a show like “Outsourced” and the subsequent responses to it are
indicative of some of the changes in the role that Asians have come to play in both the
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media and American society. These include everything from the influx of South Asians and
other Asian immigrants in the years following the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965,
to the growth of U.S.-run call centers in India, to the global economic crisis and its impact
on American labor, to the contemporary struggles in gaining legal citizenship in a climate of
increasing anti-immigrant hostility. Indeed, in a famously risk-averse industry like
network television, the fact that media executives wanted to take a gamble on a cast of non-
white actors playing non-Americans—and in particular, a set of non-Americans whose role
in the show was to have taken jobs from Americans—is a move that reflects a media
landscape irrevocably altered by globalization and responsive to changing perceptions of
both Asian and American citizenship.
The show “Outsourced” stands in contrast to a long history of Asian Americans
being excluded from leading roles in mainstream fare such as network sitcoms, as they are
rarely given the chance to tell their own stories. Asian actors have most often been
relegated to humorous side characters and are rarely shown with families, love interests,
or well-developed back stories. This invisibility of a minority population within the
mainstream media and other sites of commercial culture is not insignificant. As cultural
theorists have long argued, popular culture as it is perpetuated through entertainment
media provides a language for articulating our social and political identities. For racialized
bodies, as distinct from the white norm, the limited number of representations serves to fix
a particular image within the public imagination and restrict possibilities—both
aesthetically within the world of imagery and within society, where racism has clearly
material consequences. These images are also critical in the formation of national
identities and cultural notions of citizenship, as the erasure non-white bodies from the
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media can lead to assumptions of exclusion from our imagined nation as well. Indeed, one
of the primary impacts of the way that Asian Americans have been represented is to shore
up institutionalized racism—reproducing structures of dominance as if Asian Americans
are categorically different, and in fact inferior, to other Americans.
Realizing these linkages, Asian American media activists have worked for decades to
promote a greater diversity of roles for Asian Americans and a greater number of Asian
Americans both behind and in front of the camera. The complicated relationship between
this kind of activist work and its interactions with media practices has yet to be untangled
and assessed, despite an abundance of scholarship on the images themselves. Scholars
ranging from the fields of cinema and film studies, ethnic studies, American studies, and
communication have explored the ways in which images have an impact on audiences.
Some notable works with regard to the representation of minorities in the media include
Herman Gray’s theorization of Black representation in television (Gray, 1995), Isabel
Molina Guzman’s exploration of the presence of Latina bodies in popular media (Molina-
Guzman, 2011), and Celine Parrenas Shimizu’s assessment of Asian American women in
pornography (Shimizu, 2007), to name a scant few. Yet if these works outline the way that
images are being constructed and interpreted, there remains a question of what can be
done if the images in question or the norms of production are problematic and need to be
changed. In the complicated interplay between media industries and the public, there are
important mediators whose task is to intervene into this process, and their work deserves
attention.
The example of “Outsourced” gives us one clue to the influence of Asian American
media activists. Although testing a new show before audiences is a standard practice in the
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industry, the fact that the show was specifically tested before Asian American activists is
important to note. The relationship between the industry and the community can generally
be seen as a negotiated struggle, with image producers calling upon activists to voice their
approval so that they can make a claim to strive for diversity. For activists, this means
developing complicated relationships with media gatekeepers, as they regularly participate
in behind-the-scenes conversations with producers and executives. This scenario
illustrates a momentous shift from decades past, when Asian Americans had little to no
presence inside the industry, and yet fits perfectly within a reading of popular texts as
representative of competing discourses rather than monolithic ideologies.
In the following chapters, I investigate this complicated interplay between activists
and media producers, particularly within the context of other Asian American media
projects that have contributed to these impacts but that might not so readily be identified
as activism, such as the creations of Asian American online videographers and bloggers,
and the work of advertising agencies in Asian American communities. Although there have
been many textual analyses of Asian American images and the patterns they fall into, there
has yet to be an exploration of those who have organized to structurally impact these
images with tactics ranging from outreach to media industries, to the formation of online
communities, to educational programming and media production within the Asian
American community, to protests and boycotts. I explore the way that each of these modes
of activism and sites for action can become a threshold environment for transforming
everyday media consumers and citizens into activists, and how those transformations
might take place. Given that such efforts rely on the premise that the media
representations teach us what it means to be a citizen and who counts as a citizen, on a
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broader level this investigation helps us to better understand how Asian American
citizenship in its many different forms has been imagined and enacted. The relationship
between Asian American activists and the media industry is importantly connected to the
idea of the citizen-consumer, or powerful groups of consumers who articulate their market
value as a means for impacting societal change. Although scholars within Asian American
Studies have traditionally been hesitant about theorizing consumer culture as a site for
constituting Asian American subjecthood, this investigation of media activism offers a new
perspective on the relationship between marketing, consumer culture, and political action
within Asian American communities. Moreover, by exploring this kind of activism through
the specific lens of Asian American cultural citizenship, we are forced to consider the
impact of transnational identity formations on the world of media activism.
It is important to add here that although I am using the terms “Asian” and “Asian
American,” I want to recognize the fluid, dynamic, and constructed nature of race and racial
identities. These terms refer to an incredibly broad collection of individuals and
communities, including those from varied national, cultural, linguistic, and geographic
backgrounds. In my work I consider the ways that media representations work to create
and uphold these kinds of racial identities as well as how race is constructed and
challenged through the work of activists and community organizations. For instance, both
the mainstream media and activist organizations traditionally include Chinese, Japanese,
Filipino, Vietnamese, and Korean amongst their membership and representatives. This
leaves out a variety of those who undoubtedly belong within the categorizations of Asian
and Asian American, including South Asians in places like India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan; the
indigenous people of Hawaii and other Pacific Islands; ethnic groups such as the Hmong;
6

and countless others. My contention is that in studying the media and community
organizations that organize under this identity, we can learn more about how Asian
American identities operate and are upheld in our society, and the different ways that
minority communities understand, interpret, and are affected by media images.
The primary research question that my dissertation explores is how the work of
Asian American media activists can be theorized and understood in relation to discourses
of citizenship and consumer culture. But in order to begin to answer this question, we
must first examine who can be considered an Asian American media activist and what kind
of work these activists undertake. Who are the individuals and organizations who
participate in Asian American media activism, and what is their history? How have their
battles impacted the representation of Asian Americans in the media, and what work
remains to be done? I also investigate the connection between media activists and other
community activists who have joined together in the wake of the Asian American
Movement, expanding the idea of activism to include modes of creating change that extend
beyond traditional activities such as protests and boycotts. How does the policing of media
industries and other corporations connect to the work of Asian American media activism?
How do groups like advertising agencies, Asian American celebrities, and fan collectives
participate in media activism, and how do they voice their unique conceptions of
citizenship? How do discourses of consumerism and specifically media consumption play
an important role in these activist efforts? Through an investigation of these different
groups, we can begin to see the different ways that Asian American media activists create,
rely upon, and challenge notions of citizenship and the relationship between the consumer
and media representation.
7

The Contradiction of Asian American Citizenship
At its most basic level, citizenship can be seen as the set of laws and procedures that
prohibit or grant an individual legal status to reside within the nation-state. Someone who
is a member of the citizenry is assumed to possess a basic set of rights and protections,
such as the right to free speech and protection from unjust imprisonment. But there is also
a more complicated and less formal way of viewing citizenship that is not reliant on
paperwork, but on the fulfillment of certain cultural practices. For instance, citizens can be
seen as those who participate in their civic duties and contribute to the upkeep of the
national body by voting or volunteering their services, speaking up about important issues,
or helping to police the community against wrongdoing. A citizen can also be culturally
demarcated by their feelings of identification or belonging with the nation and its people.
Given that citizenship encompasses such a broad range of concepts, it follows that the
processes of granting and denying citizenship are similarly complicated. For each of these
ways of viewing citizenship, there are particular identities and practices that can activate
and that can close down membership and participation.
Although at its core the logic of citizenship assumes that those who possess
citizenship ought to be treated equally, the reality is that many groups of people are
systematically denied the privileges that citizenship is assumed to accord, and many groups
constantly struggle for an equal share in what we might call “first-class citizenship.” In his
work on minority groups in Southeast Asia and Latinos in the US, Renato Rosaldo points
out that “when one enjoys the status of belonging to the national community, this belonging
can easily be taken for granted and trivialized; but when such belonging is denied, its
absence can prove devastating” (Rosaldo, 2003, p. 2). One such arena in which these
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different degrees of citizenship can be seen at work is within cultural practices. In one
sense, we can think of a citizen is as someone whose cultural practices match those of the
dominant culture. This means that people can be excluded from citizenship for having
nonnormative cultural practices, such as ethnic traditions, sexual preferences, or religious
practices. Indeed, many individuals whose cultural practices do not align with hegemonic
norms—gays and lesbians, Muslims, or atheists, for example—are made to feel as though
they do not belong and that their lifestyle is somehow antithetical to the ideals of the
nation. It is within our everyday lives that cultural citizenship becomes evidenced—by the
way that one is treated and respected, whether one is allowed to speak up for themselves
and their community, or whether one can participate in the public sphere.
The concept of citizenship also has a fraught relationship with race in the United
States that stretches back to the Civil War and debates over whether or not African
Americans were part of the American citizenry. Although founding documents such as the
Declaration of Independence explicitly connected the concept of citizenship to notions of
equality and freedom, in reality there were many restrictions and exclusions about who
counted as a citizen. For blacks, women, and other minorities, the fight for the rights of
American citizenship—including representation, the ability to vote, to possess land, and to
live under the protection of the government—were long and arduous. Even the 14
th

amendment to the Constitution, which set forth a basic definition for citizenship that
included birthright citizenship and therefore granted citizenship to African Americans, was
not meant to apply to Native Americans or other non-white immigrants. In fact, Asians
were intentionally marked as ineligible for citizenship.
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Asian Americans have had a complicated relationship with the concept of
citizenship in both legal and cultural terms, as they have consistently been seen as “alien”
throughout their history in the U.S. Mae Ngai (2004) argues that Asian Americans are
uniquely marked by the category of the “alien citizen”—Asians who were born in the US
held birthright legal citizenship, and yet all Asians were nevertheless seen “as racially
unassimilable and hence ineligible to naturalized citizenship” (p. 170). She specifically
examines the treatment of Japanese Americans and Chinese Americans during World War
II and the Cold War as moments when alien citizenship is produced, and continues on until
1965 when immigration restrictions are lifted and perceptions of Asian Americans begin to
shift. Lisa Lowe (1996) further examines the notion of Asian American citizenship in
Immigrant Acts, arguing that “the American citizen has been defined over against the Asian
immigrant, legally, economically, culturally” (p. 4), and these anxieties of the US nation-
state become represented in images of Asians as “exotic, barbaric, and alien…a ‘yellow
peril’ threatening to displace white European immigrants” (p. 4). She examines the various
exclusion acts and naturalization laws that have worked to regulate the national body of
the US within an Orientalist discourse that consistently marks Asian Americans as the
enemy despite their role as a necessary labor force in maintaining the US economy.
Although many Asian Americans are native-born citizens or have become citizens through
naturalization, Lowe argues that their conditions within the nation-state are so marked by
these laws and policies that the idea of citizenship for Asian Americans remains a perpetual
contradiction.
Leti Volpp (2001) further explores the contradiction of Asian American citizenship
by distinguishing between the different facets of citizenship—legal status, rights, political
10

activity, and identity. These discourses each possess unique histories and relationships to
one another, but she finds that “race cuts against the promise of each of these citizenship
discourses” (p. 58). Whether from legal prohibitions to citizenship, the realities of white
privilege, assumptions about a lack of political activity on the part of Asian Americans, or
blatant assumptions of disloyalty on the part of immigrant communities, the result is that
“there is discomfort associated with [Asian Americans] being conceptualized as political
subjects whose activity constitutes the American nation” (p. 58). As a result of these
complicated histories and relationships to citizenship, many Asian Americans have given
up the aspiration of ever becoming American citizens. The US Citizenship and Immigration
Services launched a campaign in May 2011 to try to convince the nearly 8 million Green
Card holders in areas like Los Angeles and New York that they will benefit from becoming
citizens (Indo Asian News Service, 2011). Announcements for the campaign were
specifically targeted to Chinese and Vietnamese communities, as well as Hispanic
communities, in the hopes that Asian immigrants would make the decision to become
citizens.
Yet as evidenced by the need for such an advertising campaign, gaining legal or
cultural citizenship in the US is not always a high priority for Asian Americans. Although it
is clear that Asian Americans and other immigrant groups have been unfairly denied many
of the tenets of legal citizenship in the U.S. and have consistently been viewed as alien in a
number of regards, it is also the case that many Asian Americans can and do lay claim to
cultural citizenship in the Asian country of their heritage. The possession of competing
cultural citizenships serves to undercut the assumed primacy of so-called American
citizenship, offering other routes to participation and acceptance. If cultural citizenship
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includes participating in the normative cultural practices of a nation and therefore allowing
for feelings of belonging and inclusion, then we must consider that many Asians moving
through diasporic spaces can possess this kind of citizenship in places other than the U.S.
Media creation and media consumption offer particularly important moments of enacting
this kind of citizenship. In examples such as Indian Americans keeping up with the latest
Bollywood movies, Korean Americans participating in the Korean Wave of interest in K-pop
music, Vietnamese Americans partnering with film producers overseas to produce
Vietnamese comedies, or Japanese Americans trading and translating anime and manga,
many different communities of Asian Americans are laying claim to different cultural
identities and feelings of belonging through the transnational flow of media between Asia
and the U.S. Indeed, the fight for legal citizenship within American needs to be viewed as
only one desired result of the way that Asian Americans are interacting with media texts
and representations, leaving open the possibility for other interpretations and desires for
citizenship that exceed these limited perspectives.
This contemporary movement toward transnational cultural citizenship through
media stands in contrast to the history of the representation of Asian Americans in
mainstream U.S. media. It cannot be denied that the cultural and legal limitations Asian
Americans have faced are both reflected within and constituted by media representations.
That is, media representations of Asian Americans reflect assumptions about who Asian
Americans are and how they do or do not participate within the national body, effectively
constructing our basis for ideas of citizenship. Such images also function to uphold and
reinforce these ideologies so that alternative perspectives are continually marginalized and
silenced. As Stuart Hall and others argue in Policing the Crisis (1978), racial inequalities are
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the product of specific sociohistorical conjunctures that are upheld and affirmed through
the media. In their discussion of the phenomenon of mugging in Britain during the 1970s,
they argue that the image of an increase in black crime perpetuated in the media is
reflective of larger fears and threats to society. As they claim, “when the state finds itself in
crisis, it tries to police the crisis by containing any disruptive elements, vilifying dissenters,
mobilizing ideological constructions such as ‘the nation’ and ‘the people’ in order to reclaim
a legitimacy…” (p. 339). This crisis of hegemony and fear for the ideological stability of the
nation can also be seen as threatened with the influx of Asians into the United States—a
crisis that is similarly understood, managed, and contained within the sphere of media
representation. Through assessing the historical image of Asian Americans in the media,
we can begin to understand how discourses of citizenship and national identity are
maintained through images of “the other,” and begin to map the articulation of ideologies
about Asian American citizenship onto their historical context and the way that Asian
Americans are represented in the media.

Situating Asian American Media Representation
From the earliest depictions in film and television, images of Asians in American
entertainment media have fallen into a set of rigidly bounded categories. All storylines
having to do with Asians were seemingly pulled from the same limited stable of
characters—the perpetual foreigner, the model minority, the martial arts villain, and the
sex object. As Helen Zia (2000) states, “characters in the mass media often blend the wildly
diverse traits from distinct Asian cultures into an unimaginative, one-size-fits-all Asian
stereotype…Asian goulash…” (p. 117). In an examination of the industry-wide practices
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that maintain such limited and demeaning representation, Jun Xing (1998) finds three
primary trends: role segregation, or the idea that Asians cannot take roles designated for
white actors even though white actors regularly take on roles for characters of all races;
role stratification, since Asian Americans are primarily relegated to the role of background
or side characters instead of starring roles; and role delimitation, where roles for Asian
Americans are numerically limited with relation to the actual proportion of Asians in the
US. Each of these practices helps to maintain what Edward Said calls an Orientalist vision
of the world, wherein “the East” can never resemble or fully blend in with “the West” and
our mediated vision of the world confirms the superiority of whiteness (Said, 1979). For
Said, ideas about “the Orient” are not based on reality, but are upheld through a flexible
discourse that always maintains the domination and power of the West. Jane Iwamura
uses the term “virtual Orientalism” to mark the fact that in our postcolonial world, it is
images and reproductions of the Orient that sustain Orientalist stereotypes. She argues
that these images are repeated until “it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the difference
between what is real and what is not…to the point that these images become the real for us”
(Iwamura, 2011, p. 8).
When examining the image of Asians in the media, it is important to connect
analyses to the context of the United States’ complicated and fluid relationship with Asia.
The very first Asian immigrants to the US were the thousands of Chinese who were hired to
work on the transcontinental railroad. But the rapid influx of Chinese immigrants soon
brought fears that their cheap labor would negatively impact the jobs of European settlers.
This fear can be seen materialized in fictional characters like Fu Manchu, the Chinese villain
who appeared in countless British and American movies, radio programs, books, graphic
14

novels, and television shows from 1915 to 1960. Fu Manchu embodied the mysterious,
inscrutable, mystical power of the East, always plotting a new way to take over the world.
Later foreign policies brought new stereotypes—antagonisms between the US and Japan
during World War II contributed to a fear of Japanese Americans and their subsequent
internment, colonization in the Pacific lead to the idea of Filipino Americans as our “little
brown brothers,” and the threat of the red menace contributed to the construction of
domestic Asians as the “model minority.” As Robert Lee (1999) lays out, “six images—the
pollutant, the coolie, the deviant, the yellow peril, the model minority, and the gook—
portray the Oriental as an alien body and a threat to the American national family” (p. 8).
Although each of these individual tropes has a distinct history and set of characteristics,
under Lee’s logic we can see that the underlying current of the alien threat links them all.
Even the docile image of the model minority—the racial group who has somehow
managed to “make it,” providing a model for Blacks and Latinos to aspire to—is based on
the damaging and racist idea that Asians are intrinsically different from whites. The model
Asian American is passive and non-confrontational, possesses an aptitude for math and
science, and is the picture of discipline and obedience. Frank Chin and Jeffery Paul Chan
(1972) tie the yellow peril together with the model minority in two succinct images: “For
Fu Manchu and the Yellow Peril, there is Charlie Chan and his Number One Son. The
unacceptable model is unacceptable because he cannot be controlled by whites. The
acceptable model is acceptable because he is tractable. There is racist hate and racist love”
(Chin & Chan, 1972). We can see that even these so-called “positive” attributes can be
connected to racism and condemnation against Asians and Asian Americans. If we further
examine the character of Charlie Chan and his son, we can begin to see how this racist
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conceptualization operates. The genial detective and his overachieving son filmically
represent the Asian American who enjoys a certain degree of educational and financial
success. But his ability to do so relies on his cultural inassimilability to American society.
In each of his film portrayals, Chan’s signature is his fortune cookie-like set of aphorisms,
often spoken in improper English, marking him as a strange, funny foreigner even as he
helps society by solving crime. Further, within this idea of the model minority is both an
antagonism toward other minorities and a reification of the dominance of whiteness. The
idea that all Asians could be connected by one set of cultural traits also negates the rich
diversity and heterogeneity of Asian and Asian American traditions. In these stories of the
model minority, neoliberal parables where any hardship can be overcome through
personal responsibility and self-sufficiency are replicated; if Asians can do it, so can all of
the other disenfranchised minorities in the US. Even with this injunctive to other
minorities, however, the model minority still retains its element of yellow peril—as Asians
become more successful in the US, there is always the age-old fear of Asian dominance and
impending takeover.
Gina Marchetti (1993) examines the impact of Asians as the alien threat and its
surrounding mythology in the way that interracial relationships have been imagined within
cinema. She argues that the yellow peril is not necessarily about an actual fear that Asian
immigrants posed any sort of threat. Rather, narratives of Asian men raping white women
and Asian women being saved by a white man serve to “create a mythic image of Asia that
empower the West and rationalizes Euroamerican authority over the Asian other.
Romance and sexuality provide the metaphoric justification for this dominance” (p. 6).
Although Marchetti’s examination is predominantly historical, covering films produced
16

between 1915 and 1985, we see that there is an endless bounty of such images propagated
in pornography and contemporary imagery. These filmic representations of racialized
sexual relationships wherein tropes of male dominance serving to reify racial dominance
remind us of the constructed nature of gender as well as race. In her exploration of Asian
American female sexuality on screen, Celine Perrenas-Shimizu (2007) finds unavoidable
patterns of Asian women as “perversely and pathologically sexual in Western cinema” (p.
21)—a reality that has forced her, as an Asian American woman, to painfully recreate and
negotiate her own sexuality and pleasure in conversation with such pervasive imagery.
Shimizu’s work reminds us that these “limited definitions of sexuality, race, and
representation…are crucibles for the creative formations of subjectivity” (p. 6). Not only do
these images impact the way that the mainstream viewing public comes to imagine Asian
America, but Asian Americans themselves must come to terms with the impact of such
imagery on their own sense of self. In many ways, conveying the primary narrative
through the bodies of white actors while engaging with extraneous people of color and
their culture can be seen as a liberal strategy of containment. As Gabriel describes in
“Whitewash: Racialized Politics and the Media,” stories that include some aspects of
minority cultures serve to “re-define whiteness in more inclusive terms, i.e. as both
interested in, and tolerant of, difference as long as it is kept within limits and always
understood through the white gaze” (1998: 62). In these kinds of depictions, we are
allowed to see people of color, but only through their position of inferiority to the white
actors.
Beyond the problems that plague Asian American actors in entertainment media,
the practice of yellowface has also served to marginalize and erase Asian American stories.
17

There are countless examples of white actors taking on Asian characters such as Fu
Manchu, Charlie Chan, or famously Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Similar to the
adoption of “blackface,” the white actors participate in “yellowface” by wearing prosthetics
over their eyes, buck teeth, and garish costumes, often speaking in an exaggerated accent.
Unfortunately, such practices have not disappeared; white actor David Carradine beat out
Bruce Lee for the lead role of a Shaolin monk in the 1970s television show “Kung Fu,” and
Rob Schneider played an offensively stereotypical Asian nerd in I Now Pronounce you Chuck
and Larry in 2007. In his work on appropriating blackness, Johnson notes that such
moments of cultural usurpation are a common practice on the part of white Americans:
In many instances, whites exoticize and/or fetishize blackness, what bell hooks calls
"eating the other." Thus, when white-identified subjects perform "black"
signifiers—normative or otherwise—the effect is always already entangled in the
discourse of otherness; the historical weight of white skin privilege necessarily
engenders a tense relationship with its Others. (2003: 4)
According to Johnson, these practices do more harm than simply erasing bodies of color
from the media, but further damage the relationship between “the Other” and the
privileged individuals who can so easily stand in for them.

The Roots of Asian American Media Activism
As these problems with the representation of Asian Americans continued,
community members began to respond. Those who were closest to the problem were
among the first to take a stand—Asian American actors and industry professionals. Despite
the fact that “Asian Americans—perhaps stereotypically—were perceived by the film
18

industry as one of the least threatening” (Lyons, 1992, p. 88) minority groups, in 1973 they
had already begun to speak out with regard to their portrayal in the movies. First, a
Chinese American actor complained about the use of the word “chink” in the film Charlie
Varrick and got the line removed. Then a group of Asian American artists protested the
film Lost Horizons for its use of yellowface, which was the standard practice within the
industry of white actors wearing makeup to take on the role of Asian characters. In
subsequent protests, they also fought against the stereotyped performances of characters
like Fu Manchu and Charlie Chan, demanding that Asian American roles be cast with Asian
actors who spoke proper English and did not live in crime-infested Chinatowns. In 1985,
the stereotype-ridden film Year of the Dragon inspired the first nationally organized
protest by a number of different Asian American organizations. The numerous protests
and rallies around the film’s premiere culminated in a $100 million class action lawsuit
against the film’s producers at MGM/UA. They responded to the lawsuit with a disclaimer
that ran before the film stating that “this film does not intend to demean or to ignore the
many positive features of Asian Americans…” (Lyons, 1996, p. 289).
The moderate success of the protests against Year of the Dragon and the community
organizing that took place laid the groundwork for the founding of the Media Action
Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) in 1991, who remain the only watchdog group
dedicated to responding to Asian American representations today. Although members
initially joined together to protest news stories during the 50
th
anniversary of the bombing
of Pearl Harbor that revisited old antagonisms between the Japanese and the US, most of
their advocacy is now focused on entertainment media. As part of the Asian Pacific
American Media Coalition (APAMC) and the larger umbrella organization of the Multi-
19

Ethnic Media Coalition (which also includes the National Latino Media Council and
American Indians in film and Television), MANAA also participates in the annual awarding
of Diversity Report Cards to the top four television networks. Since 1999 the coalition has
met to analyze statistics on how many Asian Americans are hired by the major networks,
and this information is then discussed during individual meetings with the networks, as
well as publicized in press releases. But as we can see in their mission of “advocating
balanced, sensitive and positive portrayals of Asian Americans,” their work largely consists
of calling attention to the same antagonisms seen in previous decades—offensive
stereotypes employed to the exclusion of any other kinds of roles for Asian Americans, the
use of yellowface to allow white actors to play Asian characters, and the exclusion of Asian
Americans from starring roles.
It is not a coincidence that Asian Americans began organizing to protest racist media
imagery in the early 1970s, as it was during this time period that a collective and
politicized Asian American identity began to form. Prior to 1969, Asian immigrants tended
to hold firmly to their distinct ethnic identities, and “disidentified” with any Asian ethnic
community that was being targeted politically or economically. Yen Le Espiritu (1992)
notes that this was the case for Japanese during the Chinese Exclusion and then Chinese
during the Japanese American internment (p. 20). But this act of disidentification and its
dampening impact on intraethnic coalitions stood in contrast to the fact that non-Asians
still ascribed a collective identity to all Americans of Asian descent. Indeed, individuals of
all Asian backgrounds were being treated in the same discriminatory ways—they had been
allowed to immigrate because of the labor power that they could provide, but suffered from
hostilities and violence as well as discriminatory anti-immigration laws.
20

As Asian immigrant families continued to settle in the U.S. throughout the 20
th

century, ties to their home countries began to dissipate or transform. A sense of shared
history and circumstance within the U.S. context began to come together under the title of
“Asian American.” This group identification was propelled by a burgeoning social
movement that united many who aligned themselves with Third World organizations
fighting against poverty, war, and racism. As William Wei (1993) describes, “The
Movement gave them an unprecedented means of developing a pan-Asian consciousness,
changing them from Asian ethnics into Asian Americans” (p. 45). Despite the potential
flaws inherent in the term “Asian American” and the vast community it could potentially
blanket, activists mobilizing under its collective umbrella began to organize and mobilize as
activists. Asian immigrants had begun building alliances with labor organizers and other
racialized communities, and their organizational infrastructure allowed them a space to
develop their own consciousness and awareness of their common experiences. Daryl
Maeda (2009) argues that “Asian American identity contested Asian nationalism, liberal
assimilationism, and narrow ethnic and class-based radicalism by embracing multiethnic,
interracial, and transnational solidarity” (p. 39). In his examination of important moments
such as the Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State College, alliances of
the Red Guard Party with the Black Panthers, and protests against the Vietnam War, Maeda
finds that Asian American identity is intimately connected to both anti-racism and anti-
imperialism. Activists within the Asian American Movement in the 1960s linked the
struggles of working-class communities to Third World struggles, and in the process,
sought to mobilize Asian Americans across the country in their efforts to challenge a
number of norms, including “systems of rank and privilege, structures of hierarchy and
21

bureaucracy, forms of exploitation and inequality, and notions of selfishness and
individualism” (Omatsu, 2010, p. 304).
Although the forging of a collective Asian American identity in the 1970s was
imbued with this kind of radical critique, the meaning of Asian American activism has
shifted in recent decades. As Glenn Omatsu (2010) argues, the growth of the Asian
American neoconservative class and the influx of Asian American professionals and
business executives who have all taken up the banner of Asian American identity have
pushed the politics of the movement away from its radical counterhegemonic roots.
Instead of seeking to overthrow the structures of dominance that lead to oppression and
inequalities, Asian American community groups who survived the economic turbulence of
the 1980s and use the term now are often conspicuously lacking in the populations who
first came together as activists—youth without college degrees, immigrant workers, gang
members, the elderly, and the poor. As a result, the meaning of Asian American activism
and the direction of Asian American grassroots organizing has shifted as well.
Given the transformation of the communities using the term “Asian American” and
the wide diversity of communities who might fall under its indiscriminate umbrella, it is
important to consider the political significance of continuing to use such a term. Gayatri
Spivak’s theories are helpful in understanding the significance of the strategic use of
essentialism, where a master concept is strategically deployed for political action. Spivak
acknowledges that there is a risk inherent in deploying essentialism in this way, as the
strategy can serve to solidify an identity as if there were, indeed, a unifying essence to all
those encompassed within it. But she hopes that “the strategic use of an essence as a
mobilizing slogan or masterword like woman or worker or the name of a nation is, ideally,
22

self-conscious for all mobilized” (Spivak, 1993, p. 3). In bringing together different Asian
communities, the term “Asian American” was constructed to strategically destabilize the
existing racial order and empower individuals to speak out on behalf of their marginalized
community. In accordance with Spivak’s hopes for only temporary alliances, Kent Ono
(1995) has called for “re-signing” of the term “Asian American.” In efforts to either resign
or re-signify the term, we could rethink what purpose the term still served, and how it
could still be used in an era when the incommensurability of the diverse community to
which it refers had not been addressed (Ono, 1995). As a broad category, the term “Asian
American” has always served to exclude many of its members, and in looking at
contemporary formations, has been dominated by only a minority of the community’s most
privileged participants. As Ono argues, now more than ever, the term needs to be
reconsidered so that it can come to terms with changing social conditions without
sacrificing dissent from within its ranks. It is my hope that media activism as I define it
within this project, can provide a site for such a re-signing, helping us to better understand
the diversity of those encompassed by the term Asian American, as well as some of the
practices—including participation in consumer culture, explicitly activist or political
actions, and media production—that enable us to widen and redefine its boundaries.
Like those within the Asian American Movement, individuals laboring to identify
and dismantle stereotypes within the media have relied on panethnic identity formations
and the collective notion that their diverse and disparate voices are stronger when united.
As evidenced by the fact that many Asian American media activists have been active
professional members of media industries—actors, filmmakers, and crew—it is clear that
their model of activism falls under this more conservative, contemporary model. Rather
23

than seeking to wholly remake the film industry or challenge the system of media
structures that uphold racial hierarchies and inequalities, media activists are simply
fighting for access to greater participation and a recognized voice in the process that
already exists. In this way, media activists take on the collective political identity that
developed out of the Asian American Movement from the 1960s but do not share its radical
critiques. Indeed, throughout my investigation of Asian American media activism, I seek to
outline the limitations of what I consider to be a more conservative, assimilationist Asian
American politics while nevertheless identifying political potential in a mode of activism
that relies on invoking both consumer culture and cultural citizenship as vehicles for social
change.

Expanding Definitions of Activism
Through this project I am interested in refining the definition of activism so that the
term can more accurately be deployed in conversations about who is participating in
creating change in the media. Academics and practitioners have long debated what should
count as activism, given that activism-related activities span a broad range from those that
are designed to bring about awareness or act as symbolic gestures, to governmental or
legislative action, to activities that endeavor to actually bring about structural or
institutional change. All activism begins with the identification of a social problem based
on inequality, injustice, or harm to society. After identifying this core problem, activists
engage in any number of activities designed to bring about social change. Such a project
can be focused on just one facet of a social problem and may be limited in scope, but
centers on a cause or set of causes with the goal of achieving societal change. Some
24

examples of social causes that activists have organized around include AIDS, animal rights,
environmental, gay and lesbian, feminism, and labor issues. The Asian American media
activism described thus far includes tactics such as protesting problematic representations
and organizing meetings with media producers to convey concerns. Yet there are many
other sites for activism that individuals face in their everyday lives, outside of such formal
avenues. Martin, Hanson and Fontaine (2007) identify women whom they would consider
activists because of their embeddedness and their actions within the community that are
focused on fostering positive social change. In their search for a more feminist theory of
activism, they contend that activism importantly includes:
everyday actions by individuals that foster new social networks or power dynamics.
In this sense, we see activism as a precursor to political action that transforms a
community, develops a formal organization, or extends in scale to reach social
networks beyond the initial embededdness of the instigating activist. (Martin,
Hanson, & Fontaine, 2007, p. 79).
In this definition we can see that activism can consist of ordinary everyday activities. Some
of these women do not consider themselves to be part of any explicitly political movement,
and yet they have each identified social problems—including juvenile delinquency, sexual
harassment, and lack of entrepreneurial training for low-income people—and taken
intentional action to create change that spreads to their entire social network.
For this project, I define activism as intentional participation in a political act
designed to remedy a social injustice. Of course, the definition of what counts as political is
not clear cut, and within cultural studies there is a tendency to see nearly all social activity
as being imbued with political meaning. But at the very least this definition helps to clarify
25

that activism is intentional, meaning that activists must be aware of the intended
consequences of their actions with regard to a cause. Since I am interested in expanding
our vision of who is involved in media activism, we can then look for what I have defined as
the necessary elements of activism—the identification of a social problem, and the
intentional action taken to remedy this problem. From this brief history, we can see that
the activists who organized to improve the representation of Asian Americans in the media
have identified the social problem as the second-class treatment of Asian Americans within
American society, where Asian Americans are still routinely subject to discrimination and
violence. This problem is attributed to a combination of the fact that images of Asian
Americans fall into problematic and limiting categories in our visual imagination, and that
Asian Americans are often distanced from the ability to control, direct, or even participate
in telling their own stories. Thus, media activists seek to remedy the social problem of the
oppression of Asian Americans by changing media representations. But I am also
interested in examining other dimensions of media representation that can be improved,
and the agents who are working to change them. In the chapters that follow, I look at Asian
Americans in a variety of roles—members of corporate advisory councils, cable channel
owners, owners of advertising agencies, YouTube videographers, bloggers, and others. For
each case, we can consider the theory of change that is being utilized and the kinds of
actions that are being taken in the hopes of leading to a better future for Asian Americans.
Although not all of the cases I examine fall under the category of activism as it is defined
here, I am still interested in the individuals and organizations who are contributing to the
same vision of social change through media representation that is so clearly defined by
traditional activist groups. Through mapping the intersections of these different agents
26

and activities we can better understand what it takes to bring about change in the media,
and thus in society.
When talking about organizations and individuals who are intentionally changing
the image of Asian Americans in the media, there is an obvious category of activists who I
do not want to leave out—artists and creators from within the independent Asian
American filmmaking world. From documentary filmmakers like Renee Tajima Pena and
Tad Nakamura to narrative filmmakers like Wayne Wang and Mira Nair, there is a rich
history and tradition within the Asian American community of creative expression through
moving images. These films are supported and screened at a wide array of Asian American
film festivals across the country, with the two largest located in San Francisco and Los
Angeles and smaller festivals held yearly in New York, Washington D.C., San Diego, Austin,
Eugene, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Houston, and other locations. Despite the
importance of these films and their impact on the way that the community is portrayed and
represented, there is a well-developed body of research on this particular aspect of Asian
American media activism. An extensive anthology of essays written by artists within the
independent Asian Pacific American media arts movement from 1970 to 1990, edited by
the UCLA Asian American Studies Center and Visual Communications, describes the work
that these artists were undertaking in their own words (Leong, 1991). Screening Asian
Americans (2002), edited by Peter X Feng, tackles the same subject matter from a more
distinctly academic perspective, with essays on topics such as the history of Asian
American Media Arts Centers to specific investigations of Filipino/a American, Chinese
American and Korean American women’s cinema. The most contemporary examination of
Asian American film and video, Glen Mimura’s Ghostlife of Third Cinema: Asian American
27

Film and Video (2009), additionally considers the perspective of international and queer
cinema in its exploration of Asian American independent media.
While Asian American artists and filmmakers are incredibly important in their
contribution to the way that Asian American bodies and identities have been inscribed, in
many ways their work remains sequestered within the niche market of Asian American
film festivals and Asian American Studies classrooms, seen only by patrons of these events
and those who belong to the Asian American independent cinema scene. It is rare for even
the most popular, award-winning films screened at Asian American film festivals to find
mainstream distribution, meaning that everyday filmgoing audiences almost never have
the opportunity to see such work playing at their local theater or even being available for
rental. Thus it is not necessarily the size of the audience that matters, but the accessibility
of these materials, since much of the work of Asian American independent filmmakers is
only available to privileged audiences in specific geographic locations for a small amount of
time. In this dissertation I investigate the organizations and individuals who set their
sights on improving mainstream media and other forms of media that are widely available
and accessible to general audiences. These activists hope to take part in a broader social
justice movement that extends beyond Asian American audiences to impact the way that
Asian Americans are perceived and treated.
In order to do so, I extend the scope of my research beyond traditional media
advocacy organizations to include a number of less formal organizations and communities
that have worked to educate, inspire, and impact Asian American citizens about this
important issue of representation. Beyond fan communities and advertising agencies,
there are also many important online communities that focus on communicating Asian
28

American stories. YouTube stars like KevJumba and NigaHiga have skyrocketed to web-
based fame and fortune on a massive scale. Although their work is not always explicitly
political or Asian American-themed, their significant online presence nonetheless provides
a forum for considering and critiquing the visibility of Asian Americans in the media.
Bloggers like Angry Asian Man and blogging communities like You Offend Me You Offend
My Family similarly offer online communities where viewers and participants might be
drawn into the virtual arena in search of news or entertainment, but then become engaged
in discussions of what can be done to impact the representation of Asian Americans in
mainstream media. In my dissertation I examine each of these sites to see how the image
of Asian Americans in the media can be changed, who is participating in the conversation
about doing so, and how the future of Asian American media representation can be
imagined by taking these different kinds of activists into consideration.

Research Process
Research for my dissertation began in the fall of 2008, when I began attending the
general meetings for the Media Action Network for Asian Americans. I knew that I was
interested in Asian American activism, and after moving to Los Angeles to begin my
doctoral program, it seemed the best way to acquaint myself with the local activist
communities was to jump right in. Although I identified myself as a graduate student who
studied the representation of Asian Americans in the media, it was clear that the
boundaries between participant and observer would be indelibly blurred in my
relationships with the members of the organization. Indeed, I became a regular participant
within the business of the organization and eventually was asked to serve on their board of
29

directors, which I did for almost two years. When I returned home from my meetings I
would jot down field notes and transcribe the observations I had scrawled in the margins
of my meeting agendas, but I would also take on the regular work of the organization—
editing drafts of letters to movie studios, creating and updating the organization’s blog, and
offering my opinions and suggestions whenever they were called for.
Of course, this dissertation is not wholly ethnographic; for some of the organizations
profiled in this study, such as the advertising agencies and policy centers, I did not spend
significant time in the field. For those chapters, my analysis relies on a combination of
interviews, archival research, attendance at special events, and brief visits to their offices.
But it was my volunteer work with MANAA that is at the heart of this study, as it was
through this work that I became well-acquainted with the other subjects of my study and
was able to fully immerse myself in the world of Asian American media activism. Leaders
from the fledgling organization Racebending.com started attending MANAA meetings in the
fall of 2009 to present their case for protesting the casting of The Last Airbender. After
meeting and working with them, I began closely following their online communities,
communicating regularly with the leaders online. Members of MANAA’s leadership were
also among the select few who were invited to meet with the television networks as part of
the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition and engage with the policy work that overlaps
with that of the Asian American Justice Center. In the fall of 2010, I was invited to attend
the network meetings because of my status as a board member. Although I conducted
formal interviews with members of each of these organizations and told them that I was
studying organizations like theirs for my dissertation, it is safe to say that they did not see
me as an objective or neutral participant in their cause—they understood that I was an
30

activist alongside them, even if I was occasionally presenting my thoughts about their work
at academic conferences or publishing papers about them in academic journals.
Within ethnographic work, there has been much debate and discussion about the
advantages of being an “insider” versus an “outsider” to the community one is studying. If
the researcher belongs to the community he or she studies, there is often a fear of the
researcher “going native,” as anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski has called it. By this, he
means the act of becoming so immersed in the lives of your subjects that you lose the
capacity for analysis and insight. As Fuller states, the dreaded consequences of going
native include “the apparent loss of validity, integrity, criticality, necessary distance,
formality, and ultimately, reputation” (Fuller, 1999). Moreover, Labaree argues that being
an insider creates a number of ethical dilemmas that can over-complicate the research
project, such as how to enter a field one already belongs to, how to position oneself in order
to maintain trust with respondents, and how to negotiate friendship with informants all
while balancing a research agenda (Labaree, 2002).
While these can be valid concerns in many situations, I would argue that here, my
research is strengthened by the access that was afforded to me by embracing my identity as
both activist and scholar. Although I would not argue that being an insider necessarily
offered me a position of “epistemological privilege,” as is often the case with feminist
research or research on other disempowered groups (Griffith, 1998), there are still many
ways in which this study could not have been written if I had stayed on the outside of these
organizations. In particular, it would have been limiting to only be able to observe what
went on during public meetings or during scheduled interviews. As a full participant in the
lifeblood of these organizations, I was able to gain a much more detailed portrait of the way
31

that the organizations functioned—including the strategic planning that occurred in instant
messages online, the daily emails shared between organizational leaders, the exasperations
that were revealed in the late hours after a meeting had ended, and the epic struggles and
heartaches that would never have been exposed to anyone but an insider. On a practical
level, the network meetings with the APAMC are extremely exclusive and the information
discussed within them is proprietary. Because I was a board member of MANAA, I was
reluctantly allowed limited access to these rare meetings, and while participating in them I
took on the role of activist, not scholar. Although I could not report any of the actual
content of the meetings, my participation within them helped me to more deeply
understand the kind of work that was being conducted there.
It is also important to consider how my own identity impacted my research. Within
qualitative studies there is a growing importance placed on the identity of the researcher,
given that subjects might position their own stories differently depending on who is asking
and listening. In Elizabeth Chin’s ethnography of black children and consumer culture, she
openly admits that her own racial ambiguity as a helped her to remain somewhat outside
the black/white boundaries that were so central to her participants’ communities (Chin E. ,
2001). Moreover, her status as a researcher often helped others to see her as a “teacher”
figure, rather than what might otherwise be seen as a threatening agent of the state or an
outsider completely lacking in authority. In many ways, my own identity tends to occupy a
liminal position that says more about the one who is identifying me than any static truth
about my position as insider or outsider. When asked about my own racial background, my
response is that I am mixed race, Japanese and white. For some, this means that I belong
wholly to the Asian American community. But there are many others who do not ask about
32

my background, and it is possible that from my physical appearance I pass as white—or
even Latina, given my Hispanic last name. For yet others, my racial identity is simply a
question mark. Moreover, I would argue that student researchers occupy a liminal space
between youth and adulthood. For instance, some subjects ask to read my finished papers
because they are curious about my power to describe and assess their efforts, but some
seemed to interpret my requests for interviews as being part of a “class project” or simply
“a homework assignment.”
This liminality bleeds over into discussions of my identity as a scholar and activist. I
was often asked to take on leadership positions within the various organizations I
interacted with, but they were also interested in using my academic work as evidence of
their own legitimacy and significance. In these examples it becomes clear that there can be
important overlaps between activists and scholars, even within the same work—
scholarship can be seen as activist, and the work of scholars can be seen to contribute to
activist efforts. Within the fields of cultural studies, Asian American Studies, and even
media studies, the position of siding with marginalized communities and attempting to use
scholarly works to have a positive impact on their realities is a heartily championed
position. As George Lipsitz describes, “scholar activists have been disseminating the
situated knowledge of communities in struggle for many years,” (Lipsitz, 2008, p. 90),
including individuals from fair housing movements, prison reform movements,
environmental justice movements, AIDS research, international anti-violence coalitions,
labor organizers, and queer theorists. In each of these projects, academics have been able
to call attention to the work of these activists in ways that create new kinds of knowledge
and lead to social mobilization. Cultural studies theorists have also long implored scholars
33

to impact the power structures that they study. As Jennifer Slack and Laurie Anne Whitt
argue, “cultural theorists, consciously and emphatically, aim not merely to describe or
explain contemporary cultural and social practices, but to change them, and more
pointedly, to transform existing structures of power” (Slack & Whitt, 1992, p. 572). In my
own work I hope to embrace the challenge of creating work that “does something,” rather
than simply standing on the sidelines describing, even if that makes my own position as a
researcher more complicated and demands more careful introspection.
Ethnography is the work of the researcher “being there,” spending significant
amounts of time immersed in the social world, observing and absorbing everyday cultures.
It is immersive and messy, involving critical examinations, but also bodily engagements.
Although ethnography has traditionally been considered the keystone methodology of
anthropologists seeking to understand foreign peoples and cultures, researchers from
cultural studies and countless other fields have now taken up the practice of ethnography
as a way of understanding their own cultures of everyday life. By undertaking an
ethnography of these organizations as a participant who was not afraid to take a stand and
get dirty in the trenches alongside the other participants, I hope to be in a position to reveal
insights about the realities of media activism that are accurate to those who are most
closely involved, but also useful to those who are still in the field trying to make a
difference. If this dissertation seeks to make sense of the struggles in which these
individuals have been engaged by applying the framework of consumer culture and
citizenship to Asian American media activism, I hope that the knowledge produced in doing
so will assist future media activists in going about their work in a way that continues to
positively contribute to justice and equality for Asian American communities.
34

Structure of the Dissertation
This dissertation is structured around specific sites of media activism that employ
different strategies and tactics, and also that have different relationships to the term
“activism.” I move from groups that are most easily identifiable as media activism groups,
such as the Media Action Network for Asian Americans and the Asian Pacific American
Media Coalition, to groups that take distinctly untraditional positions in the fight for
representation. In doing so, I trace a trajectory toward experimental and possibly
unconventional means of changing the way that Asian Americans are represented, while
also better understanding the history and roots of Asian American media activism.
Chapter One presents a cultural history of media activism in Asian American
communities, beginning with actors in Los Angeles in the 1960s. This history provides the
context for examining the work of the Media Action Network for Asian Americans
(MANAA), who are one of the most longstanding contemporary groups who engage in
media activism. In examining their recent campaigns and organizational structure, we can
begin to take a deeper look at the traditional tactics that media activists use. As with all
Asian American politics and rhetoric, media activists are faced with a changing landscape
both in terms of who constitutes Asian America, what citizenship entails, and what kind of
representation they are most interested in impacting. This chapter explores some of the
contradictions between the theoretical foundations of Asian American Studies and the
work of MANAA in the hopes of opening up a space for considering new tactics for
contributing to change in the realm of Asian American media imagery. In laying out some
critiques of the way that traditional advocacy organizations operate, we can see that there
35

is a call to investigate other potential sites of media activism and rethink the possibilities
for impacting change on a systemic level.
Chapter Two examines media advocacy at the level of policy. Through interviews
with individuals at the Asian American Justice Center and the Asian Pacific American Media
Coalition (APAMC), we can begin to see how media policy can affect the way that Asian
Americans are represented—both visually and politically. This chapter examines the
relationship of the APAMC with the television networks, the rise and fall of Asian American
cable channels, the merger of Comcast and NBC Universal in 2010, and recent changes to
the way that the Nielson Company measures minority viewers. Through each of these
policy battles we can begin to see the way that the Asian American consumer-citizen has a
voice in speaking up for the policies that shape how the community is represented, and the
different ways that Asian Americans have worked to voice their concerns to these powerful
bodies.
Chapter Three begins to more explicitly explore the connection between the project
of Asian American media advocacy organization and consumer movements. By looking at
the relationship between consumer culture and social change, we can see some of the ways
that Asian American media activists use the language of consumption to further their goals.
This chapter focuses on the work of companies like IW Group and other members of
the Asian American Advertising Federation (3AF). Asian American media activists help to
strategically create the idea of the Asian American consumer and then use that idea to
impact social change. This chapter asks who is the consumer that is created, and how such
a constructions might rely on exclusive or discriminatory ideas like the “model minority”
that need complicating and updating.
36

Chapter Four further explores the advocacy and activism that are occurring online
by focusing on the virtual communities at Racebending.com, blogs like Angry Asian Man
and 8Asians,com, organizations like You Offend Me You Offend My Family, and YouTube
artists like KevJumba and Wong Fu Productions. In these online communities we can see
that moving organizing online instantly expands beyond the localities and limitations of
West-coast civil rights types of organizations. Moreover, such online venues offer new
opportunities for rethinking the discourse of celebrity with a new cast of popular Asian
American celebrities online who are in a position to use their fame in service of
representational change and even overtly political activism.
In looking at these different sites for media activism, we can see that there are many
different communities who are working toward improving the image of Asian Americans in
the media beyond traditional activist organizations and their limited set of strategies and
tactics. Some of these communities have yet to fully embrace their connection to activist
movements and ideologies, but together they are laying the groundwork for a dramatic
shift in both the way that Asian American identity is conceived and visualized.

37

Chapter One
MANAA and the Limits of Traditional Media Advocacy

In the summer of 2009, a board member for the Media Action Network for Asians
Americans (MANAA) was watching television and happened to catch a special promotion
on CBS’s show Big Brother. Guest star Jeremy Piven made an appearance so that he could
reveal the trailer for his latest film, The Goods: Live Hard Sell Hard, in which he plays a
silver-tongued car salesman. The trailer focused on his rallying speech, where he yells,
“Don’t even get me started about Pearl Harbor…Never again! Never again!” Together the
other salesmen join in with the chant, including Asian American actor Ken Jeong, who looks
nervous. Suddenly an older white man who had been eyeing him yells, “Get him!” and the
men begin beating Jeong.
Incensed by the portrayal of anti-Asian sentiment and the racially motivated
violence that was played for laughs, members of MANAA including founding president Guy
Aoki immediately sprang into action. Aoki contacted VPs at CBS, communicating the
group’s concern about the inclusion of such an offensive scene in the trailer. The VP of
Diversity responded by saying that they did not condone the content of the trailer, but they
would not apologize. MANAA’s members then began contacting the film’s producers at
Paramount Pictures, various local media outlets, and fellow Asian American activists. Soon
the issue was being reported on KTLA’s blog, while colleagues at IW Group, the Japanese
American Citizens League (JACL), and the American Jewish Committee of New York echoed
their support of MANAA. Hearing nothing from Paramount Studios, they began to plan a
protest outside Paramount’s gates. The next day, over 40 members of various Asian
American community groups marched in front of Paramount, chanting and waving signs.
38

That afternoon, the president of Paramount, emailed the president of JACL. In his letter, he
apologized to the Asian American community for the “hurtful, racially disparaging
language” and stated that they “genuinely regret the use of this language in the film.”
Further, they discontinued use of the trailer that focused on that scene, and offered to meet
with Asian American leaders to discuss the issue in person.
In many ways, this moment of Asian American media activism can be seen as an
instructive model—through community partnerships, quick decisive action, and a clear
argument, they were able to communicate their message to both the studio and the news
media and garner a positive response. But this story is not an isolated incident; on the
contrary, this mode of media activism with regard to Asian American portrayals has existed
in nearly the exact same form for decades. By examining the history of Asian American
organizing around the issue of media representation, we can begin to better understand
what is meant by media activism and the tactics that are traditionally encompassed by that
term. In this chapter I specifically focus on MANAA in order to discuss some of the
strengths and weaknesses of these traditional tactics and strategies. Given that MANAA is
currently the only national watchdog organization dedicated to monitoring the portrayals
of Asian Americans and that they attempt to speak for the larger Asian American
community when they meet with media producers and news outlets, their work is
important to evaluate. In examining MANAA and their work, we can see many ways in
which the advocacy strategies traditionally used by such groups can be seen as successful.
But there are also many ways in which they are in conflict with the realities of the
contemporary media and sociopolitical landscape, particularly with regard to the way that
racial formations intersect with mediated representations. Some of these conflicts include
39

focusing on stereotype analysis rather than allowing for interpretive variation, focusing on
national boundaries to the exclusion of transnational notions of the citizen, and focusing on
broadcast media rather than expanding to include new media. In historicizing the efforts of
Asian American media activists today and identifying these moments of contradiction and
rupture within the ways that advocacy organizations deploy their efforts, we can open up a
space for considering new tactics in the fight for change in the realm of Asian American
media imagery.

History of Media Activism
As Katherine Montgomery argues, “all forms of mass media have been targets of
advocacy groups at one time or another…” (Montgomery, 1989, p. 5), including everything
from books and newspapers to comic books and movies. As early as 1915, the NAACP was
already creating headlines with a national boycott of Birth of a Nation for its overtly racist
themes, including the glorification of the Ku Klux Klan and depictions of African Americans
as violent and primitive. Although the silent film, directed by D. W. Griffith, has been long
heralded in the history of cinema for its ground-breaking techniques and epic budget,
members of the NAACP were incensed by its messages. They petitioned the National Board
of Censorship as well as hundreds of individual theaters, seeking to prohibit screenings of
the film and for the most offensive scenes to be excised. They argued that the film was a
threat to public safety because of its potential to incite racial violence. When their efforts
for censorship failed, they launched a nationwide protest that included picketing outside
movie theaters, writing scathing reviews in dozens of newspapers, and even buying tickets
so that they could throw eggs at the screen (Lang, 1994). The NCAAP was not the first
40

organization to complain about the derogatory effects of filmic racism, but their well-
publicized efforts were important in conveying the power of media activists to the public.
This kind of protest, designed to curtail the impact of such a film upon mass audiences and
decrease the earning power of the movie for the filmmakers and studio can clearly be seen
as a form of censorship. Indeed, one of the first efforts on the part of the NAACP included
bringing their concerns to the National Board of Censorship, which was an industry
organization founded in 1909 that reviewed films and made recommendations for cuts or
the suppression of inflammatory material. The battle over Birth of a Nation instigated
conversation across the country about the balance between state censorship and the
freedom of speech for filmmakers to create and distribute their products freely. One
consequence of the desire to impact society through film was that censorship boards at
both the state and national level often represented an alliance between conservatives and
progressives. Conservative activists were interested in banning the portrayal of topics like
abortion, birth control, and other sacrilegious activities, while progressives “welcomed
moving pictures as a means to develop a new cultural consciousness, mediate between
social classes, and thereby blunt social conflict” (Rosenbloom, From Regulation to
Censorship: Film and Political Culture in New York in the Early Twentieth Century, 2004, p.
373). The National Board of Censorship included diverse membership from organizations
such as the Women’s Municipal League, the Children’s Aid Society, the Charity Organization
Society, and the Federation of Churches (Grieveson, 2004). Both sides agreed that if films
could serve to uplift society, then portrayals of obscenity, “crime-for crime’s sake,” suicide,
violence against women, drunkenness, and the ridicule of the insane needed to be curtailed
(Rosenbloom, 1987).
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Despite this alliance, progressive reformers have simultaneously struggled with the
reality that any kind of censorship can be seen as infringing upon the right of free speech.
This includes the efforts of industry censors and their voluntary suggestions, government
censors, and the censorious demands of citizen groups. Charles Lyons argues that although
the work of pressure groups like the NAACP can rightfully be categorized as censorious,
their work should be seen as different because of the part it can play in upholding the idea
of a healthy democracy. As he states, it is better to risk pressure groups becoming
censorious than “in any way to limit groups’ right to ‘peaceably gather’ and protest” (Lyons,
1997, p. 1).
Although specific films have caused much uproar over the past century, there has
been no bigger media target for pressure groups than television. Ever since the beginning
of television, there have been advocacy groups pressuring television broadcasters to
change their programming according to their community’s needs. Groups made up of
interested citizens have brought together women, gays and lesbians, racial minorities, the
disabled, and other disenfranchised communities who seek inclusion and more nuanced
representation. Other pressure groups hoping to impact television have included religious
groups seeking plotlines that accord with their morals and values, anti-violence groups
hoping to curtail the graphic depictions of violence on television, and educational groups
hoping to push their particular messages. Montgomery cites television as such a central
target due to its enormous popularity and prominent role in the homes of Americans as the
medium through which news, entertainment, and information about the world were
conveyed.
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Interestingly, racially motivated groups were amongst the very first to protest
television’s imagery as well. When “Amos ‘n’ Andy” premiered in 1951 on CBS, the NAACP
immediately organized to call for its cancellation. The television show was based on a
radio program of the same name that followed a handful of African American men through
comedic foibles. The radio show, performed by its two white creators Freeman Goshen and
Charles Correll, aired from 1928 – 1960 and was wildly popular with white Americans.
Nevertheless, in 1931, an African American editor at the Pittsburgh Courier began
criticizing the show, both for its offensive portrayals of the African American characters
and for the fact that its white creators were reaping all the financial gain. He called for the
show’s cancellation, collected the signatures of nearly 750,000 African Americans, and
incited a national conversation about the portrayal of African Americans in the media.
When the television show premiered in 1951, it featured an all-black cast for the first time
on network television. But for those familiar with the previous incarnations of the
program, it clearly relied on the same belittling stereotypes—the Uncle Tom, the crook, the
mammy, the buffoon. Further, the NAACP was prepared for the television show’s premiere,
organizing letter-writing campaigns to the show’s sponsors and publicly calling for a
nationwide boycott.
The efficacy of the NAACP’s actions is debatable; the show continued for two
seasons before it was eventually shelved into syndication, where it remained for the next
decade. Montgomery calls this result unsuccessful and remarks that “black activists were
particularly disturbed by their powerlessness in keeping the offensive series off the air”
(Montgomery, 1989, p. 15). Others argue that “the campaign without a doubt affected the
status of the show” (Nelson, 1998, p. 82) and moreover that it caused “blacks to question
43

the image of the race projected by the entertainment industry and even by Afro-American
periodicals” (Shankman, 1978, p. 249). Indeed, in many ways we can think of media
advocacy as an important force in constructing racialized identities. In calling attention to
the patterns of stereotypical portrayals of African Americans in the media, activists are
participating in the act of defining who or what it means to be African American.
Through examining the history of actions taken against media images, a model for
traditional modes of media activism emerges. For any image that is problematic and in
need of attention, there are five possible actions, or sites of action, that a media activism
group can take:
1

1. Contact the creators of the offensive image and lobby for change. This can take the
form of letter-writing campaigns, phone calls, or attempts to organize meetings with
media producers or executives.
2. Educate consumers and encourage them to boycott the media in question.
3. Convince advertisers to pull their advertising money, or use their financial leverage
to make demands such as hiring changes or an increase in diversity.
4. Move the cause to the court of public opinion by using news media to influence
public support for the activists’ position.
5. Threaten legal or governmental intervention or regulation by suing the company, or
by petitioning the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the Equal
Opportunities Commission (EOC), members of Congress, or state elected officials to
look into the issue and take action.

1
Thanks to Karen Narasaki for illuminating these five sites for action.
44

The efficacy of each potential tactic depends on a complex configuration of factors. These
include what kind of image is being protested, what kind of group is initiating the protest,
and the cultural and legal landscape surrounding the production and distribution of the
image, among others. For the option of legal or governmental intervention, the possibilities
have of course been impacted by various media policies over the years, including the legal
power of censorship boards, as well as legislation impacting the authority of the FCC such
as the Fairness Doctrine. Likewise, the viability of convincing advertisers to pull their
support or of an impactful consumer boycott depend on the perceived or real market
strength of the offended parties. Despite the complicated interplay of these moving parts,
this model has proven remarkably stable over the last century in outlining the possible
courses of action for pressure groups as they attempt to use whatever means possible to
create change in the media—and the same has been true for Asian American media
activists.

The Asian American Battle for Representation
When examining the particular history of Asian America media activism, it is
important to begin with the theater. Although dramatic productions before an intimate live
audience are not part of the mass mediated world that contemporary Asian American
media activists hope to impact, many of the first media activists were born within the Asian
American theater. This makes sense when considering the fact that complaints of
stereotypical roles, yellowface, or Asian Americans being held back from leading roles are
not restricted to film and television—each of these forms of representational
discrimination existed on the stage long before they ever made their way to the screen. In
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1969, the Brotherhood of Artists (BOA) was founded as one of the first advocacy groups for
minority actors.
2
Many of BOA’s members were part of East West Players, the oldest Asian
American theatre company in the US, which had started in 1965. Other members were
from Nosotros, an advocacy group for Latino actors. Unsurprisingly, the time period in
which East West Players and the BOA arose coincided with the emergence of Asian
American identities and the notion of a distinctly racialized community.
As mentioned in the introduction, 1969 marked the beginning of the Yellow Power
Movement, when Asians from different ethnic backgrounds began to come together under
a politicized identity in order to combat institutionalized discrimination and oppression.
Part of their work included coming together to create spaces for their community to tell
their stories and promote their own members, and they also began to develop some of the
first advocacy groups. College campuses were a particularly fertile ground for Asian
American activism, with groups like the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) at the
University of California Berkeley and Orientals Concerned at the University of California
Los Angeles. In New York, a group called I Wor Kuen was greatly influenced by the Black
Panther party, while street youth formed groups along the West Coast called Yellow
Brotherhood and Asian American Hardcore. In Esther Kim Lee’s history of Asian American
theatre, she argues that “the actors’ activism resembled the civil rights and the later
women’s rights movements, which emphasized the transformation of personal issues into
political activism through coalitions” (Lee E. K., 2006, p. 25). As Asian Americans began to
recognize and give a name to the everyday injustices they encountered at school, in the

2
All information regarding the Asian American Performing Artists Association and the
Brotherhood of Artists can be found in the personal collection of Sumi Haru, whose
archives include minutes from board meetings, correspondences, and other documents
spanning the history of these organizations.
46

workplace, at their churches, and other public spaces, they realized that uniting under the
banner of this collective identity had the potential to impact change.
The BOA’s statement of purpose reads, “BOA (Brotherhood of Artists) was formed
out of the realization that rich cultural resources which exist in America’s minority
communities continue to be overlooked and ignored.” As a result, they came together to
promote what they believed were more authentic depictions that did not rely on
stereotypes and combat misrepresentations of minority groups. They also encouraged
minority actors to choose careers in the performing arts and related areas. They were
amongst the first individuals to serve as a collective voice for Asian Americans within the
entertainment industry, strategizing as to how to fight for equal employment rights and
opportunities.
Although most of the BOA’s campaigns were focused on the theater, some of their
campaigns also included television and film. For instance, they met with CBS television
about the made-for-TV movie “Anna and the King of Siam” because they were worried
about the recurrent theme that American culture was superior to the inferior and
backwards Thai culture. They also contacted NBC when they heard of plans to make a
Charlie Chan movie starring the white actor Ross Martin, since they felt that white actors
donning “yellowface” was both offensive in its caricature of Asian culture but also
detrimental to Asian actors in taking away opportunities for starring roles. Many of the
actors who got their start in the theater and were part of the BOA later went on to form the
Association of Asian/Pacific American Artists, or AAPAA, as they moved on to more roles in
the mainstream media. Founded in 1976, AAPAA was formally established as “an artistic,
educational organization with an emphasis on promoting interracial cooperation and
47

understanding.” More informally, during one of their board meetings in 1979 they came up
with a list of their goals:
Serve as an advocate group; Work with studios about casting; Create a better image
of Asians; Promote Asian talent; Work closely with community organizations; Show
ourselves in one or two high quality productions; To educate ourselves and to
educate the general public; Get some of our people in decision making positions.
Although they were an advocacy organization, it is important to note that like the BOA, they
were composed entirely of actors and industry professionals. This meant that when they
met with studios to address their concerns about issues like the scarcity of Asian
Americans in their casting and hiring, they were putting their own jobs at risk. In one
meeting they discussed the fact that their organization was “perceived as being anti-
employment because they are against all stereotypes, especially the villainous one and that
was threatening to them as artists because they are called upon to do so much of these
roles.” In order to combat the idea that they were anti-employment and only serving to
critique, they began having yearly awards programs where they honored members of the
industry who promoted positive Asian-Pacific American images. Rather than reward the
actors who were “lucky enough to land these jobs,” they rewarded producers, writers, and
directors who stimulated more jobs for Asian Americans. Despite the threat to their
careers, AAPAA nevertheless continued to contact movie studios with their complaints
about everything from the use of white actors to play Asian roles in films like Blade Runner,
discrimination and racist comments made on set, failure to cast minority actors, anti-Asian
defamation within media, stereotypical portrayals in films like 16 Candles, and the
hypersexualization of Asian women.
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Organizations like AAPAA, BOA, and many others—including Asian Americans for
Fair Media, Asian Pacific American Media Watch, and Media Artists Against
Discrimination—all rose in the late 1960s and 1970s but eventually disbanded. Some of
the groups formed in reaction to specific films as they were released, so they dissolved or
died out when the film had run its course. For others, the groups were too small or
informal to sustain themselves. In 1991, when all of these groups had fallen by the
wayside, yet another group of politicized Asian Americans came together to fill the void in
advocating for better media representation. This time, the impetus for political organizing
centered around the 50
th
anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Los Angeles news
organizations began running stories that revisited old antagonisms between the Japanese
and the US, rehashing false rumors and old prejudices. These stories coincided with the
vandalism of the homes and businesses of several Japanese Americans. This targeting of
the Japanese American community caught the attention of a number of Japanese American
activists who had worked together on the Redress and Reparation Movement from 1988.
They were not actors or industry professionals, just concerned Asian American citizens
who had a history of political activism. This meant that there was no conflict of interest
when they approached media producers with demands to hire more Asian Americans; they
could position themselves as simply community advocates who had no desire for personal
gain. Together they decided to establish the Media Action Network for Asian Americans.

The Birth of MANAA
Since 1992 MANAA’s members have stayed loyal to their mission of “advocating
balanced, sensitive and positive portrayals of Asian Americans,” and most of their advocacy
49

is now focused on entertainment media. The organization is based in Los Angeles and
although they have a somewhat small membership and are entirely run by volunteers, they
remain the only dedicated watchdog organization for Asian American media
representations. Their work reflects a long tradition of Asian American media activism,
and is the product of many generations of Asian American community organizers coming
together to strategize about how to most effectively impact representations. For every
media advocacy group, one of the most critical functions of the group is deciding when to
take action once an image has been brought to their attention. At the most basic level, their
available options are to ignore the image—and perhaps write an email back to the original
complainant—or to respond to the image in some way, usually by reaching out to the
creators of the image. In extreme circumstances where the creators cannot be reached or
refuse to respond positively, MANAA has waged all-out war by organizing rallies, protests,
or boycotts of offensive films and TV shows. It is also possible that the original image is
positive, in which case MANAA can praise the producers. Like AAPAA, MANAA has
produced a series of award shows over the years, designed to reward producers of
exemplary imagery and raise the profile of Asian American actors and industry
professionals.
In general, MANAA chooses how to respond to an image based on four factors—
emotional response, achievability, allocation of resources, and past precedent. In many
cases, images are brought to the group’s attention by a member of the community, but then
the group can decide whether or not they agree with their reading of the image. Since most
people who attend the meetings are Asian American, group consensus on the offensiveness
of the image is often reached by simply asking if anyone is personally offended by the
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image. Emotional responses to the images such as feeling proud, embarrassed, insulted,
angry, amused, or pleased are all seen as valid reasons for the group to ground their
decisions. If the group decides that the image is offensive and should not be ignored, they
begin to consider the achievability of impacting change. There is quite a bit of industry
knowledge within the group, given that some members of MANAA are actors or work on
the administrative side of media companies. Also, those who attend yearly meetings with
the television networks and film studios consider themselves industry insiders from the
close connections and relationships made in those meetings. From this history and
knowledge, the group generally has of sense of the stages of a project when things like
scripts or actors can still be changed, the way that movies are marketed and written about
in the press, and how to target the end product in a way that is most impactful. However,
because of this closeness with certain members of the industry, there is also a strong desire
to take proactive stances, working with the image’s creators, rather than to continually
burn bridges or deliver threats when the media producers make a mistake.
This desire to maintain positive relationships with media producers is a common
attribute of advocacy groups whose main goal is to impact representations in mainstream
media outlets. In Schilt’s investigation of GLAAD, she found that it was “more productive to
employ educational campaigns that provide information for altering future LGBT
representations than to use hostile tactics, such as boycotts, that tend to only effect the
immediate issue at hand” (Schilt, 2003, p. 184). This is based on the belief that defamation
is more commonly the result of ignorance than malice, so cooperative tactics can actually
be productive in preempting future incidents as well. For instance, MANAA had the
opportunity to explain to a filmmaker that making a movie where Chinese people play the
51

enemy threatening to take over the world can be harmful because that image relates to the
systemic notion of “Yellow Peril,” wherein the government actually put policies in place to
subjugate Chinese Americans. In expressing this scenario, the group hoped that there was
a chance that such images would not be recreated in the future. These educational
moments do not always impact the representations in the targeted film, as has been seen
time and time again, but MANAA contributes to a growing discourse about systemic racism
in the media and the way that stereotypes can contribute to anti-Asian sentiment.
Another factor is the amount of resources that can be allocated to the project, which
includes concrete factors like manpower and more intangible resources like time and
effort. One board member stated, “You pick battles that are worth fighting and that you are
able to commit resources to. Pursuing an issue takes people power and follow-up. There
are some issues that we think sound interesting or it would be nice to look further into, but
we just can’t because no one has the time.” The most common methods of protest for the
group are writing a letter or email to the image’s producer, issuing a press release
condemning or praising the image, or trying to set up a meeting with the producers. While
all of these activities take time to complete, they also take writing skills, experience, and
more importantly, willingness and persistence.
MANAA’s model of traditional activism has brought them many successes over the
years, not the least of which includes simply sustaining their momentum for over two
decades. For an all-volunteer organization like MANAA to remain vibrant has demanded
much talent, loyalty, and dedication—most of which can be seen embodied by Guy Aoki,
who was one of the founding presidents of the group and remains one of its most active
board members. Through his long commitment to the issue of Asian American
52

representation, he has cultivated many close connections to those who work in
entertainment media, news media, and other advocacy organizations that can help to get a
campaign off the ground. Further, he is well known for tackling personalities like Sarah
Silverman and Adam Carolla on the air for making jokes that offended Asian Americans.
His fearless and confrontational style is rare amongst his colleagues—particularly those
who are afraid of risking their jobs to speak out—and offer an important site for bringing
discussions of racial politics into the popular media sphere. Silverman had used the word
“chink” in a joke while performing on The Conan O’Brien Show in 2001, and Carolla
included a skit on his radio show in 2006 that mocked the Asian Excellence Awards by
saying that all the presenters said was “ching chong ching chong.” This kind of racist
language—using the word “chink” and joking that all Asian language sounds like “ching
chong”—was exactly MANAA wanted to remove from public discourse. They felt having
white comedians use such language to make Asian Americans the punchline of a joke was
indelibly harmful, and propagated the idea that the use of these derogatory terms was
acceptable in spite of their histories of slander. Although both comedians still maintain
that they disagree with Aoki, his blunt arguments and often humorous critiques clearly left
a lasting impact—Silverman included a subsection in her memoir called “Guy Aoki: Heart in
Right Place, Head Up Wrong Place,” while Carolla frequently agonized about Aoki years
later on his humorous podcasts.
Beyond Aoki’s media appearances and the success of the protest of The Goods: Live
Hard, Sell Hard, MANAA has made numerous successful interventions into the world of
Asian American media representation since its founding. In 1994, MANAA led a nationwide
protest of the film Rising Sun because they feared that its negative portrayals of Japanese as
53

violent and ruthless businesspeople trying to take over the U.S. would lead to a backlash
against Japanese Americans. With protests in New York, San Francisco, Chicago, Seattle
and Los Angeles, MANAA and their collaborators (among them were Nosotros, the Gay and
Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee,
the Japanese American Citizens League, the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations,
and the Women’s Organization Reaching Koreans) counted their success in the impact of
their protest on national media coverage of the film. As Aoki said:
In all the interviews I saw on T.V., all the comments the stars made were in answer
to our accusations…They weren't able to talk about that lightweight stuff; they had
to spend all their time defending the film. So, I think we won the public relations
battle: even though Fox spent millions to publicize Rising Sun and we didn't have a
budget, we controlled the spin on the film.
MANAA has protested a number of films over the years, each time weighing the success of
their actions by the amount of media coverage that their protest draws, or in cases like that
of The Goods, in a positive or conciliatory response by the studio, although this is
admittedly more rare.
These outward displays of disapproval and calls for boycott belie much of the
behind-the-scenes work in which MANAA engages. With regard to The Rising Sun,
members of MANAA contacted the studios on numerous occasions, giving them ample
opportunity to enlist their help in improving the film and potentially avoid the entire
situation. It is the organization’s general policy to always contact the studios and
producers as soon as they hear about a potentially problematic project and try to impact
change from within, and this strategy has often proved effective. In 1997, members of
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MANAA heard that there was to be a remake of the CBS Television’s series “Hawaii Five-O”
and immediately went to work pressuring the network to cast an Asian American in a lead
role. Although CBS had planned to cast a white actor in the role of Nick Irons, who takes
over Five-O, members of MANAA met with CBS President Leslie Moonves to argue that the
show should more accurately reflect the Asian population of Hawaii. After much
conversation, Asian American actor Russell Wong was cast in the lead role, marking the
first time that MANAA was able to proactively affect the racial makeup of a series before
the casting decisions had been completed. Unfortunately, the pilot was not approved by
network executives and the show did not air. But in 2011 when the show was again
rebooted with an entirely new cast, two of the four leads—albeit the two lesser leads—
went to Asian American actors Daniel Dae Kim and Grace Park. These small victories, even
over the course of many years of work, reflect the tremendous impact organizations can
have when they build positive relationships within the studios.
These examples mark only a small fraction of the work that MANAA has
accomplished over the years; as their yearly newsletter highlights, they are frequently
called upon to speak on panels or give interviews to the mass media, and they participate in
a number of educational outreach events at colleges and community festivals each year.
They are also given the opportunity to speak directly to media producers and gatekeepers
in yearly meetings with the top television networks, which I discuss at length in the next
chapter. Despite these successes, it is important for community groups to constantly
evaluate their surroundings and their positioning in order to continue being effective, and
there is always room to grow with regard to finding new ways to educate and impact
55

change. Through my time with MANAA there were a number of areas in which it seemed
that there was room for reassessing and reevaluating their strategies.

Focusing on Stereotype Analysis
On MANAA’s website they state that the group “was formed…to address the
negative stereotypes long perpetuated by the media which detrimentally affects all Asian
Americans, hurting not only their self image, but how non-Asians treat them” (About
MANAA). We can see that stereotypes are one of the foundational issues that these kinds of
groups face. Further, one of the resources that MANAA created and relies on is a document
called “Restrictive Portrayals of Asians in the Media and How to Balance Them.” The
document explains that they do not want to limit creative imagination, but to “encourage
Hollywood’s creative minds to think in new direction.” For instance, instead of portraying
Asian cultures as inherently predatory, MANAA lists a stereotype buster of “Asians as
positive contributors to American society.” Instead of portraying Asian Americans as
restaurant workers, anchorwomen, martial artists, faith healers or prostitutes, they suggest
busting the stereotype with “Asian Americans in diverse, mainstream occupations:
therapists, educators, US soldiers, etc.” This list of stereotype busters is routinely handed
out at meetings with media producers and is indicative of MANAA’s discourse on
stereotypes.
Yet this notion that stereotypes must necessarily be avoided or possibly protested is
a somewhat limited way of interpreting racialized imagery. It is clear that roles for Asians
fall into an embarrassingly limited set of caricatures—Asian women are seen as sexual
objects or dangerous villains (the Lotus Blossom and the Dragon Lady), while Asian men
56

are emasculated and nerdy, the karate master or the evil villain. Asian actors are always
subordinate to white actors; in the case of Asian women, the result of an interracial
romance can be dangerous and potentially fatal, and the Asian man can never compete
against white dominance. In general, Asian actors and actresses are consistently portrayed
as ignorant foreigners, despised model minorities, or cartoonish enemies. But beyond the
importance of pointing out the harm that can be inflicted from only seeing these limited
representations, it is also important to consider the complicated and nuanced ways in
which viewers might read and interact with any kind of imagery, as well as how specific
images are being deployed. Theorists like Stuart Hall, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam,
Michelle Wallace, and many others have pointed out the fallacies inherent in stereotype
analysis. If the problem with racism is that racialized bodies are categorized as inferior,
then by calling for more positive imagery it seems as though we are saying that we want to
reverse that equation and put racialized bodies in a superior position. This, of course,
would do nothing to alter racist ideologies and structures. Also, when we talk about what
these so-called positive attributes are, in many ways we are simply reifying the dominant
culture, saying that cultural markers like a certain type of clothes, or occupation, or lifestyle
is inherently better than another. Despite a general desire to “uplift” racial minorities
through filmic representations, this kind of binary discourse leads to an essentializing of
both whiteness and of the racialized bodies who are called upon to reproduce those
qualities.
Robert Stam and Ella Shohat (1994) argue that although the work of stereotype
analysts has been indispensable, a stereotype-centered approach nonetheless leads to
some serious problems. These include ahistoricism, essentialism, moralism and
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individualism, all of which cause analysts to flatten our reading of the image at hand. To
elaborate upon each of these categories, let us look at the example of the character Saito,
played by Ken Watanabe in the film Inception. Saito’s character is a powerful Japanese
businessman who pays a team of criminals to enter a competitor’s mind so that his
business won’t be overtaken. If we are to contextualize this role within known tropes such
as the yellow peril or the Asian villain trying to take over the world, we might contend that
this character is thus stereotypical. Further, Saito tortures and possibly kills a member of
the team in order to find out where their leader is located, so it seems he can firmly be
lodged into the camp of the “bad guy,” or the “negative representation.” Yet in watching the
film, it becomes clear that the moral system of this imaginary futuristic world is unclear,
and we know very little about Saito’s true motivations or background. His character is as
richly developed and acted as any of the other primary characters. To label him as the
yellow peril simply because he is Asian would be to fall into the trap of essentialism—given
that we assume his attributes are indelibly connected to his racial identity—as well as
ahistoricism, since these labels match a racialized body to a concept that may have
outgrown its usefulness or gained new meaning in its contemporary context. To condemn
his character’s actions as “bad” would be to fall into the trap of moralism, as we cannot
definitively ascertain what actions and characters are right and wrong. Indeed, movie
producers so feared this outcome—that Saito would be seen as the “bad guy”—that they
specifically reached out to Asian American bloggers and community organizations with free
tickets and promotional merchandise to ensure that Asian Americans would support the
film.
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Celine Perrenas Shimizu (2007) has also critiqued stereotype analysis in The
Hypersexuality of Race—a text that reads from the margins to show how even the most
seemingly “negative” images of Asian American women in pornography can be mined for
their productive potential. Shimizu allows for the possibility of a pornography that is
politicized and redemptive, and through speaking with female producers, spectators and
critics, is able to identify many different forms of protest and critique within these oft-
disparaged roles. Similarly, in Peter Feng’s (2000) examination of Nancy Kwan, he looks to
independent films made by Asian American women as a way of recontextualizing and
reinvesting spectatorial pleasure in the image of Suzie Wong—the quintessential Asian
prostitute with a heart of gold. Feng seeks out a middle ground between claiming that the
film is either racist or anti-racist, arguing that meaning is dependent on readings of the
audience, locating pleasure at the intersection of the closed narrative structure of the film
and the polysemy of Kwan’s star discourse. In each of these works, theorists admit that
even “bad texts” can be pleasurable, and that there are multiple ways to interpret the
meaning of texts, particularly on the part of Asian American audiences and viewers.
Shimizu and Feng also redeem the actors who take on stereotypical roles, interpreting their
actions and performances as resistant despite the fact that they often knowingly embody
stereotypical roles.
MANAA’s straightforward conversation about positive and negative stereotypes is
in direct conflict with these concerns about stereotype analysis. Indeed, the activists
working at MANAA leave no room for spectatorial pleasure or any resistive process of
reading and playing with images. It is clear why they would take believe they must take
this stance—if the problem at hand continues to be a lack of general knowledge of the ways
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that Asian Americans have been unfairly forced to fit a prescribed mold of submission on
the part of media producers, it seems that even the most simplistic education about the
stereotypes that have come before would have to remain a primary goal. Yet I would also
argue that there is a great deal of potential in incorporating different reading strategies
into their understanding of the way that media imagery operates. Although they might find
a certain image stereotypical and fear that mainstream viewers will sharpen their
cartoonish mental image of Asians as a result, there is no reason for conversation to stop at
this level. Indeed, their rigid binaries wherein all images should either be categorized as
good or bad, praised or protested, stereotypical or stereotype-busting, can serve to alienate
and distance themselves from actual Asian American audiences who might find pleasure in
being fans of Jet Li’s martial arts villainry or who think that Lucy Liu’s dragon lady Ling is
subversive and empowering. In some cases activists have even been seen to deliberately
employ stereotypes as a means of skewering them, or to appropriate stereotypes through
camp in order to mobilize and call attention to their cause.
Comedienne Margaret Cho, a longtime queer feminist activist and the only Asian
American woman to ever star in her own sitcom, poses a challenge to this hard stance
against stereotypes. In her performances, she frequently mocks her parents by using an
exaggerated Korean accent and teasing them about their immigrant ways. One of her bits
similarly mocks Asian foreign exchange students, with Cho taking on an affected accent and
the deferential bow. But as Rachel Lee (2004) argues, Cho’s bit is not meant to skewer
Asians, Asian Americans, or Asian immigrants in her foreign exchange student act. On the
contrary, “Cho theatricalizes white civility—precisely what passes for whiteness
everyday—by Orientalizing it, exaggerating the colored person’s response toward such
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civility, and finally holding that civility suspect” (p. 108). That is, Cho uses yellowface and
self-Orientalizing gesture to illustrate and critique racial inequality through her comedy.
Adhering to a straightforward condemnation of all things stereotypical can leave a group
like MANAA unequipped for dealing with satire and comic portrayals like Cho’s that might
actually help to communicate their message about social injustices. To combat this blind
spot, activists might find it productive to partner with individuals, organizations, and
communities who celebrate a more active interpretation of the relationships individuals
create with their media. In later chapters I will explore more of these possibilities.

Fighting for Citizenship through Assimilation
These distinctions about what is a stereotypical representation of Asian Americans
help to reveal the interconnectedness of representation with identity and citizenship.
Asian American media activists have long argued that if we can increase the visibility of
Asian American bodies and stories in the media, then Asian American audiences will begin
to recognize themselves within media images, and the mainstream viewing public will
begin to understand a diversity of experiences outside their own. However, in deciding
what kinds of images are acceptable in depicting Asian America, MANAA’s leadership has
often been forced to draw firm national boundaries around their own identities. For
instance, one of the organization’s most often-repeated stances is that Asian Americans are
not the same thing as Asian nationals, and so media representations must disavow any
connection between Asia and the US. For example, after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami
in Japan, MANAA received emails condemning some of the anti-Japan messages they had
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seen propagated on Twitter. In response, a MANAA member wrote to the rest of the
organization:
We don't defend foreign countries, Asian or otherwise. And it's a fact. Are we going
to be asked to defend call centers in India which also take away jobs from
Americans? I understand they are worried about the impact on Asian Americans
but unless someone makes anti-Asian sentiments in general, it's not our
"jurisdiction" to comment.
This statement represents an extremely common sentiment on the part of MANAA—they
do not want to intervene in issues that focus on Asia because it is important to make a
distinction between “Asians” and “Asian Americans.” Given that Asian Americans have
historically been denied the basic tenets of American citizenship, including everything from
exclusion from the right to immigrate, to naturalize, to own property, to vote, or in the case
of internment, to be free from unjust imprisonment, it makes sense for activists to strive for
Asian Americans to be viewed as fully fledged Americans. Yet we can also see these
impulses as evidence that assimilation provides a solution in the struggle for citizenship,
and further of a desire for the national boundaries of the US to fully enclose Asian American
identities—both of which can be seen as problematic and limiting. In this kind of
statement, we can read a very anti-global sentiment that denies the existence of
transnational identities, citizenship, or media flows. They use the term “jurisdiction” as if it
is useful to designate the issues that are within their authority to speak on, but in fact this
statement seems to be cutting themselves off from a diversity of issues and communities
that it might be beneficial to include in their work.
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Although MANAA has been fighting the same battle since the group’s creation in
1992, in many ways the landscape surrounding them has changed. During one general
meeting, an interaction between participants helped illustrate some of the ways that this
discourse around stereotypes can become a conversation about national identity.
MANAA’s general meetings provide a space for members to discuss how they feel about
recent images in the media. Members are routinely assigned to monitor specific television
programs and then report back what kind of roles the Asian American actors are given. At
this meeting, actor Tim Kang was praised because he was cast in a “typical tough cop” role
on The Mentalist, as opposed to the nerdy computer tech role that Asian men are usually
given on procedural dramas. Some longstanding members of the group agreed that seeing
the Asian cop chase after a runaway suspect, hit him with a 2x4, cuff him and say “You’re
busted buddy” was a victory because it was the type of role usually written for white men.
However, at this meeting a newcomer spoke up to challenge this praise, saying, “I didn’t
like seeing the Asian guy act like a white cop. It bothers me when you see Asian people
trying to act white on TV.” In response, the MANAA members questioned how an Asian cop
would act differently—Would he use martial arts? Would he speak with an accent?
Essentially, would you have him act stereotypically to mark his Asian-ness?
These rhetorical questions seem to be criticizing the use of stereotypes, but can
actually be seen here to indicate MANAA’s deep investment in assimilation. For the
longstanding members of the group, it is of critical importance for Asian Americans to be
seen as no different from white people. This kind of desire of course presupposes that
whiteness is something that can be attained, rather than acknowledging that whiteness is
just as much a social construction as Asianness or any other racial identity. The specific
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nature of the clip being discussed also illuminates some of the problems with this desire.
First, the Asian actor is praised for being given a role in which he is a member of the police,
and as a police officer he is praised for enacting violence on another man. Although the
victim of violence is purportedly a criminal, it seems important to note that for Asians to
aspire to be in a position where violence, racial injustice, and the abuse of power are
systemic is quite problematic. In Paolo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he warns about
the dangers of striving for liberation in a way that lead to the oppressed becoming
oppressors or “sub-oppressors” themselves. He finds that “almost always, during the initial
stage of the struggle…their ideal is to be men; but for them, to be men is to be oppressors.
This is their model of humanity” (Freire, 1970, p. 45).
In assessing the conversation surrounding Tim Kang and others, we can also see
that MANAA’s views embrace some of the more limited ways of viewing the concept of
assimilation. As it functions here, assimilation can be characterized as the inevitable
process through which minority groups adapt to life in the United States by discarding
their previous culture and embracing the dominant Anglo-American, Protestant, middle-
class culture (Alba & Nee, 2003). This one-sided ethnocentric view elides the reality that
the mainstream culture itself is changed by the influx of immigrants and the diversity of
cultures within the U.S. Further, assimilation is not necessarily a linear form of adaptation,
but rather a complex and fluid process of negotiation and creation. Cheng’s (2001) critique
of these expectations of traditional assimilation offers a helpful way of looking at the case
of Asian Americans. She argues that while assimilation is idealized in the so-called
American Dream, it is actually impossible for Asians because “the standard of assimilation,
‘Americanness,’ denotes whiteness” (p. 69). Cheng’s portrait of the U.S. is one where
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racialization gives way to a melancholia that is deeply internalized and often unexplored.
Cheng argues that “the double malady of melancholia for the racial-ethnic subject is the
condition of having to incorporate both an impossible ideal and a denigrated self” (p. 72).
Further, Cheng sees assimilation and mourning as intimately connected, and worries that it
is problematically assumed that one can potentially “get over” the experience of loss and
racial grief. Since assimilation requires a complicated process of incorporation and
introjection that can last a lifetime, the grieving process is in reality continuous; “there is
no such a thing as ‘just’ letting go” (p. 97).
Beyond what Cheng sees as the melancholia of assimilation, MANAA’s expectations
of the positive impact of assimilation also serve to reify the dominance of normative
“American” culture, since it implies that all other groups must necessarily change their own
ways to fit in. In this way of thinking, it is as if the dominant culture represents an idealized
version of the world that needs no modification. MANAA seems trapped within a fixed
binary where Asian Americans are seen as either detested outsiders or as assimilated white
Americans. Rather than rely on this binary, groups like MANAA could possibly more
productively seek out a middle ground or a mode of representation that more fully
encompasses what Lisa Lowe (1996) so famously refers to as the “heterogeneity, hybridity
and multiplicity” that truly mark Asian America. Perhaps instead of praising actors for
taking on roles that would usually be given to white actors, it could be more productive to
begin to imagine roles that are uniquely suited to Asian Americans and all of the
complicated histories and cultures encompassed within the community.
The diversity of the community is important to consider, given that another problem
MANAA has yet to face is that the demographics of those encompassed by the term Asian
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American are always changing. As mentioned earlier, MANAA has resolutely stood fast to
the argument that Asians should not be caricatured as perpetual foreigners because they
are actually American-born and native English speakers. To that end, the organization
criticizes representations where an Asian American actor is made to speak with an accent,
since the accent becomes a symbol of the Asian as foreigner. Yet their failure to tackle
issues taking place in Asia also helps to reveal their perception of national boundaries as
concrete when the reality is that they are becoming more porous than ever, particularly
between Asia and America. For instance, an episode of Desperate Housewives was brought
to MANAA’s attention when the character Susan asked her doctor, “Can I check your
diplomas because I want to make sure they’re not from some med school in the
Philippines.” The Filipino American community was outraged about the criticism of the
quality of education in the Philippines, but MANAA refused to take a stand. Since the
derogatory comment was made about the Philippines but not the US, they felt that it was
not within the scope of their organization. This stance is particularly unfortunate given the
strong presence of Filipino professionals within the American medical community,
particularly in California where it is estimated that one-third of all nurses are Filipino
American. Indeed, the invisibility of this population of professionals seems directly within
MANAA’s scope. As one online petition from Filipino Americans stated, “Many of the
hospitals in major metropolitan areas of the U.S. (and the world) would not be able to
operate without its Filipino and Filipino American staff members” (Filipino Americans
demand for apology from ABC and Desperate Housewives). But MANAA’s organizational
position is also problematic because it fails to recognize the true diversity of Asians in the
US. For instance, over 65% of all Americans of Asian descent are first-generation
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immigrants, meaning that English is not their native language, and they are likely still
battling to become citizens.
While members of MANAA are frustrated by the fact that Asian Americans are
stereotypically depicted as the perpetual foreigner, it is as if they have not fully realized
that such representations reflect the realities that many Asians have in attaining citizenship
in a country that consistently views them as “the other.” MANAA’s pleas for
representations of assimilated, English-speaking Asian American characters possibly
reflects the composition of MANAA’s membership, which includes many second- and third-
generation, as well as Chinese- and Japanese-Americans. Given the specific histories of
Chinese and Japanese immigrants in the U.S., including anti-Chinese sentiment as a result of
labor conflicts and the Japanese-American internment during World War II, among many
others, these ethnic and generational subsets of the Asian American population have
specific sociohistorical reasons for seeking such treatment. Although specific laws against
Asian immigration lead to a disproportionately high number of immigrants from Japan and
China in the first half of the 20
th
century, when these restrictions were lifted in 1965 the
composition of Asian immigrants shifted rapidly to include a much higher percentage of
first-generation immigrants from Vietnam, Korea, Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, India,
Pakistan, and the Philippines. Beyond ethnic differences, this more heterogeneous Asian
American formation also views their relationship to the U.S. differently than earlier
generations. Many post-1965 immigrants possess dual citizenship in the US and in their
country of origin and identify primarily as members of a diaspora, rather than as belonging
within the US. These Americans of Asian descent have a wide diversity of relationships
with their country of origin, both linguistically and culturally, and in our transnational era
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of global capitalism, many individuals navigate between continents for various financial
reasons. Given these realities, it is likely that the Filipino Americans who were insulted by
the comment about medical schools in the Philippines did not see the issue as one that was
outside or their own community or their own experiences.
This limited way of viewing Asian America also makes it difficult for traditional
media activists to even have a vocabulary for many individuals within the film industry,
such as actors Jackie Chan and Ken Watanabe, or director Ang Lee—who are difficult to
categorize as either Asian or American, since their identities are clearly fluid and
contextual. These kinds of stars are increasingly important to consider, given that movie
studios have become so interested in the international market that they frequently employ
well-known Asian actors who then become introduced to domestic audiences. For
instance, the role of The Green Hornet’s Asian sidekick was given to Jay Chou, who is a
famous singer/songwriter-turned-actor from Taiwan. The blockbuster marked Chou’s first
foray into American cinema, and he needed to learn English to prepare for the film.
Although members of MANAA have expressed disappointment that this role and others
have gone to international talent rather than promoting Asian American talent, it is clear
that the saleability of an international cast is becoming an undeniable influence in
Hollywood.
Asian American Studies scholars have long argued that Asian America has a
complicated relationship with Asia and the rest of the world. The foundation of Asian
American Studies itself coincided with anti-war movements and the desire for Asian
Americans to unite with their Asian brothers and sisters who were being killed in Vietnam.
As Daryl Maeda (2009) argues, “Asian American identity contested Asian nationalism,
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liberal assimilationism, and narrow ethnic and class-based radicalism by embracing
multiethnic, interracial, and transnational solidarity” (p. 39). In his examination of
important moments such as the Third World Liberation Front strike at San Francisco State
College, alliances of the Red Guard Party with the Black Panthers, and protests against the
Vietnam War, Maeda finds that Asian American identity is intimately connected to both
anti-racism and anti-imperialism. Although some of the work that MANAA undertakes is
based on the identity formations that reach back to the Asian American Movement, in many
ways contemporary media activists are also disregarding these important imperatives for
broader arguments against the nation and its imperialism. During the time that MANAA
was first beginning its protests and community-building, Sau-ling Wong (1995) proposed
in the pages of Amerasia Journal that the field of Asian American Studies was entering a
distinct mode of denationalization, and warned scholars how they might do so more
carefully. She characterized a shift toward a diasporic, rather than domestic perspective,
and a growing permeability between “Asian Asians” and “Asian Americans” as productive,
but warned that scholars needed to historicize these transitions so that myths of nation
could be sufficiently complicated.
These concerns have continued in the field of Asian American Studies, despite the
fact that media activists consistently uphold these narratives of nation and the importance
of national boundaries in defining their own sense of citizenship. Kandice Chuh’s (2006)
arguments for a view of Asian American Studies as subjectless are similarly connected to
these concerns about upholding the project of US nationalism. For Chuh, this means that
we should not assume that there is such a thing as Asian America; rather, versions of Asian
America are created within difference and contextualized relations of power. As she states,
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“reconstituting Asian American studies in difference helps us to recognize that Asian
Americanist critique must be consistently and insistently critical of both US nationalism
and its apparatuses of power.” (p. 13) In this mode of what has been called strategic anti-
essentialism, post-essentialism, or anti-anti-essentialism, Asian American Studies looks to
its position within the globalized world in order to more effectively impact justice and
social change. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine Asian American media activists abandoning
their collective identities as American citizens in order to change the way that
entertainment media portrays their largely disenfranchised and marginalized community.
Still, Chuh’s injunctive to recognize that there are different ways of identifying Asian
America that can include a more global perspective is important to take into consideration.

Neglecting New Media
The final area in which traditional modes of activism may have become outdated is
the choice of what media to target. Members of MANAA prefer to tackle issues originating
within network television more than any other medium, with film and radio as sites of
secondary interest. The reasoning for this preference is based on the fact that the group is
interested in what can be considered “mass media,” and network television is believed to
reach the largest audience of American viewers. Also, given that MANAA annually sends a
contingent of board members to meet with the networks, these conversations can be both
effective and efficient. In contrast, trying to contact movie studios or other media
producers can be difficult if not downright impossible without inside connections, and can
result in a waste of time and energy. After MANAA was contacted to respond to an
offensive video on YouTube, a board member sent the following email:
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One of the problems with YouTube posts and other kinds of internet sites is that
they do not have a general media aspect to them. If you do not click onto the
YouTube post or do not visit the internet site, you will not be assaulted by the
offensive language and/or images. In regular broadcast media (or even basic cable),
people are assaulted by what is on without actively seeking it out, so that is why we
target those kinds of outlets.
This same reasoning has also been applied to offensive books and novels, websites,
podcasts, and tweets. There are a number of problems with this reasoning, beginning with
the fact that consumers seek out broadcast television in much the same way as they seek
out internet sites, either directly choosing a program or site that they are interested in, or
else clicking through a number of choices sort of aimlessly—and in both cases, there is the
definite possibility that they could stumble upon unwanted or offensive material. This
strategy of focusing on prime time television to the exclusion of other forms of media also
reveals a failure to recognize that we are no longer in the network era, where it could have
been assumed that network television was among the few options available to audiences.
To understand the limitations of this kind of thinking, we can look to the changing
structure of television and the different ways that meaning and representation are
constructed in our increasingly-mediated world. As Amanda Lotz (2007) explains in The
Television Will Be Revolutionized, we are now living in a post-network television era, and
understanding the nuances of this term can help us to better understand the impact of the
media. She marks the network era, between 1952 and the mid-1980s, as one where the
three top networks (NBC, CBS and ABC) dominated the airwaves and commanded mass
audiences. There was very little choice about what to watch or how to watch it, and most
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programming was created with a white middle-class audience in mind. Shows like I Love
Lucy and The Beverly Hillbillies garnered 90 percent of the viewing audience when they
played once during their scheduled time slot. In the 1980s, the proliferation of cable
channels and technologies like video cassette recorders and remote controls began to give
viewers more choices as to both content and their viewing experiences. Lotz calls this era
the “multichannel transition,” as targeted, niche audiences began to grow in importance.
Our contemporary era of television, called the post-network area by Lotz and the neo-
network era by Michael Curtin, is marked by a number of constantly changing factors.
First, viewers can now interact with television by “pulling” content—from the internet and
websites like Hulu, from TiVos and Digital Video Recorders, from DVD boxed sets and
Netflix streaming or rented discs—to watch on their own schedule. Content is also not
restricted to the television screen; it is available for viewing on cell phones, computer
screens, iPads, and a multitude of other viewing devices.
As Curtin (1997) argues, advocacy groups may have traditionally maintained the
goal of “[challenging] the concentration of media ownership and [struggling] for control
over prime time television,” (p. 68) but he believes that this strategy is a relic of the “high
network” era of television from the 1950s to the 1980s when there were far fewer options
for viewers. In our contemporary era, television no longer exclusively programs and
advertises for the mass market; offerings are increasingly diversified, fragmented, and
transnationally minded. As Curtin argues, the neo-network era
features elaborate circuits of cultural production, distribution, and reception…the
key to success is no longer the ownership and control of a centralized and highly
integrated medium-specific empire but the management of a conglomerate
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structured around a variety of firms with different audiences and different
objectives. (p. 71)
As a result, he suggests that advocacy groups move away from a strategy that focuses solely
on impacting gatekeepers at the networks and instead looks to promote alternative media
venues, develop more alternative resources, or create particular brands that are based on
political synergies within the choices of citizen-consumers (p. 74). Moreover, the different
market structure of online media actually seems to offer an opportunity for MANAA. Their
battles over prime time television are often constrained by the network’s needs to satisfy
mass audiences, but on the internet there is much more flexibility and opportunity for
experimentation without such well-defined economic controls.

Conclusion
The strategies and tactics that I have described reflect a very traditional sense of
media advocacy that has remained static since the 1960s. More flexibility and adaptability
in the way that targets and tactics are chosen would help usher MANAA and other media
advocacy groups into the world of new media and the digital age. This is particularly
important for Asian American communities, given the explosion of representations of Asian
Americans on the internet, as well as the high number of internet users within Asian
American households. Not only are there numerous offensive images propagated on
various blogs, internet videos, and websites—that MANAA should find a way to adequately
address—but the internet also provides a space for Asian American artists and media
producers to create and distribute their own creations. There have been countless Asian
American individuals and groups who have bypassed the conventional gatekeepers to
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media access and skyrocketed to online fame and fortune, and media advocates would do
well to keep their eye on these innovations. Although I discuss internet representations of
Asian Americans more fully in Chapter Four, here I simply want to acknowledge that new
media is an important site for investigation, and to point to the difficulty of making the
argument that broadcast television remains the most pressing target.
Responding to offensive images online can be difficult and indeed demands a new
set of strategies for contacting the producers, for education and message construction, and
for the kinds of demands needed for implementing changes. But these are the kinds of
challenges that media advocacy organizations must begin to take seriously. In our highly
fragmented world of niche media and transmedia storytelling that stretches far beyond the
realm of television, there is a call for new forms of media advocacy that can be flexible and
nimble enough to adapt to each new scenario. In the next chapter, I delve more fully into
the arenas of media industries and media policy so that we can better understand what I
mean by the possibilities for new strategies with regard to moving forward into a new
media era. It is clear that a media advocacy strategy wherein organizations keep their ear
to the ground with regard to the complicated face of representation in all its many forms
may be the only way for interest groups to have an impact. For Asian Americans, this
means pushing past the overly simplistic binaries of “positive” and “negative” imagery to
embrace the way that viewers actually respond to images, and educating audiences about
the history of discrimination and stereotyping without limiting their own interpretive
capabilities. This also means returning to the roots of the Asian American Movement with
regard to transnational alliances, and seeing Asian American as a category that is fluid and
constantly changing, rather than rigidly nationalistic. Although these tactics may lead to
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small victories, and indeed over the last 50 years there have been many positive impacts
resulting from this kind of activism, a broader perspective on both the history of media
advocacy and the momentum within Asian American Studies can help to continue this
trend.

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Chapter Two
Leveraging Media Policy for Representational Change

In the battle for reforming representational practices, media monitoring
organizations like MANAA clearly play an active role in the policing and restructuring of
discourse around Asian American imagery. Yet individual organizations on their own can
only do so much, given their limited resources and largely reactionary protocols.
Responding only after an image has already begun to circulate in the media can be seen as
an ad hoc strategy that can be difficult to sustain over time. In this chapter I explore the
many ways in which media advocacy has become more proactive, systematized, and even
institutionalized over the years through an engagement with regulatory policy. Jim
McGuigan (2003) traces the roots of “policy” back to the word “police” in France, where the
idea of the government and the police force were more integrated. Yet if we consider the
fact that media institutions and products fall within the realm of culture, then there
remains the question of who can and should police culture. I argue that from a variety of
different vantage points and cultural sites, activists are actually regulating corporations as
a way of impacting the media—two institutions that are, at their core, inextricable.
Activist interventions into regulatory policies provide a means for outside bodies
beyond the activist organizations to hold cultural producers accountable and threaten
consequences if they fail to comply with their agreements. I begin by exploring the way
that the media has historically been regulated through governmental policies, and the
intersection of those policies with the agendas of activists. But I also look beyond
governmental regulation to examine the way that activists are working to regulate
privately owned media corporations, from the national networks (NBC, ABC, CBS and FOX),
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to the Nielsen company, to cable channels. Through memorandums of understanding, the
institution of advisory councils composed of non-interested parties, and filing petitions
with the FCC to either support or deny rights to broadcasters, there are many ways in
which the work of media corporations have been policed.
McGuigan emphasizes that “cultural policy raises questions of regulation and
control but its meaning should not be restricted to an ostensibly apolitical set of practical
operations that are merely administered and policed by governmental officials” (p. 24).
Rather, cultural policy helps to make clear the way that politics are always-already
integrated throughout culture, particularly within the arenas of aesthetics and artistic
expression. Media productions and other creative endeavors are largely (though not
completely) unregulated by the government, but given their significant political and
cultural impact, there are still many ways in which they can be pressured to respond to
demands for greater democratization and diversification.
These kinds of interventions are important to investigate, given that cultural studies
and media studies have long been critiqued for failing to address or adequately contribute
to policy considerations. Cultural studies practitioners like Meaghan Morris demand that
scholars produce work that interacts with the institutions and power structures that
inform culture, rather than remaining locked in an endless cycle of textual analysis (Morris,
1988). With regard to the representation of Asian Americans in the media, we can clearly
see an opportunity for the intervention of cultural policy. Although cultural studies
encompasses an exceedingly broad range of topics and subject matters, it is safe to say that
issues of media representation, textual studies, identity and difference fall well within its
boundaries. The policing of these issues—educating the public about stereotypes,
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protesting offensive images, promoting minority media producers—is thus an important
arena for regulating and influencing. Further, in seeking out ways that the image of Asian
Americans in the media can be impacted by cultural policy, we can continue in the work of
articulating the connection between representation and cultural citizenship. As Justin
Lewis and Toby Miller (2003) state, “cultural policy is…a site for the production of cultural
citizens, with the cultural industries providing not only a realm of representations about
oneself and others, but a series of rationales for particular types of conduct” (p. 1). Beyond
the laws and statutes that can allow or deny immigrants the title of citizen, media
representations continue to uphold and develop different notions of citizenship through a
much broader lens, including customs and language and consumer behaviors, among
others.
In this chapter I also explore the complicated interplay between regulatory policy
and censorship. As described in the previous chapter, deciding whether a role is
stereotypical or offensive, and thus whether it should be permitted or protested, is
incredibly difficult. An important question remains—how can Asian American media
activists promote positive representations of their community without becoming
censorious and prohibitive? Can Asian American media activists find effective ways to use
policy to impact the way that images are created, and is policy work necessary or essential
to their movement? In this chapter I explore the different ways that cultural policy has
historically limited the ability of Asian Americans to intervene in the way that their
community has been represented, as well as the ways that activists are now poised to use
policy to impact positive change. I argue that in looking at the history of the relationship
between pressure groups and media policy, there have been many perhaps surprising
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alliances between conservative and progressive activists in efforts to impact the creation,
distribution, and ownership of media content. However, in the current legal landscape, it
would be difficult for Asian Americans to continue in this vein of broad media reform.
Instead, their efforts to regulate and work with corporations have become a new site for
political change—though as always, there remains the threat of making counterproductive
or even dangerous alliances.

Censoring Film
The last chapter examined the wide variety of efforts citizen groups have taken to
influence the images and messages propagated within mass media. The possibility of
threatening legal or governmental oversight of film and television was briefly discussed
with regard to the film Birth of a Nation, but there have been many other efforts to control
the content and distribution of media productions throughout the history of the U.S. In the
early 1900s, there were no established guidelines for government censorship of film, but a
number of states began to shape standards on an ad hoc basis. In 1911, women’s groups in
Portland, Oregon persuaded their City Council to create a Censor Board that reviewed the
content of all motion pictures shown in the city, eventually creating an ordinance stating
that they could refuse to approve any film that showed obscene, indecent, or immoral
content (Erickson, 2010). In Ohio, a censorship board created in 1915 successfully rejected
the screening of Birth of a Nation. In the landmark case Mutual Film Corporation v
Industrial Commission of Ohio, it was decided that films were commercial products and
therefore could not be protected under the First Amendment like the press, art, or other
sites for public opinion (McEwan, 2008). Although the ban on the film was eventually
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overturned, the case set a threatening precedent for the power of the state to censor and
control imagery. By 1926, many states had enacted laws to create these kinds of
censorship boards—including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kansas, Maryland, New York, and
Virginia—and over a dozen bills had been introduced in Congress attempting to create
federal censorship boards charged with licensing all films before they could pass through
interstate commerce. Individual cities across the country continued in this vein,
establishing their own processes for viewing and containing images that they deemed
inappropriate for the public (MacGregor, 1926). These state-level censorship boards often
simultaneously represented the interests of conservative and progressive activists, both of
whom sought to control imagery for the greater good of promoting societal uplift.
Although their vision for a more prosperous society may have looked slightly different,
they found mutual strength in the force of their censorious demands.
3

Given the clear threat of federal censorship by the government, the motion picture
industry hastily took on the task of self-regulation. In 1922, Will Hays was named
president of the Motion Pictures Producers and Distributors Association. Largely
responsible for the task of public relations, Hays set about trying to improve Hollywood’s
image and assuage the fears of the burgeoning state censor boards. In 1924, he established
a set of guidelines called “The Formula,” followed up with a list of “Don’ts and Be Carefuls,”
both of which recommended that films do not show things like nudity, profanity,
miscegenation, and sexual perversion, and to be careful about showing things like arson,

3
This alliance mirrors a later collusion in the 1980s between Christian fundamentalists and
anti-pornography feminists, both of whom sought to limit the influence of pornography,
which they felt was degrading and harmful to women. In both cases, the effects of media
upon society are so deeply worrisome that even radically different political constituents
have banded together in an attempt to control and limit the imagery in question.

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sedition, and seduction, among other things. Despite the fact that these guidelines were not
enforced and depended on voluntary compliance by the movie studios, Hays’ work was
successful in staunching the tide of censorship in state legislation. However, with the
advent of sound technology in the late 1920s, states again began organizing for
governmental control (Vaughn, 2005). Their agitating, coupled with pressure from the
Catholic church, lead to the creation of the more well-known Hays Code, or the Production
Code, in 1930. From 1934 to 1952, members of the Production Code Administration
headed by Joseph Breen had the power to change scripts and ban movies, which they
regularly utilized.
This kind of censorship continued until 1952, when the case Joseph Burstyn, Inc. v .
Wilson challenged the constitutionality of film censorship with regard to Roberto
Rossellini’s film, “The Miracle.” When the film was shown in New York, there was an outcry
by churchgoers about the film’s allegedly sacrilegious plot, which depicted the
impregnation of a woman who believes she is the Virgin Mary. When The New York State
Board of Regents banned the film, distributor Joseph Burstyn appealed their decision. The
Supreme Court sided with Burstyn, arguing that movies were entitled to freedom of speech.
Their ruling specifically reversed the ability of the state to censor films for being
“sacrilegious,” and subsequent rulings stated that films could also not be banned for being
“immoral,” “sexually immoral,” “inciting to crime,” or “harmful”—in effect, ending the
banning of movies (Harris, 1954).
We can see that throughout history, activism at the local level—whether through
women’s groups agitating to create city-wide censor boards, religious groups attempting to
shut down a screening at a particular theater, or African American groups protesting a
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racist film in local press—has effectively intimidated the motion picture industry into
changing its ways. The institution of the Hays Code marks a profound restructuring of the
way that moviemaking was conducted, and represents a dramatic power shift from the
filmmakers to the censors in the early years of cinema. Again, it is important to question
whether or not progressive, anti-racist activists today would seek to use such strategies of
censorship and the prohibition of free speech, or even collusion with filmmaking
industries, in order to impact social change. Yet it is important to note the ways that
throughout the history of media activism, citizens with messages to promote have risen up
against media producers, and media industries have responded by changing their own
structures to contain and squelch these critiques.

Regulating the Airwaves
While Hollywood’s Hays Code and state censor boards had set their sights on the
motion picture industry, radio and television were governed by a different set of concerns.
Rather than focusing on the prohibition of offensive material due to its potential to impact
moral deterioration, radio and television were seen as important public institutions that
needed to be available to the masses, particularly with regard to their function of supplying
non-entertainment news and public affairs programming. The Federal Radio Commission
(FRC), established in 1927, granted licenses to those seeking to broadcast on a certain
spectrum, but ownership remained “in the public” and was meant to be used in accordance
with “the public interest” (Baxter, 1974). The Federal Communications Commission (FCC),
which replaced the FRC in 1934, has the mission to:
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make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without
discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid,
efficient, Nation-wide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with
adequate facilities at reasonable charges.
Historically, this included a mandate to regulate content to ensure a diverse set of
viewpoints and “fair” coverage of controversial issues. Due to the scarcity of broadcast
frequencies, The Communications Act of 1934 mandated that broadcasters give equal time
to opposing viewpoints on controversial issues, among other requirements. This
requirement, known as the Fairness Doctrine, also included a restriction on “personal
attacks,” requiring that individuals or groups had a chance to respond if an attack was
made on their honesty, character, or integrity. Although the precise meaning of this
mandate has been vague since its inception, the threat of revoking or failing to renew a
station’s license has provided complaining parties with significant power in motivating
stations to comply with their demands.
Just as with the motion picture industry, the television industry similar responded
to this fear of governmental regulation by developing its own form of self-regulation. As
Katherine Montgomery outlines, the National Association of Broadcasters in 1951
developed a “Code of Good Practices” as a means of shielding the industry from critique.
Unfortunately, when the quiz show scandal erupted in 1959 and the outcomes of popular
competition shows like Twenty-One and The $64,000 Question were found to be rigged,
scrutiny over the networks intensified. In particular, the relationship between advertisers
and the content of shows was called into question, as the outcome of the quiz shows was
blamed on advertiser strategies to maintain viewership. Television stations created
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positions like the Head of Broadcast Standards, as well as entire standards and practices
departments to serve as middlemen between pressure groups and the networks, but the
power of the consumer to make demands continued to grow.
In particular, African American civil rights groups made the strategic move to hold
the FCC accountable for racial discrimination. Jim Classen (2008) details the efforts of
activists who sought to revoke the station licenses of television and radio stations in
Jackson, Mississippi for discriminatory policies with regard to failing to hire African
Americans. They argued that station owners had intentionally cut the signal when African
Americans were being featured, interrupting the programming by feigning technical
problems, that they had failed to adequately present African American perspectives on the
topic of integration. Members of the NAACP began petitioning the FCC to deny license
renewals on the grounds that the stations were not abiding by the Fairness Doctrine. The
FCC first responded in 1962 by issuing a public statement reminding stations to include
black perspectives on the issue of integration, and to give opposing voices the opportunity
to speak out on controversial issues. But in 1966, the courts ruled that the listening public
had been aggrieved, and for the first time, citizens now had standing to legally challenge
the renewal of licenses.
Classen argues that the case was groundbreaking because the FCC was forced to
address questions such as, “who were the consumers of television, and what rights, if any,
did these consumers have?...who should have direct access to, and thus power within, the
station licensing process?” (Classen, 2004, p. 63). Consumer-citizens now represented an
important constituency that regulatory agencies were forced to recognize and respond to.
In a 1968 ruling, WLBT was granted a probational short-term license, admitting that it took
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the issue of race relations into consideration and that the station needed to resolve the
questions raised. As a result of this ruling, the tactic of filing complaints with the FCC to
revoke licenses what Montgomery calls “a powerful weapon of intimidation. The rare
instances in which the FCC granted short-term licenses as the result of a pressure campaign
were chilling reminders to the industry that no station was really safe, now that political
advocacy groups had legal power” (Montgomery, Target: Prime Time, 1989, p. 25).
Despite the important role that the FCC and other governmental bodies have
historically played in elevating the voice and power of everyday consumers, a number of
legislative changes have drastically reduced these abilities. First, although the Fairness
Doctrine was resolutely upheld in a 1969 Supreme Court decision, its power has gradually
been eroding ever since. The legislation had always been based on a complicated and even
contradictory notion that citizens should be free to voice their opinions freely and without
government oversight, while also allowing—and thus possibly demanding, under
threatened penalty to do otherwise—multiple viewpoints and perspectives to be
represented. Moreover, the means and methods for upholding this delicate balance have
always been deliberately vague, and it was unclear whether or not the Fairness Doctrine
actually encouraged the proliferation or opinions or had the opposite impact, a “chilling
effect,” on controversial speech (Hazlett & Sosa, 1997). Under the Reagan administration in
1987, the FCC decided to stop enforcing the Fairness Doctrine, arguing in their 1985
“Fairness Report” that there were now sufficiently diverse outlets for opinions that
government oversight was no longer needed. Although the actual wording was not
removed until 2011, this decision in the 1980s to do away with the Fairness Doctrine was
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representative of larger shifts toward government deregulation on a national level that had
begun a decade earlier.
Throughout the history of broadcast media, regulatory agencies have ostensibly
served the role of providing technical oversight in order to safeguard the public interest.
Yet it has also always been the case that broadcast media constitutes a for-profit industry
that cannot be removed from corporate interests, and moreover, it is unclear exactly what
is encompassed by the term “public interest.” For instance, the FCC sought to promote a
diversity of ownership in an attempt to promote a diversity of programming that was
thought to be good for the public. Yet, as Horwitz argues, “the same economic
opportunities and pitfalls confront any owner, and induce that owner to air programs
which will attract the largest possible audience. Programming, therefore, that tends to be
imitative and seeks to be inoffensive” (Horwitz, 1989, p. 174). Despite this general desire
to see a diversity of content, in the early 1980s, the FCC removed nearly all of its content
regulations. Guidelines requiring nonentertainment programming, coverage of community
issues, news and public affairs programs, informative children’s programming, and even
political debates were all rescinded. Rather than regulating television in the name of the
public interest, the FCC “sought to let the market prevail” (Ibid., p. 246). Under this logic
that television was nothing but a business, “anti-siphoning” regulations that had sought to
give the public access to important televised programming were lifted as well, and the
cable industry began to proliferate.
As Horwitz points out, the regulatory reform movement that lead to this drastic
reduction of government oversight on mass communication included a remarkably diverse
set of parties. On the one side, free market conservatives sought to liberate their economic
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enterprise from governmental oversight and take on a more laissez-faire approach to
regulation. But left-leaning political interest groups also had a stake in deregulation,
seeking to end corporate power and bring back participatory democracy (Ibid., 265). For
those seeking to fight for the public interest, regulation appeared to protect those who
financially benefitted from media industries, dampening the possibility for actual
competition and diversity. We can see that the fight for deregulation offered yet another
opportunity for a natural alliance between groups that usually seek to oppose each other—
free market economists and public interest groups. Unfortunately for the public interest
groups, deregulation of the telecommunications industry resulted in increasing the ability
of media corporations to consolidate their power and uphold the status quo. Although the
proliferation of cable networks offered new opportunities for diverse programming, the
prevailing free market logic most often meant that there was little incentive for chasing
down minority market shares, and even less opportunity for minority ownership.

Forming the Asian Pacific American Media Coalition
Another possibility for public interest groups such as Asian Americans might be
through the courts. In the case of poor representation, it would seem that defamed groups
could sue media producers when their portrayals are derogatory. Yet as Heinke and
Tremain (2000) point out, the courts generally refuse to allow groups to sue for defamation
when the group number is larger than 25. As a result, interest groups and minority
spokespeople have been unsuccessful in their attempts to influence content through
lawsuits or other legal proceedings. If it is necessary to find a sole party impacted by
discrimination, then it seems that Asian American actors and actresses have been the
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victims of employment discrimination when they are denied roles based on their race.
Unfortunately, the fear of being blacklisted for such an action and ending their acting
career is generally too large a risk for an actor to take. This issue is also complicated by the
legal language within Title VII, which states that it is illegal “to fail or refuse to hire an
individual…because of an individual’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin…” (cite).
This means that it is just as illegal to fail to hire a white person as a black person in any
position or role, and that race is simply not a pertinent factor in one’s ability to do a job.
But in the case of the entertainment industry, an additional memorandum states that “a
director of a play or movie who wished to cast an actor in the role of a Negro, could specify
that he wished to hire someone with the physical appearance of a Negro” (Onwuachi-Willig,
2007). This language evades racial discrimination by noting that casting might call for a
specific “physical appearance,” while simultaneously invoking First Amendment rules
protecting creative freedom (Robinson, 2007). In effect, media producers are free to cast
as many white people and deny as many people of color as they want.
If lawsuits and public policy have waned in their ability to impact the representation
of Asian Americans, the other possibilities for the policing and regulating of media
industries exist within the private sector, or within media corporations themselves. One
organization that has been at the forefront of efforts to address both of these aspects of
representation is the Asian American Justice Center, headed by Executive Director Karen
Narasaki. With a mission to advance the human and civil rights of Asian Americans and
build and promote a fair and equitable society for all, the AAJC maintains “Media Diversity”
as one of their core issues. As Narasaki states,
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The popular media affects how other Americans see or don’t see Asian Americans.
They have the opportunity to either enforce or negate stereotypes. Since we work
on hate crimes and discrimination, we see this kind of work as preventative because
it leads to a less ignorant population. (Narasaki, 2011)
This statement clearly marks the work of the AAJC as activist, since we can see a clear
definition of a social problem and the connection between this problem and the work
undertaken to alleviate it. Due to their work in this media activism, Narasaki has been
appointed to a number of advisory and oversight boards, including the Federal Advisory
Committee on Diversity for Communications in the Digital Age. The committee’s charge is
to make recommendations to the FCC regarding policies and practices that will further
enhance the ability of minorities and women to participate in telecommunications and
related industries. But Narasaki has also been instrumental in working on issues of
representation in entertainment media as chair of the Asian Pacific American Media
Coalition (APAMC). In examining the work of the APAMC, we can better understand some
of the potential for impacting change through policy, as well as some of the challenges that
arise in attempting to do so.
One of the first ways in which Asian American media activists laid the foundation for
becoming more institutionalized was through the formation of the Asian Pacific American
Media Coalition, which is largely focused on policy-oriented issues. Although a number of
Black, Latino, and Asian American organizations had separately been working on issues of
representation for years, they came together as a national coalition as a result of events
that transpired in 1999. That spring, the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People (NAACP) made headlines when they called attention to the fact that there
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were no regular roles given to people of color in the entire new lineup of fall shows on the
four top TV networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and FOX). NAACP President Kweisi Mfume teamed
up with a coalition of Black, Latino, Native American and Asian American activists and
threatened a “brown out,” or consumer boycott, as well as a lawsuit if the situation was not
addressed. The Multi-Ethnic Media Coalition was formed to serve as an umbrella
organization for the NAACP, the National Latino Media Council and La Raza, American
Indians in Film and Television, and representatives of a number of Asian American media
groups that came together as the APAMC.
4
The goal of the coalition was to enter into
written agreements with the networks assenting to a variety of demands. The coalition
also appointed former members of congress for each group—including Kweisi Mfume for
African Americans, Norman Mineta for Asian Americans, and Esteban Torres for the
Hispanics/Latinos (there was no Native American representative)—in the hopes that the
congresspeople would lend weight and send the message that their demands were serious.
Their invisibility in the entertainment arena tied the groups together, creating a
collective voice that was powerful and could not be ignored. Alex Nogales, President of the
National Hispanic Media Coalition and Secretariat for the National Latino Media Council
emphasizes the importance of seeing minority populations represented accurately in
entertainment programming:
When you don’t see them, then the perception is that they don’t exist, or that they’re
not part of the workforce. That’s crazy. I know that [TV and film are] make-believe,
but when that perception moves public policy, when that perception makes people

4
Asian American representatives to the group include members of MANAA, East West
Players, the Asian American Justice Center, Visual Communications, SAG, IW Group, and a
number of Asian American actors and filmmakers.

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love you or hate you, when that perception is an obstacle to your child’s well-being
in terms of self-esteem and success, it matters. It’s important. (Nogales, 2011)
After intense negotiation, the coalition was able to successfully create memorandums of
understanding with each of the networks. In the MOUs, the networks agreed to increase
minority representation through greater recruitment, contribution to pipelines of minority
talent, and the establishment of a senior vice president of diversity who would be in charge
of instituting these changes. They could not include specific numbers or quotas to be
reached due to employment discrimination laws, but as Narasaki reasons, “In most cases
you’re starting from zero, so to say increase was not that much of a stretch.” These signed
documents mark an important step toward holding the networks accountable for
responding to the demands of the activists—they were forced to improve the diversity of
their workforce and create representations that more accurately reflected a multicultural
reality.
The networks also agreed to provide regular statistics on how many minorities were
hired behind and in front of the screen,
5
and to meet face to face with the activist
organizations every year. These meetings are of critical importance, as Guy Aoki argues:
In the past if MANAA or any other organization was upset there would be a big stink
in the media for a few days and then we’d go away. Now we have ongoing meetings
and statistics and they have to answer to us about why they went down or why it
got better. They have to report back to us and be responsible to us. (Aoki, 2009)

5
The positions included in the statistics include: actors in regular and recurring roles,
directors, writers, producers, entertainment creative executives, program development,
and suppliers.

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The meetings include everyone from the president of the network and the vice presidents
to the casting directors and heads of every division. When the networks hired their senior
vice presidents of diversity, these individuals served as organizers for the meeting as well
as to collect and distribute the annual statistics. The Multi-Ethnic Media Coalition also
began awarding yearly “Report Cards” to each network based on these statistics.
In the first year of awarding report cards, the results were disastrous—all of the
networks earned either a D or an F. As the coalition reported, “the four major networks by
and large have not significantly followed through yet on agreements signed with the
coalition last year to increase the number of minorities in both the business and creative
divisions” (Braxton, 2000). The next year things were not much better, as the highest
grade—awarded to NBC—was a C (Braxton, 2001). Despite criticisms from the networks
that the coalition refused to acknowledge their progress, the coalition continued year after
year to use the report cards to criticize the networks and their failure to comply with their
promises. In 2003, the organizations finally began to note an improvement in the visibility
of Blacks and Latinos, while “the situation continued to further deteriorate” for Asian
Americans and Native Americans (Braxton, 2003). In the years since then, the networks
have settled around a C average in reports from the Asian American community, with not a
single network ever earning greater than a B- overall.
Narasaki argues that the awarding of report cards has been effective because of the
media coverage that it produces. The yearly awarding of report cards at a joint press
conference gives news media a hook for reporting on the TV season, as well as concrete
measurements for gauging progress in categories beyond just acting. Although the news
media eventually lost interest in covering the announcement of the report cards given that
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the story was largely the same each year, Narasaki still feels that the report cards are
important.
I could tell they cared because I would get calls where they would be yelling at me
about how we came up with their grades, or they would lobby me in advance about
why their grades should be higher. They cared because it was an external
measurement of their program, and largely based on the data that the networks
themselves were generating. (Narasaki, 2011)
Moreover, the report cards offered an opportunity for the different minority groups to
structure new and detailed arguments each year, rather than simply hammering the same
generic complaints and pleas year after year.
Although these initial agreements were the result of building a coalition across race
and ethnicity, the different minority groups do not always work together to advocate for
improvements in representation. Instead of combining the diverse needs of African
Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans into one meeting, each
individual group is promised time for their own individual meetings and convey their own
individual messages every year.
6
This is important to note, given that each group faces a
distinct and unique representational challenge. For instance, Latinos have succeeded in
creating shows that feature their own community, like The George Lopez Show, but they are
rarely integrated into the fictional worlds of shows outside of these specifically Latino-
themed shows. African Americans have also made great increases in the numbers of actors
being hired, but they are often segregated to channels like FOX and the WB/UPN. In
contrast, Asian Americans have succeeded in being given roles as side characters like

6
In the case of NBC, the meetings take place every quarter.
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Sandra Oh on Grey’s Anatomy, Archie Punjabi on The Good Wife, or John Cho on Flash
Forward, but they are rarely given the chance to star in their own show or have an entire
show built around an Asian American family or community. Methods for impacting change
must also be different, reflecting the different histories and cultural realities of each
community. During the meetings, each activist group has the opportunity to explain the
specific cultural nuances of their own community so that the networks can begin to
consider how minority characters and storylines can be worked into new projects, as well
as to convey criticisms or suggestions for currently existing programs.
To some extent, the impact of these meetings can be seen in the numbers. As the
AAJC states on their website, there has been “more than a 20 percent increase for both
regular and recurring roles for Asian Pacific Americans on prime-time television shows”
(Asian American Justice Center) since the report cards began. But participants in the
meetings also report that there has been a major shift in attitude on the part of the
networks in the past decade. As Guy Aoki describes, “Even after they signed the MOUs, I
think each network had a difficult time. When they looked at how they would have to
change the way they did business to meet these goals they were surprised” (Aoki, 2009).
Others similarly report that communication was incredibly difficult in the early years
because guards were up and no one was really listening to one another. In some cases,
individuals from the coalition ended up in angry shouting matches with network
executives. But as the years progressed, the conversations took on a more collaborative
and solution-oriented tone. “Sometimes people who work on diversity issues for the
networks are just liaisons. They’re there to say no,” said Marilyn Tokuda, who joined the
APAMC in 2002 when she took on the job of Artistic Director of East West Players and is
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now a co-chair of the coalition. “But we have seen them really evolve. Now they are really
thinking about diversity and trying to change the culture of the companies” (Tokuda,
2011). Members of the APAMC also noted that many of the Asian American activists who
are invited to meet with the network executives struggle to overcome their cultural
upbringing to be deferential, to avoid being a troublemaker or rocking the boat. Indeed, it
can be incredibly intimidating to meet with the president and vice presidents of the largest
television companies in the nation. But members of the coalition have each found their
way to participate because they believe in the cause. As Tokuda states, “The meetings are
really important because we go in there and are evaluating and criticizing and having face
to face meetings with decision makers, and putting pressure on them.” (Tokuda, 2011)
Despite the long-term progress that has been made, there is always a need for
further conversation. The report cards generally show little change year after year—and
sometimes a backslide—despite the improvement in the relationship between activists and
the networks. In some cases, the networks have been seen to inflate their numbers to some
degree. For instance, a show that has a single episode that takes place in Chinatown might
employ a number of Asian American actors as guest stars, resulting in what appears to be a
spike in hiring. But those guest roles are sure to evaporate, and the roles for those actors
are undoubtedly brief. Similarly, many Asian Americans are listed as regulars, but given
significantly less screen time and lines than their non-Asian counterparts. In a study
commissioned by the AAJC in 2004, researchers at UCLA found that Asian American
regulars had consistently smaller roles than their fellow actors (National Asian Pacific
American Legal Consortium, 2005). Narasaki explains, “This meant the Asian American
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characters didn’t have much impact. They weren’t well-rounded characters. They couldn’t
have families or back stories or romances—they were a sidekick.” (Narasaki, 2011)
During their meetings with the networks, members of the APAMC have the
opportunity to probe into the statistics, and to have a conversation about the quality of the
roles that are given to Asian Americans. They can praise characters that they feel are
exemplary, and criticize the roles that they think were handled poorly or the shows that are
in need of revision. Such conversations must be handled carefully, since the activists
realize that television consists of creative content. As outsiders to the industry, telling the
networks exactly what decisions should be made would seem to infringe on their creative
control as artists and producers, and could potentially negatively impact their ability to
have such conversations at all. For instance, the coalition often examines the new lineup of
shows with regard to location, since cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Honolulu have
an unusually high percentage of Asian Americans. Similarly, shows that take place in
hospitals are often desperately in need of more Asian roles, given the high percentage of
real medical professionals who are Asian. But rather than demanding that such shows
reach a suitable quota of Asian American actors, activists argue that the show will seem
more realistic if it incorporates more Asian American actors to reflect the diverse racial
makeup of those cities and workplaces. There are also economic arguments that can be
made, given that shows have been seen to be more popular when they have diverse casts,
both with minority and mainstream audiences.
Beyond these conversations and opportunities for feedback, another result of
working with the networks has been the successful implementation of a number of
diversity initiatives, such as minority writing programs. These include the ABC Scholarship
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Grant Program, the ABC Daytime Writing Program, the CBS Diversity Institute/Writers
Mentoring Program, FOX Writer’s Initiative and NBC Diversity Initiative for Writers. As
Narasaki argues, television is a writer-centric business—unlike film, which is more focused
on directors. For a series to be successful, the writer must be able to craft the entire
narrative, and as she says, “Writers write from their own experiences. So if there’s no
Asian writers, there’s no Asian stories. We won’t get a scripted Asian American show until
the writers we put into the pipeline become more senior.” (Narasaki, 2011) Fortunately,
the writer’s programs have been in existence for many years, and the numbers of writers
have continued to improve steadily. In fact, there have been more improvements in the
number of Asian American writers than actors. But members of the APAMC worry that just
employing Asian American actors does not necessarily mean that stories about their
community will be told. For one thing, not all Asian American writers strongly identify
with the Asian American community, particularly if they grew up in a mostly white area. As
with any minority group, it is dangerous to assume that bodies can be collapsed with
identities, since hiring minority writers offers no guarantees of any shifts in content or
storylines. But an additional concern is that even if writers from diverse backgrounds want
to write about their own backgrounds, they will be afraid to do so for fear of becoming
pigeonholed as only an “Asian American writer.” To combat this, members of the APAMC
request that the networks specifically encourage writers to write from their own
experiences, and make it clear that they are hoping to see diverse stories, rather than to see
the same mainstream stories over and over.

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The Plight of the Asian American Show
These fears that Asian American storylines are risky or offer particular challenges
are not completely unfounded, given the poor track record of Asian American
programming. In the history of network television, the only show to ever feature an Asian
American cast was “All-American Girl,” an ABC sitcom starring Margaret Cho. Premiering
in 1994, the show focused on the humorous intergenerational conflicts and culture clashes
within a Korean American family. Comedian Cho played a thoroughly assimilated valley-
girl punk rocker, while veteran actors Jodi Long and Amy Hill played her strict Korean
mother and wacky grandmother. Unfortunately, the show fared poorly in many respects.
Despite avowed intentions to create representations that were authentic, relatable, and
positive, the show quickly came under fire for its portrayals of Asian Americans. As one
article reported, “several [critics] complained that Grandma's speaking about how things
are done in ‘the old country’ and Mom's pushing Cho to date only Koreans were
stereotypical and unflattering portrayals of Asian-Americans” (McMahon, 1994). The Asian
American community also had an extremely polarized reaction. Many Asian viewers
immediately expressed anger at many details of the show, from the accents of the non-
Korean actors, to cultural inaccuracies of the food and home décor, to the fact that familial
relations were being mocked (Kang C. K., 1995) and declared that they would rather
remain invisible than suffer such insulting portrayals. In contrast to this criticism, MANAA
awarded “All-American Girl” numerous honors at their 1994 Media Achievement Awards
for its groundbreaking work and constantly praised the show in their conversations with
ABC.
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When the show failed to capture a sizeable audience, the network responded by
making serious changes to the show’s focus. They cut all but two of the Asian American
actors and tried to refocus the story on Cho’s non-Asian roommates. In 1995, the show
was cancelled altogether. Later, Cho revealed her struggles for creative control, including
the fact that she was requested to lose weight and to act “more Asian,” despite the fact that
the entire show was created around her own star persona (Cho, 2001). Media activists
worried that the sour taste left from the failure of “All-American Girl” would discourage the
networks from experimenting with Asian American storylines and characters, and indeed
there has not been another show focusing on Asian Americans since then. Nevertheless,
members of the APAMC still reference “All-American Girl” as a model they would like to see
given another chance. They keep clips from their favorite episodes on hand and bemoan
the years that have passed since the show aired, while still admitting that another Asian
American show seems an impossible dream at this point.
When “Outsourced” premiered on NBC in 2010, it marked a different sort of
intervention into the world of Asian American representations. Instead of focusing on
Asian immigrants or second-generation Asians in the US, “Outsourced” traveled all the way
to South Asia to tell the story of a white American trying to get along with his Indian
employees and learn about life in India. The show offered a somewhat conservative foray
into the world of “the Other,” allowing mainstream viewers a safe and familiar set of eyes
through which to view the hilarity of the Indian workplace. South Asian activists were
invited alongside the APAMC to view the pilot and offer feedback on the show. On the one
hand, the show followed in the footsteps of “All-American Girl” by focusing on a largely
non-white cast and employing many Asian American actors and writers. Yet the show
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could not be considered “Asian American” in any way, given its international setting and
white protagonist, and it relied heavily on juvenile pranks such as potty humor and
physical pratfalls rather than sophisticated storytelling. Despite the hesitantly positive
response of activists, “Outsourced” suffered much of the same treatment as “All-American
Girl” in the press. Bloggers and critics alike worried that the show was stereotypical, they
did not particularly like the characters, and after a single season the show was cancelled.

The Ratings Game and Asians on Cable TV
If the pressure of creating a single show that could appease the capricious interests
of critics, mainstream audiences, Asian American audiences, and activists seems too great,
there remains another possibility for opening up an institutionalized space for the creation
of Asian American images—an Asian American cable channel devoted to a range of original
content. There is no shortage of talented Asian American filmmakers who traverse the
Asian American film festival with their feature films, documentaries, shorts, and serial
programs, but without a venue such as a cable channel, these media producers have little to
no possibility for distributing and screening their work. Although there are far fewer cable
channels devoted to Asian and Asian American audiences than their counterparts for
African Americans and Latinos, there have been a number of notable attempts to address
the Asian market over the years. Among the first were ImaginAsian TV, which went on the
air in 2004, and AZN TV in 2005. The channels were similar in their programming,
featuring content that was largely imported from Asia and shown with English subtitles. As
journalist Jeff Yang describes AZN, the content included “Variety shows and news from
Hong Kong. Japanese animation. Soap operas from Korea. Bollywood movies. Valuable
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content, but nothing groundbreaking—and nothing targeted specifically at Asian
Americans” (Yang, AZN, R.I.P., 2005). Producers at AZN did attempt to create a handful of
Asian American reality television series that were produced in the U.S. and featured
domestic talent, and the channel was also home to the Asian Excellence Awards, held from
2006 to 2008. Still, the dominant programming on both AZN and ImaginAsian TV focused
on bringing international content to American audiences, leaving it unclear as to whether
the show was for immigrant families or second generation Asian Americans.
L.S. Kim argues that the existence of these networks and the concept of Asian
American television brought a number of questions to the fore, including what “Asian
America” might look like—why is there not an African America, or a Native America, she
asks—and who might belong to it. As Kim states,
part of the discourse reminds Asian Americans of their (or their parents’ or
grandparents’) foreign status as some are more “acculturated” than others, and
moreover, as they stand apart from the “non-Asian” viewer, i.e., American and white.
Is this a schizophrenia linked to the larger social and discursive struggle to define
Asian American—as ‘American’ or ‘Asian’? (Kim, 2005)
Perhaps as a result of this schizophrenia and inability to define their audience, almost
immediately after they began, both networks started to struggle financially. AZN was
located on Comcast, which gave it wide distribution, but after only eight months employees
were drastically reduced and the programming was slashed to only the most limited
offerings (Caramanica, 2006). In April 2008, the channel was cancelled. Some accounts
claim the channel “suffered from low advertiser interest and limited distribution; with
other cable companies declining to carry the network, AZN only manages around 13 million
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subscribers, a marginal sum against the 100 million average for Comcast’s
networks” (Wang, 2008). But others feel that the channel failed because Comcast did not
take it seriously and give it enough staffing or advertising support. With little to no
advertising for the channel or its programs, Asian American audiences could not have
known that the channel existed.
But there is another major challenge facing owners of minority cable channels—the
lack of accurate data on audiences of color. The size and composition of the television
audience has always been of central importance to the television industry, as ratings play
an important role in determining which shows are aired or cancelled, what storylines or
content to continue, and where advertisers will buy their spots, all based on the fact that
the television industry is supported by the purchasing of ads, and the price of advertising is
determined by the number of eyeballs the advertisements reach. As Ang states, “the
ratings firms occupy a key position in this corporate transaction because it is their product,
the ratings information, that forms the agreed-upon standard by which advertisers and
networks buy and sell the audience commodity” (Ang, 1991, p. 54). Given that consumer
research would be suspect if it originated from within either television producers or
advertising companies, it has historically been the case that ratings are measured by an
uninterested outside party. In the U.S., the A.C. Nielsen Company has long held an
unregulated monopoly on television ratings. Founded in 1923, Arthur C. Nielsen’s
company began conducting consumer research for companies like General Electric and
Bausch & Lom. In 1942, Nielsen turned to media audience measurement with the
invention of the Audimeter, which collected information about how a radio was being
tuned and allowed for the start of the Nielsen Radio Index. In 1950, Recordimeters began
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collecting data on television viewership, and Nielsen also began measuring and
interpreting the viewing habits of 1200 radio and television consumers (Wood, 1962).
Although the Nielsen Company continues to engage in a wealth of consumer research, their
name has become synonymous with television ratings and audience measurement.
Despite this centrality and importance in determining who constitutes an audience,
the Nielsen Company has only recently begun to measure the race and ethnicity of
television viewers. As Narasaki explains, when the different coalitions threatened a “brown
out” in 1999, the lack of viewership data would have actually made the impact impossible
to track: “At the time was that Nielsen was not adequately sampling minority communities
to do the ratings. That meant you could stop all minorities from watching, but it wouldn’t
have necessarily affected the ratings. They just weren’t asking a sufficient number of
minorities what they were watching.” (Narasaki, 2011) Although Nielsen has slowing been
improving upon this issue, problems arose in 2005 when Nielsen announced that they
were switching to a new television ratings system. They had previously measured viewing
habits by mailing diaries to families in select cities and asking them to self-record what
shows they watched. This method was slow and potentially inaccurate, since it relied on
memory and selective reporting. To combat these problems, they began moving to a
system called “local people meters” that would be installed directly into the television sets
of Nielsen families in their largest markets. But in their preliminary tests, viewership for
Fox-run UPN affiliates in New York that carried many shows geared toward Black and
Hispanic audiences saw their numbers drop significantly. An advocacy group called Don’t
Count Us Out formed to protest these results, arguing that minority audiences were being
undercounted by as much as 25% (Maynard, 2005) due to various problems with the
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people meters. Although Nielsen contended that the error rating was true of all metered
sampling and was still better than the previous methods, the discrepancy between minority
households and the general market could not be ignored. Nielsen instituted a Task Force
on Television Measurement and appointed a diverse contingency of community, business,
and media leaders to investigate the issue of minority audience measurement and make
recommendations for improvement.
There were a number of positive outcomes from the task force’s work on this
issue—most importantly, that Nielsen was urged to finally address the issue of minority
viewership and the challenges of collecting accurate data from diverse communities. The
task force recommended solutions such as providing training in languages other than
English, recruiting field operations staff and representatives who were ethnically and
linguistically diverse, educating their staff about local cultures, installing phone lines in
sample households that did not have them, and oversampling minority populations to
ensure adequate numbers of participants. One member of the task force in particular
spoke up for the Asian American community—actor and activist George Takei. When
Nielsen decided to create a set of more permanent advisory councils, the first to be
instituted was the Asian Pacific American Advisory Council. The 11-person council,
consisting of business and civic leaders, helps to tailor Nielsen’s research and outreach
efforts to more effectively measure Asian American viewers. The creation of this advisory
council is significant, given that Nielsen had not previously attempted to measure Asian
viewers in any meaningful or reliable way.
Although there are still many shortcomings to the way that Asian viewers are
recorded, Nielsen’s forays into the Asian market are steadily improving due to the
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oversight of the advisory council, leading to new data and insights. For instance, in looking
at the ratings for the top television shows in Asian American households, it becomes clear
that Asian Americans do not have exactly the same viewing patterns as the general market,
as had previously been assumed. The top ten shows might be similar, but the order is often
different, and as Narasaki has found, often reflects an increased interest in programs that
have Asian American participants or actors. We can see that the institution of advisory
councils and the subsequent improvement in the measurement of Asian American viewers
can offer substantial improvements in the ability for Asian Americans to stand up for their
community and the way that it is represented.

Comcast/NBC Universal Merger
Despite the fact there are now more measures for assessing minority audiences and
that Asian Americans have more voice in advising and regulating media industries, there
remains another problem for media activists who are concerned with diversity—the
shrinking and consolidating of media ownership. When the mass media is controlled by a
smaller and smaller number of firms, there is a fear that the marketplace for ideas shrinks
as well; “that those firms are capable of affecting public opinion, the national agenda,
democracy itself, and global culture” (Noam, 2009, p. 9). In an era of increasing
deregulation, the opportunities for media consolidation increase as well. In particular,
under FCC Chairman Michael Powell, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened the door
to further consolidation. Although the Act had many components, one of the most
significant elements was that it lifted the limit on the number of properties one television
or radio company could own. For television, the total percentage of national audience
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reached has slowly been increasing from its original cap at 35% of the national audience,
which greatly increased the potential market power of media companies like AOL Time
Warner, AT&T, or News Corp (Chambers & Howard, 2006). Although the 1996 Act
specifically contains language promising to increase female and minority ownership of
broadcast licenses and facilities, there has been little actual progress toward this goal. In
2006, 10 years after the implementation of the Act, women owned a scant 4.97% and racial
minorities 3.26% of all commercial broadcast television stations (Turner, 2006)—a clear
failure of the Act’s ability to increase diverse ownership.
The debate over media consolidation intersected with the interests of Asian
American media activists in 2010, when Comcast, General Electric Company, and NBC
Universal sought to merge into a joint venture. The proposed merger would combine
NBC’s news and entertainment programming that includes channels like USA, Bravo, SyFy,
CNBC, and MSNC; Universal Studios’ film interests, theme parks, and cable channels; and
Comcast’s internet and cable services, which include channels such as E! Entertainent
Television, Style Network, and The Golf Channel. In order to do so, they had to first receive
approval from the FCC that the merger benefited the public. Opposition to the merger was
extremely vocal, with minority groups such as the National Coalition of African American
Owned Media and the National Hispanic Journalists Association filing petitions to deny the
proposed merger. They argued that both firms had failed to do business with minority-
owned media or place minorities in executive positions, and called for the FCC to deny the
merger. The Greenlining Institute, an advocacy organization for the protection of
consumer interests, also testified against the merger, arguing that doing so would diminish
opportunities for diverse voices, undermine democracy, and cut jobs. In Sam Kang’s
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testimony, he stated, “Comcast and NBC both say they are serious about diversity, but the
truth is, both struggle when it comes to the number of minorities within their workforce
and management who actually have the ability to hire or influence content” (Kang S. ,
2010).
Given that the APAMC had been meeting with NBC for years and knew their track
record on minority hiring and minority influence on content, it seems they would see an
ally in Kang and the Greenlining Institute. But instead of openly criticizing the company for
its poor track record and joining with the chorus of opposition to the merger, they saw an
opportunity to use policy to leverage an updated agreement with the company just as it
was growing even larger and more influential. Knowing that Comcast and NBCU would be
eager to avoid having a coalition of minority representatives blocking the merger, members
of the APAMC each began drafting memorandums of understanding for their communities
in exchange for their support. This move marks yet another dangerous alliance between
progressive interest groups seeking to diversify representation and the free market
conservatives whose policies often end up homogenizing the media and shutting down
minority voices. In this sense, the APAMC’s support for the merger mirrors the support of
pro-censorship legislation by progressive activists in the early days of cinema, as well as
efforts to deregulate media industries in the 1970s. In each of these cases, we can see that
the strategic use of public policy can lead to important gains for minority communities and
grassroots community activists. But it is important to consider the costs of allying with a
coalition that in other respects exists in opposition to the goals of a progressive, activist
organization seeking to bring about an increase in opportunity and a decrease in
discrimination for their disenfranchised community.
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Regardless of the potential negative consequences, Asian American activists,
supported by Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus Chairman Mike Honda and Rep.
Judy Chu, chairwoman of the caucus’s economic development taskforce, filed a statement in
support of the merger. In a press release following the merger, the Asian American Justice
Center stated, “AAJC had asked the FCC to approve the acquisition after reaching an
agreement, on behalf of four other Asian American organizations, with the two companies
about increasing diversity and the presence of Asian Americans on the airwaves” (Asian
American Justice Center, 2011). In the MOU they explicitly outlined what part Asian
Americans would play in the future of the corporation’s work. Their requests were similar
to those that had already been established with African American organizations and
Hispanic organizations. The 16-page document first established that the newly merged
companies would honor their previous diversity commitments, which include the annual
meetings with the APAMC and the disclosing of statistics about minority hiring and other
diversity initiatives. The rest of the agreement focused on five areas: corporate
governance; employment/workforce recruitment and retention; procurement;
programming; and philanthropy and community investments. The MOU also supported a
new video-on-demand channel called Cinema Asian America that was set to launch in
December 2010. The channel featured Asian American film and video largely from the film
festival circuit, providing a much-needed venue for Asian American content that often
struggled to find distribution. More importantly, the MOU stated that Comcast would
commit to carrying a new Asian American channel. Knowing the mistakes that were made
with AZN TV, the APAMC added a demand that the channel needed to be supported with
advertising so that the community had a chance to know about it.
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Asian American Media in the Digital Age
With this new MOU in place and increasing reliability in assessing Asian American
audiences, the potential for a successful Asian American cable channel is now greater than
ever. But beyond these improvements, there have also been noteworthy changes in the
social landscape that could contribute to different outlets for representation. The
population of Asians in the US has only continued to grow in the last decade, and to spread
from beyond just the coasts to encompass a vast array of cities across the nation. Also
significant is the fact that the stakes for starting up a new cable channel are now much
lower due to changes in television technology. In the move from analog, to cable, to our
current era of digital television, the spectrum for carrying cable channels has become
exponentially greater. When AZN TV was started, cable channels had a much higher bar for
achieving success. In the digital televisual world, there is less cost and less risk associated
with new cable channels because there are less limitations with regard to how many
channels can exist. Of course, there still remains the threat that any channel could fail if it
has no viewership. As Narasaki explains, “You can leverage policy into opening doors and
leveling the playing field, but then we have to show that it was a profitable decision.”
(Narasaki, 2011)
Already, Asian American channels like MYX-TV and MNet America have quietly
ventured into what might be considered a transnational digital television space. Both
channels are available via satellite and on Comcast, and while both of their parent
companies are in Asia—MYX TV is a subsidiary of ABS-CBN, a entertainment company in
the Philippines, and MNet’s parent company CJ Group is in Korea—the channels make
deliberate efforts to reflect Asian American pop culture and sensibilities. Their programs
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feature young Asian and Asian American talent, reality television programs, music videos,
and a variety of pop entertainment content. MYX TV is also partnered with Soompi, a
popular English-language internet community for Korean pop culture (Ocampo, 2011).
This partnership helps to sustain interest in the channel’s programs and its pop idols, and
allows fans a forum for meeting other viewers and discussing pop culture interests.
Companies like MYX-TV and MNet are important to consider in light of the
increasing flexibility between Asian and Asian American culture, as well as the greater
access to satellite channels from Asia in addition to American ethnic media. Immigrant and
first generation families in the US now have access to more media options than ever before,
and in expanding the kinds of programming that they consume in their homes and
communities, there is an effect on the larger Asian American culture. In Brian Hu’s (2010)
investigation of English-language online fan communities for Korean dramas, he traces a
powerful affective connection within the Asian diaspora that offers a new space for
articulating racialized identities. In particular, there is an active community of 1.5 or
second-generation Asian American youth who maintain an interest in Asian pop culture,
sometimes across ethnic or linguistic boundaries. Their participation in the diasporic
media community then helps them to retain a sense of cultural rootedness in an Asian
heritage even as English remains their primary language and they are fully assimilated into
American life. These flexible identities challenge predominant thinking about the way that
Asian American audiences interact with both domestic and international media, and offer
new possibilities for considering the way that general audiences view and interact with
Asian and Asian American media. The route toward capturing these audiences is by no
means obvious; as Aswin Punathambekar describes, MTV’s efforts to capture diasporic
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audiences with programming geared toward South Asian American youth (MTV-Desi),
Korean (MTV-K), and Chinese-American youth (MTV-Chi) all were cancelled when they
failed to attract their target market. Punathambekar argues that the programming on
MTV-Desi did not adequately intersect with the “decidedly transnational, hybrid, and
increasingly digital youth culture” (Punathambekar, 2009), but that are plenty of digital
media companies who are poised to do just that.
These kinds of relationships between Asian Americans and Asian culture industries
complicate our picture of cultural citizenship. In the vision of social justice drawn by the
activists discussed throughout the chapter—Karen Narasaki and others at the AAJC,
Hispanic and Latino media activists, members of the APAMC—media industries are seen as
an important site for increasing minority participation because who we see in the media
impacts how we think about ourselves and our communities. If we see Asian American
bodies and stories, then we can begin to include those bodies and stories within the
imagined borders of our nation. But the recognition of the relationships that Asian
Americans possess with countries outside the U.S. poses a challenge to this focus on
fighting for American citizenship. Although cultural citizenship is certainly an important
cause to fight for, if we examine the way that Asian Americans are interacting with global
flows of media, we can also rethink the necessity of claiming cultural citizenship only
within the U.S. Through cultural production and consumption, many Asian Americans are
constructing a kind of cultural citizenship that transgresses and disrupts national
boundaries, offering a new ethics of intercultural interaction and understanding.
For instance, second- and third-generation Indian Americans have begun attracting
attention as a lucrative market for Bollywood films, music, fashion, and dance cultures. As
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Jigna Desai argues, “the impact of the Bollywood film and music industry in the 1990s has
created a new language of cultural identity and affiliation among second-generation youth
in the United States” (Desai, 2005, p. 56). As a result, Bollywood filmmakers now create
storylines with this specific diasporic audience in mind, tracing cultural connections
between Non-Resident Indians and Indians in India with hopes of reincorporating the
larger community of diasporic Indians into the imagined community through cultural
engagement. Similarly, a New York Times article in March 2012 called attention to the
trend of “Korean Wave,” or hallyu, wherein South Korean cultural imports like soap operas
and musical groups have found popularity and fame in the West due to online social media.
With Korean music industries now focused on digital distribution and touring, K-pop bands
and artist like Wonder Girls, Super Junior, Jay Park, and Skull have been able to develop fan
bases in the U.S., making movies on the TeenNick channel and appearing on David
Letterman’s “Late Show” (Sang-Hun, 2012).
These examples of the flexibility of Asian American cultural citizenship help us to
better understand the kinds of relationships Asian Americans might have to their country
of origin or ancestry, and expands our notion of cultural citizenship beyond the borders of
the U.S. But within these examples there are more identities at play than simply Indian
Americans and Korean Americans. Bollywood film is popular in far-flung locales such as
the Middle East, Africa, and East Asia, and the term “Korean Wave” was originally applied
to the spread of South Korean culture throughout East Asia, including Indonesia, Japan,
Taiwan, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and China. If we can expand upon these two examples, it
seems that the kind of cultural citizenship illustrated within the sharing, creating, and
consuming of Asian and Asian American culture could more accurately be illustrative of an
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Asian American cosmopolitanism than diasporic nostalgia or the precise matching of
ethnicity or language to cultures of origin. Cosmopolitanism, when used in the realm of
culture, encompasses the idea that one is a “citizen of the world,” appreciating cultural
forms such as music, food, and artwork outside of their home culture. The idea of
cosmopolitanism often stands as a challenge to national identities, as we can see in these
cases of Asian American cosmopolitanism. But cosmopolitanism is also a moral
worldview—not merely describing the aesthetics of enjoying other cultures, but claiming
that one ought to engage with others and learn about their cultures. In fact, the basis of
cosmopolitanism is the idea that there are shared characteristics of all humans that
transcend cultural and societal difference, and therefore we must seek out these universal
traits through engaging with different societies and peoples (Appiah, 2006). Although we
must be careful not to neglect the power differences, particularly at the nation-state level,
that color our cultural differences and cannot always be transcended (Roberts, 2011),
theorizing the flow of media cultures between Asia and the U.S. within the ethics of
cosmopolitanism can help us to understand the importance of using cultural citizenship to
transform national boundaries.

Conclusion
Although Asian American media activists have already taken a position on the
NBC/Universal merger with Comcast that allies them with those who seek to consolidate
media ownership and close down opportunities for minority ownership and participation,
there are still numerous opportunities for policy intervention that can continue to
strengthen the representation of Asian Americans. It is clear that their strategy of
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partnering with NBC/Universal rather than standing in opposition positioned the Asian
American community to have a continued voice in the company’s business, just as they
positioned themselves as advisories to the Nielsen Company when it became clear that
Asian Americans had been left out of the ratings game. In recognizing the existence of
multiple Asian American cultural citizenships, as well as the idea of a global or
cosmopolitan Asian America, we can again see opportunities for diasporic and
transnational media endeavors that engage Asian American audiences and provide
opportunities for Asian American artists, actors, producers, and media professionals. The
increasingly productive relationship that Asian Americans have developed and maintained
with powerful media industries could very well open the door to encouraging and
supporting this kind of transnational media production.
Throughout this discussion of the way that Asian American activists have
intervened into the television industry there is always the looming presence of the “Asian
American audience” or the “Asian American consumer.” In each of these strategies for
policy interventions into the way that representations are shaped, shows are created,
ratings are measured, and channels are expanded, there must always be fundamental
considerations about the media corporation’s ability to make a profit from the decisions
that are made. The television networks, the Nielsen Company, and cable providers cannot
likely be convinced to change their ways unless there is a financial incentive to do so. Yet
within these exchanges, we cannot forget the fact that television programming is not the
product that is being sold. Rather, it is the selling of the audience to marketers that funds
and sustains the industry of television. Thus, it is important to know who the Asian
American audience is—how many consumers belong to this category, what their viewing
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habits look like, and how they spend their money. It is difficult to consider making an
argument the potential for Asian American television, whether for entire cable channels or
single Asian American characters and storylines, without this data. But it is not only media
creators who research this data. Other important bodies to consider are the multicultural
and Asian American advertising agencies that create and rely upon the existence of the
Asian American market in order to exist. In the next chapter I focus on the interaction
between Asian American advertising agencies and media companies to see how the
representation of Asian Americans is importantly related to marketing and advertising.

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Chapter Three
Social Change through the Asian American Market

In the previous chapters, we have seen Asian American media activists relying on
ethical motivations for impacting change. They argue that minority communities should be
represented accurately and fairly, that discrimination should be decreased and diversity
increased within the entertainment industries, and that their own community should be
included within the larger national citizenry as visualized within the media. The work of
convincing both media producers and audiences that these issues deserve their attention
involves highlighting the starkness of injustice and inequity that surrounds them. But there
are also ways in which this kind of work engages and relies upon the notion of consumer
activism, wherein change comes about through consumer groups collectively impacting the
sales and profits of powerful corporations. Given that media production is a business that
relies on selling a product, advocates do well to emphasize the saleability of a product that
aligns with their community’s needs—and its converse, the threat of boycott when a
product fails in the eyes of the community, or outright offends. Although it is possible to
convince audiences and producers to simply “do the right thing,” activists also realize the
strength of strategically positioning themselves as citizen-consumers, arguing that listening
to their demands is a financial necessity for the media industries that produce those
images.
This recognition of the power to impact the profitability of a show, a channel, or a
media corporation has long played a part in the strategies of traditional media activism
groups. Efforts to boycott a movie or theater for showing an offensive program were
clearly aimed to financially impact movie producers and distributors. In the early days of
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television when programming was tied to a single sponsor, pressure groups could
effectively exert influence over the show by convincing the advertisers to either pull their
financial backing from the show, or for the advertisers to demand a change in the contact.
As Montgomery (1989) argues, this kind of activism was most effective in the 1950s, when
shows had single sponsors, and those sponsors had significant control over the
programming. As the funding model changed in the early 1960s to spot advertisement or
the “magazine” format, with different advertisements mixed in alongside the programming,
this tactic became less effective. With this change in formatting, power over the content of
a show shifted from the sponsor to the networks, and advertisers exercised much less
influence over both scheduling and content. Further, if a sponsor received pressure from
an interest group and decided to pull their advertising, another advertiser could simply
replace them. Nevertheless, even as advertising continues to diversify and there are less
direct connections between sponsors and programming, activists still see advertising
agencies and corporations as important allies in their efforts to alter content. After all, the
financial model for television still exists solely based on selling audience eyeballs to
advertisers, and advertisers still want the high price of their investment in programming to
contribute to an increase in their bottom line. Given this relationship, advertisers do retain
some power in their relationships with television networks, and media activists can take
advantage of this relationship in furthering their own goals.
If advertisers play an important role in influencing media producers, then
positioning a community as one of powerful consumers is essential in convincing
advertisers to pay attention to any sort of demands. Asian American media activists have
recently begun to do just that, emphasizing the strength of their own spending power in
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attempts to woo advertisers to their point of view. In 2010, the Affirmative Action and
Diversity staff at the Screen Actors Guild commissioned a report called “From Dollars and
Sense to Screen: The Asian Pacific Islander Market and the Entertainment Industry,”
outlining both ethical and fiscal imperatives for industry professionals hiring more Asian
Americans. As the report states, “Like other consumers, APIs respond best to products and
advertisements that seemingly understand and cater to their individuality and culture.
Consumers like to see themselves in media and will consume products to which they can
relate” (Screen Actors Guild Affirmative Action and Diversity, 2010, p. 11). In this report
and in other similar presentations to media executives, Asian Americans do more than
request advertisers to learn about their culture—they also position Asian Americans as one
of the fastest growing and most wealthy base of consumers that cannot be ignored. This
portrait of Asian America is in stark opposition to the image of the poor, working class
Asian Americans who suffered from discrimination in Chinatowns and other immigrant
communities that dominated during the height of the Yellow Power movement. By
invoking a new set of images, activists hope to change the way that representations are
conceived and produced, rather than simply reacting to—or worse, accepting—the images
that are presented to them.
This kind of consumer activism is of course not separate or disengaged from
politics; on the contrary, as Lawrence Glickman (2009) argues in his history of consumer
activism, American politics have always been intertwined with the demands and activities
of consumer society. From anti-slavery campaigns in the 1800s to the long-standing use of
boycotts to convey a social message, the powerful impact of consumption on politics is far
from revolutionary or new. In the previous chapter I argued for the productive potential
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within media policy and interventions by regulatory bodies. This chapter’s exploration of
the marketplace as a site for social change is reflective of a neoliberal landscape wherein
the enterprising individual is thought to be capable of governing him or herself. Consumer
activism is based on the idea that an individual’s everyday choices of what to purchase and
how to consume are deeply social and political acts that can have long-term
consequences—and moreover, can reflect the ethics of the individual as well. This kind of
neoliberal focus on the individual marks yet another departure from traditional views of
Asian American Studies, which emphasize the power of collective struggles for social
justice. One important way of viewing the consequences of Asian American collective
consumption is to connect their actions to the discourse on citizenship. Given that
citizenship in the U.S. is often explicitly tied to the buying power of any group of
individuals, the acknowledgement of Asian Americans as a distinct group of consumers is
importantly connected to their recognition as citizens.
At the center of this conversation about the creation of the Asian American
marketplace, recognition of the strength of Asian American consumers, and the subsequent
intervention into discourses of cultural citizenship, are advertising agencies. Alongside the
steady rise of the multicultural advertising business, including those focusing on the
African American and Hispanic markets, numerous agencies in areas like New York, San
Francisco, and Los Angeles have formed to specifically target Asian Americans since the
1980s. Working with clients of every size—from McDonalds and national insurance
agencies to small community organizations and projects—these agencies serve to bring
brands, products and messaging into Asian American communities that are largely
informed by ethnic media. This includes placing ads within television programming,
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community newspapers, and public spaces where information is primarily conveyed “in-
language,” or in non-English languages. The dominant segments targeted by Asian
American advertisers include Chinese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, and Vietnamese. Other
ethnic groups, such as Japanese, Cambodian, Laotian, and other Asian American
communities are only targeted for specific campaigns.
By investigating the work of such agencies, we can gain important insights into the
relationship between Asian American consumption and citizenship. Further, advertisers
also work to create and insert the image of Asian Americans into the media. Advertising
agencies do more than direct campaigns and shape brands; they are also media producers
themselves, creating everything from print and video media creations to immersive brand
experiences that utilize Asian American actors and professionals. This chapter focuses on
the work of these agencies in creating and reifying the idea of an Asian American market
that can be sold to their clients, and the resulting images that are created to invoke and
entice such an audience. Through interviews with industry professionals, visits to the
offices of advertising agencies, attendance at the annual Asian American Advertising
Federation’s Marketing Summit, and analysis of various ad campaigns, we can begin to
understand the critical role that marketers can play in the world of media advocacy. I first
consider the ways that the creation of such a market can be seen as problematic, since it
seems to rely on stereotypes and generalizations that belie the actual diversity of the Asian
population in the US and are reminiscent of the myth of the model minority. Moreover,
given that advertising is based on the idea of commodifying identity into a product that can
be sold for profit, there is also a question of how politically beneficial the creation of this
kind of market can be for a disenfranchised community. I then go on to consider some of
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the ways in which advertisers can avoid these problems, and further, how they are
contributing important efforts in the fight for more representation and better
representation of Asian Americans in mainstream media. In doing so, they recognize the
power of Asian Americans as consumer-citizens and open up new possibilities for the
politicization of Asian American media.

Consumer Culture and Citizenship
Before delving into the use of consumer culture and minority advertising agencies
for political purposes, it is important to discuss about the role that advertising plays in our
society. Although marketing ostensibly exists to sell products and brands, advertisements
also work to indelibly associate mass consumption with aspirational lifestyles and values
that align with dominant ideologies. Advertising’s plethora of repeating images and
competing signifiers crowd the visual arena, continually confirming hegemonic ideals and
norms. As Stuart Ewen (1976) argues, advertising creates an illusion of a homogeneous
national culture of plenty that can be attained through consumer culture and leisure. He
traces the construction of this illusion back to the 1920s, when workers’ lives were
becoming increasingly industrial and feelings of alienation and the loss of community
began to grow. In contrast to this collective loss of power, “the basic impulse in advertising
was one of control, of actively channeling social impulses toward a support of corporation
capitalism and its productive and distributive priorities” (Ewen, 1976, p. 81). But in
upholding the system of capitalism, advertising effectively conceals social inequalities and
disparities, suppressing any attempts to challenge the status quo. The promise of
happiness as a result of consumption serves to replace the desire for the satisfaction of fair
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wages, political power and participation, social equality, or other desirable improvements
in the lives of ordinary citizens. From this historical view of the way that advertising was
deliberately utilized in the dampening of resentment about the loss of power for laborers,
we can already begin to understand some of the critiques of the marketing industry. But
when we then turn to the way that advertisers specifically focus on minority communities,
their profit-oriented motives seem even more dangerous.
Advertising and consumer culture have always played an important role in creating
and defining social identities such as those related to race, gender, or sexual orientation,
just to name a few. The advertising industry operates by segmenting different
demographic or market categories so that messages can be tailored to specifically appeal to
these target audiences. But the act of creating these distinct identities as market segments
constitutes those identities for consumers as well—through the work of advertising,
ideologies and identities become inextricably bound. As Robert Goldman argues, the
meaning of a commodity is not determined by its use value, but by the combination of
product and image that emerges out of the social practice of advertising. Products become
so deeply associated with the signs attached to them that they can no longer be disengaged,
and the consumer becomes transfixed by the process of drawing “pleasure from the image-
making process itself, the glorification of the product by associating it with important social
qualities becoming our satisfaction too” (Goldman, 1992, p. 19). We can see that
advertisements to women for cleaning products and to men for powerful trucks, to girls for
pretty dolls and to boys for construction sets, all clearly teach consumers about the
normative rules of gender in our society—and offer the acquisition of goods as the means
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for successfully achieving these social identities and relationships. In this sense, the
business of selling products cannot be separated from the politics of identity.
This relationship between the construction of commodities and identities is of
critical importance for communities who suffer from the imbalance of power inherent
within capitalism, and for those whose visibility—or lack thereof—has real political
consequences. As Katherine Sender (2004) argues in her examination of gay marketing,
“even a cursory look at contemporary marketing activity reveals that the separation of
business endeavors from their political effects is spurious” (p. 4). On the contrary, the
place of gays and lesbians within the marketplace is deeply connected to their social and
political struggles. Although the recognition of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender
(GLBT) consumers as an attractive market can serve to demonstrate affirmation and
acceptance, activists within the GLBT community have worried that this carefully
constructed visibility might also have negative effects on their fight to gain political power.
This is particularly worrisome given the potential for promoting an assimilationist politics
within grassroots organizations, and the tendency to skew visibility toward only the more
secure segments of the community, such as white male professionals. Arlene Davila (2001)
is similarly concerned about the impact of the advertising world on Latino identities and
politics. As she argues, the advertising industry’s “political economy, history, and
composition are directly implicated in the global processes and transnational bases that
sustain commonplace understandings of Latinos as a ‘people’ and a ‘culture’” (p. 3). When
Hispanic advertising then positions the community as unified and depoliticized, or as
falling into patterns such as being culture-bound, family-oriented and brand-loyal, these
characterizations are solidified as meaningful and salient, removing any possibility for
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competing or contradictory narratives. For all minority groups, advertising agencies—
among a host of other social forces—constitute identities as inherently generalizable,
homogeneous, and thus manageable. In doing so, identities can be manipulated and
contained, serving to increase the profits for both advertising agencies and the
corporations who hire them to improve their brand and sell more products.
If advertising and consumer culture serve to silence resistance and gloss over social
injustices, it seems that the growth of multicultural advertising industries would then be
implicated in these problems. Indeed, the commoditization of identity within different
spheres of the advertising world deserves close examination and critique, as Sender and
Davila have done. But I also want to consider the way that everyday practices of
consumption can be productively constitutive of citizenship, and what political possibilities
that relationship entails. Consumption and citizenship are often closely related in popular
discourse—one need look no further than the post-9/11 injunction to stave off the
terrorists by continuing to go shopping to see that a citizen is one who participates in
upholding the American economy by consuming goods and products. But the arena of
consumption can also be connected to the idea of participation in political life, since one’s
buying power can be seen as a political act. As Nestor Garcia Canclini (2001) argues, “when
we select goods and appropriate them, we define what we consider publicly valuable, the
ways we integrate and distinguish ourselves in society, and the ways to combine
pragmatism with pleasure” (p. 20). Although consumption can be caricatured as a system
where dehumanizing corporations work to deceive the masses into blindly buying into a
system that oppresses them, there are many ways in which the picture is much more
complicated than this—the act of selling and buying can be interactive, and consumers can
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have agency in contributing to the way that society values or defines certain objects and
practices. Although the idea that consumers have a “choice” is debatable, it is still possible
that through the act of choosing one product over another, consumers are communicating
what is important to them, and voting with their dollars for a system of cultural values that
accords with their own.
Lizabeth Cohen (2008) traces the history of the relationship between citizenship
and consumerism in the creation of what she calls the Consumers’ Republic—“an economy,
culture, and politics built around the promises of mass consumption, both in terms of
material life and the more idealistic goals of greater freedom, democracy, and equality” (p.
7). Cohen sees mass consumption as one of the defining aspects of American society,
seeping into every corner of politics and culture. She is particularly interested in the way
that individuals have developed politicized identities as consumers—the “citizen
consumers” who organize to protect the rights of consumers, the “purchaser consumers”
who use the positive effects of their own purchasing power to assert themselves, and the
“purchaser as citizen” who contributes to the maintenance of a national economy with his
or her personal purchases. In each of these formations, citizenship is gained through one’s
behavior as a consumer—either by becoming civically engaged or through simply
upholding the cultural ideals of the nation through consumption.
Although individual acts of consumption may seem to be self-interested and thus
have no bearing on the nation as a whole, Cohen reveals the ways that individuals become
part of a collective consuming body that can wield political power. In the early consumer
movements, individuals banded together to fight for things like fair pricing and product
quality. Disempowered groups like women and African Americans also had the
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opportunity to demonstrate their opinion through consumption, strengthening their
collective voices through boycotts and consumer activism, and legitimating themselves as
important political constituencies. In Cohen’s assessment of the Consumers’ Republic, “a
dynamic mass consumption economy [expected] not only to delivery prosperity, but also to
fulfill American society’s loftier aspirations: more social egalitarianism, more democratic
participation, and more political freedom” (Cohen, 2008, p. 403).
The connection between practices of consumption and citizenship is also important
to recognize in the context of minority communities, such as African Americans. Robert
Weems (1998) argues that the recognition of African Americans as a legitimate consumer
group at the turn of the century helped blacks develop the ability to protest offensive
advertisements, support the growth of black-owned businesses, and use their collective
spending power for political gain. In fact, Weems characterizes consumer activism as the
most “potent nonviolent strategy employed by African Americans” during the Civil Rights
Movement, which drew strength from a long history of boycotts such as the “Don’t Buy
Where You Can’t Work” campaigns in the 1930s and the promotion of “Double Duty”
patronage of black-owned stores. We can see through these examples that a group’s
collective behavior as consumers can have a serious impact, and that consumption can be
an empowering act of citizenship.
But Weems also warns about the dangers of going too far in conflating consumption
with political action, since it can also come with negative consequences. Once marketers
realized that their sales would increase when they targeted black audiences, they set their
sights on alcohol and cigarettes, promoting products that clearly impacted the health of the
black community. Blaxploitation films similarly showed the potential dangers of becoming
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a marketable audience. Films showcased the talents of black actors and actresses, but
contained “extra doses of the film industry’s unholy trinity of sex, violence, and crime.
Thus, the term ‘blaxploitation,’ while not grammatically correct, does accurately convey the
fleecing of African American moviegoers during this era” (Weems, 1998, p. 83). This
“fleecing” was further compounded by the fact that few African Americans actually made
money off of these films, given that the theaters were largely owned by white businessmen
and the profits from the cheaply made films went to their white producers. As with Cohen,
Weems argues that there are always drawbacks to the elevation of consumption as a means
for politics. While African Americans may have become active citizens in their fight for
consumer rights, their increased visibility as a collective made them a target for harmful
campaigns. Once they had become a visible consumer group, advertisers and corporations
wanted their spending money at any cost, obviously for no regard to the social implications
of their advertising or of the harmful impact of their products—all they wanted was to
increase their own profits.
These potential issues that arise in the constitution of a new consumer audience,
particularly one that is already marginalized or oppressed, are important to note. As
Elizabeth Chin (2001) argues in her exploration of black kids and consumer culture,
“consumer consumption [is] a sphere of inequality where differences in consumption are
the result of processes beyond that of the accretion of individual desire” (p. 8). Differences
and inequalities are not lessened within the consumer world, and the same political and
economic factors that saturate our everyday lives remain present. As we can see in Weems’
work, these inequalities are both created and transmitted through media industries—in the
representation of minorities and in the economic structures that produce and distribute
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those images. Thus, the relationship between consumer audiences and discourses of
citizenship is of critical importance in looking at Asian American media activism. Given
that an important element of citizenship is the act of being represented at all, there are
countless ways in which Asian Americans have been distanced from being part of the
imagined nation. But through harnessing the power of their collective voice as consumers,
Asian Americans have the opportunity to impact a change in their own representation.

Defining the Asian American Consumer
If consumption can help us to define citizenship, political involvement, and a larger
notion of representation, then what exactly does Asian American consumer culture look
like? Throughout the greater part of the 20
th
century, Asian Americans were not seen as a
desirable market to advertisers or media companies. As mentioned in previous chapters,
this is related to the idea that a panethnic Asian American identity had not yet been clearly
articulated, either within the community or as a market segment. Yet as Shirley Lim (2006)
argues, there is still evidence that popular culture provided a site for Asian Americans to
enter the American consumer republic. In her investigation of Asian American newspapers
and magazines, she finds that “examining liberal-democratic narratives shows how Asian
Americans used that language within their popular culture practices to argue for an
enhanced place in the American nation-state” (Lim, 2006, p. 90). In the 1930s, Chinese
Americans sought to assert their nationalism and use cultural citizenship as evidence that
they did not support Japanese aggression in Asia. In one instance of employing consumer
culture to do so, Chinese American women participated in a boycott of silk stockings. Over
500 Chinese women marched through New York, waving banners and embodying their
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solidarity with a number of other anti-Japanese boycotts aimed at condemning Japanese
imperialism and aggression (Glickman L. , 2005).
After the Japanese American internment ended, Japanese American magazines from
the 1950s like Scene, Nisei Vue and East Wind implored their readers to Americanize
themselves by performing cultural citizenship and engaging in consumer culture—to dress
and fix their hair in contemporary styles, participate in traditional sororities and women’s
clubs, and throw parties with American food products. Lim argues that “the magazine’s
founders wished to lessen racial prejudice through demonstrating proper belonging in
American democratic-liberal consumer culture” (Lim, 2006, p. 100). Despite Lim’s
assertion that this kind of engagement with consumer culture had the potential to alleviate
social inequalities, the commercialization of Asian American identities within media and
other cultural practices has been controversial within Asian American community. When
the Asian American lifestyle magazine Jade was first published in 1974, writers from the
radical Asian American community newspaper Gidra were extremely critical of its
appropriation of Asian American identity for profit. In an article titled, “Jade: Magazine for
Colonized Asians,” the writers argues that articles on restaurateur Rocky Aoki (“modest
pimp of Asian culture”), airline stewardess Suzi Kawasoye (“promoting the travel and
tourism business for the sake of American imperialism”), Congressman Spark Matsunaga
(“glorifying Asian who have made it to become politicians within a corrupt system”), and
Asian eye makeup (“Asian women’s eyes can become more desirable to western eyes”) are
evidence that editor-publisher Gerald Jann is either terribly misguided, or “a conscious
capitalist exploiting the public just for the sake of selling a product” (Monkawa, 1974).
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This kind of critique bleeds over into Asian American literature as well, where Viet
Nguyen (2002) finds that Asian American writers and intellectuals have capitalized and
profited from a strategy of panethnic entrepreneurship in spite of an avowed desire to use
anti-capitalism as a force for anti-racism. Nguyen teases out this contradiction, arguing
that “the contemporary Asian American identity that has allowed Asian Americans to
participate in American politics—frequently as an anticapitalist force—has now also
become a thing, a commodity, to be marketed and consumed” (Nguyen, 2002, p. 9). Rather
than naively idealize resistance and the subversion of capitalism, Nguyen implores
academics to address the complexities of both symbolic and economic capital, and the role
that they play in the construction of Asian American identities and political participation.
Given these concerns, the existence and operation of Asian American advertising agencies
is clearly a fraught space for examining the potential for media activism. In heeding
Nguyen’s call to critically confront the role of panethnic entrepreneurship without slipping
into blanket condemnation, let us now examine the work of these agencies and their
potential for improving political discourse and participation.

The Rise of Asian American Advertising Agencies
Although Asian American advertising agencies have been in existence for decades
alongside other multicultural marketers, their work remains difficult to compare to their
counterparts in the African American and Hispanic/Latino advertising world. Asian
American advertisers are still forced to spend a lot of energy making the argument to
corporations that their community deserves attention, and more specifically, a dedicated
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budget for advertising to the Asian American market. This is in contrast to the successes of
the African American and Hispanic markets, which have rapidly blossomed into
multibillion dollar industries.
7
The business of selling and promoting the Asian American
market
8
is held back by a number of factors. First, at only 4% of the US population, Asian
Americans represent a comparatively small slice of the general market. Second, there are a
number of assumptions made about Asian Americans that may seem like insurmountable
challenges for advertisers. In an article in Advertising Age, Bill Imada addresses the issue of
small size along with three other common misperceptions might convince a corporation
that they should not tackle the Asian American market: that Asian Americans can be
reached through English general market ads, that Asian American media are dying, and that
the population is too diverse to be a viable market (Imada B. , 2007). Imada works to
debunk these myths by arguing that culturally sensitive ads created in Asian languages,
properly placed within the vibrant Asian ethnic media, will have a tremendous impact on
the 15 million Asian Americans whose population and spending capital rival countless
European nations.
Yet the existence of such an article and the ease with which these excuses come to
mind remains a significant barrier for Asian American agencies to overcome. Although

7
In fact, increasing dollars for an Asian American budget is often (unfortunately) achieved
by decreasing dollars from a company’s African American or Hispanic budget over to the
Asian American budget, given that many companies refuse to expand the overall amount of
money allocated to minority markets. This effectively converts all minority marketers into
competitors.

8
One executive within the Asian American advertising industry informed me that insiders
do not actually use the term “Asian American market,” and simply call it the “Asian
market”—a title that would make sense if they are simply referring to race (such as Black,
or Hispanic), and not nationality (American). But since the marketing agencies explored in
this chapter only work in the US and do not do any advertising in Asia, I will continue to
refer to the “Asian American market” to be as clear as possible.
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there are plenty of corporations who now enthusiastically go after the Asian American
market, one executive noted that even for one of their largest clients, seven years passed
from the day they started talking until the day they signed them—and that this length of
time was not unusual in the least. For IW Group in particular, there is a policy in place that
they will not try to poach clients from other Asian American advertising agencies. “The pie
is so small, there are so few advertisers in the Asian American marketplace, the game
should be about growing the pie,” explained an employee. Their main goal is always to
simply bring more new clients into the Asian American market, no matter who ends up
signing them. This is particularly important given how volatile the business can be; for
small advertising agencies with only one or two clients, losing a client can mean shuttering
their doors, and during the recent recession dozens of large corporations pulled out of the
Asian market altogether.
Another challenge facing Asian American marketers is the lack of research and data
on Asian consumers, and the difficulty that agencies face in conducting their own research.
The assumption that Asian Americans are not a viable market affects more than the
corporations who continue to ignore the segment—it also affects the way that large
research companies collect their data. While most advertising agencies can pay large
research firms to collect data on their consumer segment, most of these firms either do not
collect data on Asians or do not differentiate by ethnicity, making the data that they do
collect extremely prone to miscalculation, overly simplistic, and difficult to use.
Researchers within the strategic planning departments of these advertising agencies are
forced to rely on the Census as their baseline, with additional data from only a handful of
infrequent research studies.
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Alice Lee, Vice President of Research and Development at LA 18, is acutely aware of
the difficulties that exist in collecting data on Asian American audiences. Since LA 18 is the
biggest Asian language television station in Southern California, Lee has a significant
budget—particularly in comparison to small advertising firms—for conducting and
gathering research on the Asian American market. She happily shares her data with
advertising firms in the effort to collectively bring more companies into the Asian American
market, but the data itself is often incredibly poor. Some research companies conduct their
studies only in English and Spanish, so many Asian immigrant families cannot even begin to
fill out the extensive surveys. Further, she found that a large automotive study was using
surnames as a marker of race, which left Asians significantly undercounted. After
investigating deeper, she found that the name Lee was marked as Caucasian and that all
Hispanic surnames were marked as Hispanic, despite the prevalence of Filipinos with
Hispanic surnames and Asians with the name Lee—including, of course, Lee herself. As a
member of the Asian Pacific Advocacy Board for Nielsen, Lee has also seen the problems
that the face even the largest and most trusted source of data on media consumption. For
instance, in the Los Angeles area, Nielsen surveys has only 1000 meters. Since Los Angeles
is around 14% Asian Pacific American, that means that only around 140 of these families
are Asian—a number that shrinks even further when differentiated by ethnicity. As a
result, the data is extremely unstable and unreliable. As Lee explains it, to get an accurate
portrait of the viewers of her station LA 18, she surveys between 800 and 1000 Chinese
and Koreans alone. With Nielsen surveying such a drastically reduced number of Asian
American viewers, it becomes clear why most Asian American advertisers simply say that
“Nielsen doesn’t do Asians” (Lee A. , 2011).
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Another problem is that Asian Americans are amongst the highest users of mobile
phones (Kellogg, 2011), which makes traditional telephonic surveying very difficult, while
mail surveys are slow and expensive. As a result of this dearth of data from even the
largest research corporations, most agencies are left to conduct much of their own
research, both in testing specific campaigns for their clients and in general baseline surveys
of their population. One company explained that they essentially do one large study every
year that focuses on a question they have identified as critical at that moment, such as,
“How do Asian Americans use social media?” or “How do Asian Americans consume
packaged goods?” Researchers within Asian American advertising firms mostly collect
qualitative data, including focus groups, interviews at shopping malls or on street corners,
webcam interviews, and making ethnographic visits into private homes and other spaces of
consumption. Larger quantitative studies are only undertaken on occasion, given the
immense cost that it takes to do so.
But this kind quantitative research suffers from a number of problems. In
particular, reports from the US Census that provide baseline data for these corporations are
based on artificially constructed racial categories that reify racial distinctions and
institutionalize difference in arbitrary but politically significant ways. Davila (2001) notes
the consequences of being able to collect Census data on the Hispanic population in the
US—on the one hand, advertisers were legitimized in their work because they had the
numbers to prove that their community existed. But it also served to flatten difference
between all Latin American and Hispanic communities. Ien Ang (1991) also calls into
question the emphasis on numerical ratings within discussions of television audiences.
Media industries behave as if these sought-after audiences really exist, when in fact “no
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representation of ‘television audience,’ empirical or otherwise, gives us direct access to any
actual audience” (p. 34). Rather, the notion of an audience is merely a discursive construct
that serves to deliver profits to the television stations via advertising corporations. Indeed,
the entire commercial television industry depends on the collection of ratings and the
conversion of these statistics into advertising dollars.
Despite these contradictions, as well as the empirical difficulties that Asian
American agencies can face in coming up with good quantitative data, it is precisely these
hard facts and figures that can be their greatest selling point in attracting new clients and
developing the notion of the Asian American consumer. From the numbers, the Asian
American market looks incredibly appealing. In a 2010 video commissioned by the Asian
American Advertising Federation entitled “Asian Consumers—A Segment You Can’t
Ignore,” the most promising highlights of the population are described. In the video’s
teaser, available on the 3AF organization’s website, images of Bollywood, sushi, the
Jabbawockees, yoga, Lucy Liu and Pokemon flash across the screen while a hip, youthful
soundtrack blares in the background. We learn within the three-minute video that Asian
Americans are “your new growth segment.” Infographics illustrate the fact that Asian
Americans have billions of dollars in spending power, the highest household income of any
racial group, they are well educated and own businesses, they are online, they buy tons of
luxury goods and organic food, and best yet—they are growing at an unequaled rate.
Although these statistics are meant to convince corporations that Asian Americans
should be taken seriously as a market segment, they do so by reifying nearly every tenet of
the model minority myth. In this video, we appear to witness empirical proof that Asians
are not only smart and wealthy, but that they are poised to take over America in the
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manner of the model minority’s threatening counterpart, the yellow peril. Identifying the
parallels between these characterizations of the Asian American consumer helps to
illuminate a number of insights. First, it is clear why advertising agencies would rely on
these statistics—the model minority Asian American appears to be an ideal customer. As
the marketers put it, who wouldn’t want to go after an audience that is so likely to spend
money on their products? Moreover, all advertising agencies function by positioning their
market as the ideal consumers, whether that market is teenagers, women, Hispanics,
homeowners, or early adopters.
But characterizing this particular construction of Asian Americans within the myth
of the model minority helps to reveal some of the specific problems that can arise in doing
so. First, these statistics may capture averages or describe a segment of the Asian
American population, but they conceal the true diversity of the community. There are
thousands of Asian Americans who are living at the poverty level, who are political
refugees, who do not speak English or are illiterate, who are migrant laborers, who are
jobless or homeless, or who otherwise do not fulfill the myth of the model minority. If we
return to the idea that creating a consumer audience can play a part in constituting
citizenship, we can see that this idea of the model minority grants citizenship to those who
are likely already fully participating in American civic life. For these ad agencies to be
laboring to expand the boundaries of Asian American citizenship, they would need to push
beyond the limits of the model minority and gesture to the thousands of Americans of Asian
descent who become invisible within this discourse, and are treated as second-class
citizens as a result. For these individuals, trying to invoke consumer culture as a means of
constructing citizenship will do little to change their realities.
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The Politics of Accurate Research
Yet this is only a broad caricature of the work that advertising agencies actually
undertake on a daily basis. When drawing in a client they may paint the picture of an
audience that consists of only model minorities, but when it actually comes to designing a
campaign, they know that their success rests on creating products that are targeted,
nuanced, and culturally specific to the precise demographic they are trying to reach. As one
advertiser put it, “If we’re talking about entering the Asian market I don’t have a problem
relying on the [broader] data. But when we decide to target and market you’re going after
the market you can serve.” In fact, some advertisers were quite pointed in their critique of
the term “model minority”:
I hate the term model minority. It cuts both ways. It says model on the basis of
what? Commentators will say, you’re Asian you don’t cause any trouble. You’re
studious and you’re quiet and not troublesome. That’s annoying because it says you
don’t stand up for your rights. So that’s something we don’t advocate. It’s not one
minority, it’s way too complex for that. And there are serious problems within the
ethnicities. (Narayanan, 2011)
In hearing about the strategies that they actually employ within their specific campaigns, it
becomes clear that their work does not simply address “Asian America” as if such a broad
categorization exists or is useful. Rather, each specific campaign focuses on a pre-
determined ethnic group of a certain gender, age, educational background, geographic
location, and socioeconomic standing. The majority of any given campaign focuses on five
main segments—Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino and Indians—and then further
differentiates from there. Although the use of a “pan-Asian” ad might be created in some
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circumstances, using voiceovers in multiple languages with the same non-speaking image
of an East Asian actor, this kind of work is becoming more rare.
In order to successfully know their audience, advertisers research deep into their
communities with their qualitative studies that flesh out the depth and complexity of their
true audience. interTrend, an Asian American communications agency in Los Angeles,
conducted a study on the way that Twitter was being used in Japan after the 2011
earthquake in Tohoku. They had noticed that there was a flurry of activity on Twitter after
the earthquake occurred, so they invited a team of their own researchers, partners at
Bassett & Company, and a select group of academics who study Japan and social media to
take a closer look. The results of their study are highlighted in a brief video entitled,
“Twitter: The New Haiku,” which is featured on the company’s YouTube site. The study’s
most prominent findings include the fact that there was a marked increase in the use of
emotive language—words like hope, sadness, and love—in tweets from Japan immediately
following the earthquake. Researchers connected the proliferation of these messages with
Japan’s cultural connection to haiku—an ancient Japanese form of poetry that is tightly
structured but allows for much emotional depth and connections between the writer and
the reader. Just as haiku are limited to three lines of verse containing only 17 syllables,
messages on Twitter are limited to only 140 characters. Anna Xie, who served as a
research manager for the project, outlined a few outcomes of the research. On the one
hand, the agency had an opportunity to learn more about how Asians were employing
online social networking, which is an arena that advertisers are always keen to understand
better. They also tapped into a cultural phenomenon that she hopes will help their
company to better understand Japanese Americans and Asian Americans, given the
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strength of transnational cultural flows between Asia and Asian American communities
(Xie, 2011). Researchers at interTrend work hard to stay on top of a multitude of trends in
Asia in the hopes that they can capitalize on the next crossover hit, like sushi or karaoke.
But another outcome of the study was that they were able to better understand the
way that Japanese people communicated their emotions. Xie noted that Westerners often
seem to assume that Japanese people are stoic and dispassionate, unable to express their
feelings. Through interTrend’s analysis of Twitter and their interviews with Japanese
living in Japan and Japanese Americans, they were better able to understand the cultural
nuances of emotional expression and shift away from these somewhat derogatory
stereotypes (Xie, 2011). Research projects like this one, then, offer an opportunity to
collect data about a community that is often neglected and relegated to stereotypes, and to
transform that data into representations that are more accurate, authentic, and culturally
sensitive.
Advertisers are often seen to stress the importance of understanding the cultural
specificities of Asian American audiences. For instance, they know that they can’t use the
same ad for a Filipino community that they created with the Chinese community in mind,
and make sure that the in-language material is not just a direct translation. Years ago, one
Asian American firm translated the statement, “It makes my mouth water” into Vietnamese,
where the statement ended up as “My saliva drips profusely” (Imada B. , 2011). This
comical mistranslation provided an instructive moment that helped to emphasize the
importance of the culturally relevant use of language. As the Managing Director of AAAZA
Kevin Vu stated, “We do transcreation, not translation. It’s not about the literal translation
from one language to another, it’s about creating ideas that make sense and resonate in
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different contexts” (Vu, 2011). This idea of transcreation, or completely recreating an idea
so that it resonates with a cross-cultural audience, offers an important model for the work
of Asian American cultural producers more generally. Given the diversity of the
community, it is unlikely that any single idea could be used to the same effect without this
kind of rigorous intercultural conceptualization. A failure to consider the transportability
of concepts across culture often results in images that are not only culturally irrelevant, but
also potentially offensive.
In the early years of Asian American advertising, there was a more generic use of
Asian iconography, such as pagodas, cherry blossoms, bamboo, or pandas. Contemporary
advertisers are sensitive to these mistakes of the past and create ads that are culturally
relevant to a new generation of Asian Americans. This can even lead to conflict with their
clients, since advertisers create ads that do not carry the traditional visual markers of
“Asianness.” The client often ends up asking, “What’s Asian about this ad?” Since
advertisers are dedicated to creating material that truly speaks to their audience, the
images that they create are designed to connect on a level that runs deeper than a simple
stereotype and serves to differentiate between the multiple identities within Asian
America.

Advocacy and Activism Through Advertising
Through this work, we can see that one way the work of Asian American advertising
agencies can be positioned as activist is through the fact that they are creating images of
Asian Americans with a specific goal in mind—to stay true to the community, avoid
stereotypes, and create characters and storylines that Asian Americans will actually relate
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to and believe in. I want to be clear that this is a very particular—and limited—form of
activism, given that it is occurring through and within a capitalistic endeavor that clearly
does not attempt or even desire to radically alter the social inequalities sustained within
capitalism. Moreover, those who work within advertising agencies do so with the goal of
making money, rather than with the goal of remedying a social injustice. But just as media
activist groups like MANAA and the APAMC seek to work within the existing media system
to simply improve and proliferate representation from inside the industry without
challenging the system itself, advertising agencies can also be seen to fight for some of the
same goals as traditional media activists. While it might be inaccurate to call these
individuals or organizations activist, I argue that they are nevertheless contributing efforts
toward activist causes and need to be assessed within the idea of Asian American media
activism.
As media producers, their goals of creating accurate, relatable content can surely be
seen as political in nature when we consider the larger media landscape that often aims to
do none of these things with regard to Asian Americans. In fact, this goal seems remarkably
similar to MANAA’s goals of rejecting stereotypes, but here we see a marked attempt to not
simply make a list of stereotypes and then ban them. Rather, Asian American advertisers
are most concerned with actually interacting with Asian American community members to
learn about their actual experiences, purchasing habits, histories, likes and dislikes. In this
sense, their work moves beyond complaining about stereotypes to actually creating
original content that resonates with Asian American audiences. From a media studies
perspective it might be counterintuitive to conceive of advertisers as progressive political
agents, given advertising’s long history of contributing to harmful stereotypes, promoting
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products that are unhealthy such as cigarettes and alcohol, and generally misleading
consumers in service of helping a large corporation to make a profit. Yet I still want to
consider the fact that Asian American advertisers are media producers, and in examining
their own particular histories and goals as well as the images that they create, we can begin
to frame their work within a larger conversation about the politics of representation.
In doing so, we must consider the way that consumer culture and activism have a
different relationship in the 21
st
century that is increasingly flexible. My use of the term
“activist” in this assessment is particularly situated within our neoliberal moment, where
the marketplace has become the central site for rendering identities visible and allowing
capitalist endeavours to be reframed as ethical or political. As Banet-Weiser and
Mukherjee (2012) argue, within the discursive formations of neoliberalism, both
consumers and corporations can participate in activism through their virtuous capitalistic
undertakings. For consumers, this means practicing “doing good” through thoughtful
purchasing and ethical consumption—purchasing from companies who are thought to be
contributing to social change in some way, or avoiding companies whose social practices
are thought to be problematic. For corporations, this means practicing “Corporate Social
Responsibility” and doing business that leads to desirable social outcomes, even when it is
clear that these social justice ventures simultaneously increase their own profits. Under
this logic, it makes sense to consider Asian American advertising agencies as potential
agents of social change, even as their first priority is always to remain profitable as a
business.
If Asian American advertisers are contributing to social change in their work, it is
important to consider the size of impact that their images might produce. One potential
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limit to the effects of their work on the broader population is that Asian American
marketers largely create advertisements for ethnic or in-language media and are noticeably
absent from the mainstream market. Thus, while many of the images that they create
might be innovative and commendable, it is unlikely that their impact will spread to a
larger audience. Yet this is where the labor of the marketers themselves comes into play.
As champions of their own media creations, they are in constant conversation with their
clients, working to convince them that Asian American advertising is a priority. Once an
image has been created, it is possible that the corporation can then choose to use that
advertisement wherever they please, and in some cases there has been a crossover
between ads placed in ethnic media and the general market. Advertisers report that there
have been many cases where a company has been so pleased with a commercial or a
campaign that they have decided to extend it beyond the limited range of the multicultural
market. For instance, a McDonald’s advertisement for strawberry lemonade that featured
Asian American dance stars Yuri Kim and Victor Wong—both of whom were stars of the
show America’s Best Dance Crew on MTV—made the crossover from ethnic media to
mainstream media in the summer of 2011, much to the delight of Asian American
audiences.
Beyond the creation and exposure of images by Asian American advertisers, there is
also a more deliberate role that advertisers can take to make a difference. Within their own
ranks, Asian American marketers often serve to police their own work and the work of
their competitors. As Asian Americans, they are not immune from creating images that
uphold stereotypes or offend their own community, and they are not afraid to take a stand
when problematic images surface. Bill Imada from IW Group explained:
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Sometimes I look at the work of our competitors and the work we do, and I’ll say,
“Who created that? It really upsets me.” We make a lot of mistakes too. One of our
competitors made a brilliant ad as part of an anti-smoking campaign that was
terribly culturally insensitive. I picked up the phone and called the agency and said
something. I said I love this ad from a creative point of view but think about the
ramifications this ad might have. Some ads might be offensive and hurt the
community emotionally and perpetuate some stereotypes that are enduring that we
want to shake from the mindset of most Americans about Asians in particular.
There’s been a lot of those kinds of ads. (Imada B. , 2011)
In this way, members within the industry help to educate and inform one another about
creating better images. One advertisement in particular that Imada has taken a stand on is
a series of ads for Metro PCS that feature two South Asian talk show commentators who
talk with exaggerated accents and participate in silly stunts. After talking to his staff and
South Asian colleagues, he decided that the ad was offensive because it belittled and
ridiculed South Asians and took a position against the ad, which was not created by an
Asian American agency. In his blog on Ad Age he condemned the spot, writing,
“Perpetuating stereotypes, whether they appear harmless or not, typecasts a group of
people as perpetual foreigners who remain at the fringe of American society. They set these
communities of people up for constant ridicule and make recent immigrants feel
unwelcome and unappreciated.” His blog post received both positive and negative
feedback, with many commentators arguing that the commercials were funny and that the
accents were a realistic part of Indian culture. From these comments, it is clear that
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individuals within the advertising agency are in a position to initiate dialogue about
representation within their own ranks and with a larger audience.
Despite this outright demonstration of a politicized perspective on the part of
Imada, I also want to consider the place of self-identification in this discussion of activism.
In all of my interviews with advertisers, very few professionals stated that they saw their
work in the communications industry as being activist in nature. Although some of them
did consider themselves activists because of other aspects of their identity—serving on the
board of a non-profit, advocating for increases in Asian American hiring, or supporting
particular causes in the community—they did not readily come to the conclusion that
activities like convincing corporations to target the Asian American market or creating
images that were not stereotypical meant that they were activists. As one individual stated,
“I mean, to be honest we’d all love to call ourselves activists, but the truth is that we do this
because the corporations hire us for their multicultural advertising.” For many who work
in the industry, the financial imperative behind their work and the continued demand to
increase profits for corporations removes the potential for politics in their daily labor.
Nevertheless, I believe the term activism is flexible enough to encompass the activities of
those who are laying the foundation for avowed activists like those at MANAA or the AAJC
to succeed in their work. Even if advertisers do not consider themselves activists because
of their work in promoting the products of Coca-Cola or Nike, much of their work can be
seen to positively contribute to and support the more explicitly political work of
community organizers whose sole goal is to positively impact the lives of Asian Americans.

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Increasing the Market for Film
Another arena in which advertisers can begin to influence the larger media
landscape is through the relationships they are beginning to forge with movie studios. In
2010, Warner Brothers tackled the Asian American filmgoing audience for the first time,
launching campaigns for films like Inception, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and
Sucker Punch. This is noteworthy because it is the first time that a major studio hired an
advertising agency specifically for the Asian American market. The prevailing logic had
previously been that Asian American audiences could be effectively captured through
general marketing and did not demand ethnic-specific targeting. But Warner Brothers
decided to take a chance, and hired IW Group to reach out to Asian Americans.
The result of this decision was that Warner Brothers took a close look at their films
and saw value in the Asian American talent, both behind and in front of the camera. For
Inception, this meant promoting Japanese star Ken Watanabe and Dileep Rao, who is Indian
American. For Sucker Punch, Vanessa Hudgens was highlighted because she is part
Chinese-Filipina as well as Jamie Chung, who is Chinese. Further, the film’s screenwriter,
cinematographer and editor, who are all Asian American, were prominently featured and
made available for interviews with ethnic media, including English language programs like
Kababayan L.A., and in-language news programs. In some cases they interviewed in
English, but if they could speak the language of the interviewer, they did so. Marketers for
these films also reached out to the Asian American blogosphere, where sites like Angry
Asian Man, 8Asians.com, and Disgrasian appeal to the wide diversity of the second-
generation Asian Americans and beyond, who might not read in-language ethnic media. To
promote Sucker Punch, marketers also worked with popular YouTube performer Jen of
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“frmheadtotoe,” a makeup tutorial expert. The Korean American performer created a video
tutorial of how to wear makeup just like Jamie Chung’s character in Sucker Punch,
integrating promotional material from the film into her standard lessons on how to make
eyeliner pop on Asian eyes. Although Warner Brothers has not released statistics on the
success of these campaigns, an executive recently reported that there was a “very positive
uplift with regard to the box office numbers” as a result. Given that we are entering a new
era where Asian American box office power is beginning to be calculated and
acknowledged, there will increasingly be opportunities to advocate for the movie studios to
not just try to repackage their current projects to appeal to Asian Americans, but to actually
create projects specifically for the Asian American audience.
Of course, the idea that Asian Americans have not traditionally been seen as a
reliable audience for media projects is not new. Commercial failure has long been a reality
for media producers who create media specifically for Asian American audiences—we can
see this in everything from the cancellation of the television show “All American Girl” and
the cable stations AZN and ImaginAsian TV, to the death of magazines like A Magazine and
Yolk, to the struggles for award-winning films like The People I’ve Slept With or Children of
Invention to find distribution and make a profit. At a 2010 event hosted by the Asian
Professional Exchange in Los Angeles on the topic of Asian American media, the entire
discussion focused on panelists from the media industry addressing the question of why so
many Asian American media efforts have failed to gain traction. Similarly, Asian American
film director Justin Lin blogged about someone looking at his dwindling profits and stating,
“For a group of people that are supposed to be good at math, you guys must be retarded to
keep making Asian American films.” Lin’s mainstream films like The Fast and the Furious:
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Tokyo Drift and Fast Five have been blockbuster hits, while his significant forays into Asian
American film struggled to find audiences.
But Lin’s Asian American films and their interaction with Asian American
community members deserve closer examination. One of the routes that Asian American
media producers have attempted is to address Asian American audiences as politically
motivated—a turn that makes sense, given that the idea of a cohesive Asian American
identity is rooted in a history of political coalition building rather than any sort of natural
racial solidarity. Lin’s debut film Better Luck Tomorrow, which has been heralded as the
first “mainstream Asian American film” (Hillenbrand, 2008), provides a strong example for
constituting this kind of politicized audience formation. The film’s opening was
accompanied by a grassroots email campaign to promote the project to college students,
and Asian American business leaders treated patrons to buyouts of entire screenings. As
Konrad Ng saw it, “The film became an opportunity to demonstrate the commercial
viability of Asian American cinema and the market impact of Asian Americans; put
differently, the film became an ethical issue that spawned practices of community
organizing in support of the film” (Ng, 2010). In this sense, Asian American audiences are
seen as consumers, but they are interpellated first and foremost as politicized subjects.
The message of the grassroots campaign was made clear—if Asian Americans wanted to
have an impact on the future ability of people from their community to tell their own
stories and find employment in the entertainment industry, they needed to show their
support through their dollars.
This economic logic is similar to the imperative of the citizen-consumer that I
discussed earlier, but falls prey to the essentialist idea that there is a common identity that
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Asian American audiences will respond to. As a result of this buzz and grassroots
promotion, Better Luck Tomorrow made $3.8 million—a significant profit from its
shoestring budget of $250,000. But despite its landmark status and the devotion of its fans,
the film is often shrugged off as a failure within the Asian American community. One
marketer stated:
If you go on the street and ask 100 Asian people you see if they’ve ever heard of
Better Luck Tomorrow, you’d be lucky if you found 5. Even though it’s “targeting
Asian Americans.” I think there are a lot of movies that are about the Asian
American experience that don’t see the light of day. I know a lot of Asian American
actors who are in those movies and they go straight to DVD.
Even the blog community at “You Offend Me You Offend My Family”—a website started by
Justin Lin and his friends hailing from the world of media and activism—agrees that the
film was not as successful as it could have been. “Offender” Philip writes about an incident
where an Asian American activist was protesting films like The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard
and The Last Airbender, but when asked, the activist admitted that he had never paid to see
an Asian American film in the theater.
He was talking passionately about how we need to force Hollywood to change and
show respect to our community, but even he admitted he had not done much to
support our artists and our work. Unfortunately, this brother’s story is not isolated.
And herein lies the problem—it’s great that we’re willing to speak out when we see
something that offends us. But until Asian Americans as a whole are willing to put
down our money to support the work of our Asian American filmmakers—nothing
will change. We can protest all we want, but real change will not happen until
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Hollywood knows we are an economic force that can make a difference in their
bottom line.
The relationship between Asian American advertisers and Warner Brothers is clearly a
move in this direction, but as “The Offenders” argue, this message must be conveyed to the
consumers as well.

Conclusion
Jeff Yang, a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, broached the topic of Asian
American audiences in a column in May 2011. After bemoaning the nauseating
representation of Asians and Asia in The Hangover Part I—a film that takes place in
Bangkok, which Yang argues becomes “a bizarro realm of brute violence, grim depravity
and unfettered libido, populated entirely by broad racial stereotypes” (Yang, Looking for a
"Hangover" Cure, 2011)—he notes that the only way such schlock can be created is because
audiences will pay to see it. He connects this logic of supply and demand to the failure of
Asian American films, which he fears now suffer from a “reverse halo—an odor of failure—
that wafts around Asian American media like a Japanese horror-film curse” so that even
Asian Americans will not support films produced within the community. In order to
combat this bad reputation, Yang proposes a reboot in the form of what he dubs “The Two
Percent Project,” which was spawned from a conversation on Facebook. The title of the
project is based on the industry mathematics that a CD, film, or book could become
profitable if only two percent of the one million Asian Americans currently in college
purchased it. Yang and his colleague Oliver Wang, a professor of sociology and popular
culture, propose a college tour where five independent Asian American creators or artists
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show their work. In order for the event to have an impact, there is an additional
requirement:
Although attendance at these events would be free, every attendee would have to
purchase one of the five products these artists are promoting on the spot, while
enrolling in an online community that gives the artists long-term engagement with
their consumers. The goal? Constructing an independent audience. Reinventing the
Asian American brand. And creating recorded proof that Asian American artists are
marketable and that a market exists to sustain them.
Yang’s proposal attempts to reify the existence of an pan-Asian American consumer
market, despite the fact that media artists had failed to do so for decades. His argument is
that by the sheer numbers, there are clearly enough Asian Americans—and specifically,
Asian Americans in college, who represent a particularly fertile market—to support
community art and productions. They simply need to be organized and educated about
how much their spending power is worth. Filmmaker Michael Kang admitted skepticism
about the project in response to Yang’s announcement on Facebook:
This may come off as too cynical, but having tried for so long to rally support around
the positive in our community, and seeing how much easier it is for people to flare
up and collectively bitch and moan instead, I just don't know how you get a spark to
catch for something like this. Don't get me wrong, I totally support the effort but I
can't help but feel like it feels all too familiar.”
The idea of cultivating the Asian American audience does not begin with this project, or
even with Better Luck Tomorrow, but somewhere at the intersection between the vast and
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multifaceted history of consumer activism within minority communities and the work of
Asian American marketers.
Although consumption can be a limited or problematic way to effectively impact the
realities of citizenship and representation, media activists are nevertheless still utilizing
these discourses in order to move forward. We can look to the history of women’s
movements, African American consumer movements, and other successful consumer
movements from the past century to see that there is a great deal of power in coming
together as citizen-consumers to impact change. Yet as Glickman argues, one of the
significant markers of citizen activism from the modern era is that consumers did not have
to be physically proximate in order to recognize their collective power to impact producers.
As he notes, “each person, in this vision, was a node on a network that might traverse
distances as small as a few city blocks or as large as a continent or an ocean” (Glickman L.
B., 2009). This vision becomes even more prescient in the era of the internet, when
activists often organize, educate one another, develop politicized platforms, and take
action, all in a completely virtual environment without ever even seeing one another.
Indeed, we can see the impact of new media technologies in many of the campaigns
examined here—in the study of Twitter in Japan, in the use a YouTube makeup artist to
promote a film, in the birthing of The Two Percent Project. If we are interested in
challenging the power dynamic between consumers and producers, online media is clearly
an important site for study. In the next chapter I turn to a number of these creative
campaigns and uses of online communities to further examine the possibilities for media
activism and the construction of Asian American citizenship through media.

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Chapter Four
Asian Americans Celebrities and Participatory Culture Online

In March 2011, Alexandra Wallace posted a video on YouTube that escalated into a
national controversy. The student from the University of California Los Angeles spoke
directly into the camera criticizing the “hordes of Asian people at UCLA” who don’t know
how to “use American manners” and who disrupt her studying in the library when they call
their families to check on them after the tsunami. In her 3-minute rant she also mocked
Asian languages, using the phrase “ching chong ling long ting tong” as she mimicked her
targets. The backlash against Wallace was fierce: her contact information was posted
online, hundreds of emails were sent to the vice chancellor of UCLA calling for disciplinary
actions, and she reported receiving threatening emails that eventually caused her to leave
the school. The story was covered in many mainstream news outlets, including the New
York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and ABC News. But responses to Wallace’s video also
were spread through a number of other online networks, including through Asian
American YouTube users, bloggers, and community leaders. As one blogger wrote, “of all
places to launch a racist tirade against Asians, YouTube is probably the worst” (Lum, 2011).
What was meant by this comment? How are Asian Americans participating in online
communities in noteworthy ways, and how does that participation reflect new possibilities
for media activism?
As Wallace’s video began circulating widely, Asian Americans immediately took up
the opportunity to respond and participate in a conversation. Although some of the video
responses posted on YouTube were problematic and offensive in their replication of
misogynistic rhetoric (Fighting Hate with Hate), many videos from the Asian American
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community took a different tone—instead of being angry they were humorous, quirky and
thoughtful, taking the opportunity as an educational one. Singer-songwriter Jimmy Wong
performed a song called “Ching Chong Means I Love You,” spoken word artist Beau Sia
posted “A persona poem in the voice of Alexandra Wallace,” blogger Edward Hong wrote an
open letter to Wallace at the blog 8Asians, and comedian KT Tatara rapped his reaction in a
music video, to name a few. These messages were shared through the Asian American
blogosphere and in many roundup postings on Asian American websites. The bloggers at
Disgrasian went so far as to declare that, “like it or not, ‘Ching chong ling long ting tong’ has
(rather ironically) been cemented in the Asian American vernacular (and we have the t-
shirts to prove it).” (Disgrasian, 2011) The incident provided a rallying point for many
Asian Americans, bringing previously under-the-radar Asian American performers and
cultural commentators into a broad conversation about race, representation and
stereotyping.
Wallace’s video and the responses to it are indicative of some of the creative ways
that Asian American are utilizing online networks as a new space for conversation and
critique. Wallace’s insensitive rant is by no means unusual in its format or content—her
video creation, ostensibly turned to humorous farce due to its extreme nature,
demonstrates the ease with which racist commentary can reach a global audience. In the
world of Web 2.0, where media consumers can become media producers by merely turning
on their built-in web camera, everyday citizens can create videos with the message of their
choosing. Their videos are then instantly accessible across the globe to a wide audience.
As with Wallace’s video, these platforms offer new spaces for racism to manifest itself.
Moreover, YouTube and other content-sharing sites offer arenas for problematic content
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from more traditional film and television programming to be available far beyond the
original broadcast. As I argued in my investigation of MANAA, these kinds of online content
reach a mass audience that in many cases rivals the popularity of network or cable
programming, and demands mechanisms for feedback and critique. In her work on race
and the internet, Lisa Nakamura (2008) has found that racist user-created media in both
textual and visual manifestations abound online.
But these sites do more than reflect racism and social inequalities—they also offer
opportunities to reveal, rewrite, and respond to the wide range of complex and
contradictory identities and communities participating in these online spaces. In moments
such as the one following Wallace’s post, we can see that social media offers the possibility
for political resistance and subversion, as well as the creation of new identities. Asian
Americans did not come together to decide on a unified response; they simply turned on
their own web cameras and recorded their own take on the situation as individuals who
felt targeted by Wallace’s words—whether they were queer, first-generation, Pacific
Islander, hip-hopper, or recording their image with only a pay-as-you-go cell phone, all
were invited to respond. As Nakamura states:
The multilayered visual culture of the Internet is anything but a space of utopian
post-humanism where differences between genders, races, and nationalities are
evened out; on the contrary, it is an intensely active, productive space of visual
signification where these differences are intensified, modulated, reiterated, and
challenged by former objects of interactivity… (Nakamura, 2008, p. 34)
Along with the ease of accessibility and participation comes the possibility for minority
communities to organize and use these platforms for impacting social change. I am
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interested in the ways in which online social media provides a new arena for Asian
Americans to voice their opinions, organize themselves and their allies, initiate
conversations, create their own media, and increase the impact of their messages—many
tactics which can be seen as acting in concert with or contributing to the efforts of other
Asian American media activists.
I begin this chapter by focusing on YouTube, where Asian Americans have become
particularly prominent. Although the Alexandra Wallace kerfuffle promoted the voices of
many everyday users, there are many ways in which the popularity of particular Asian
American YouTube users has offered the opportunity for the creation of a new kind of
Asian American celebrity. These celebrities then provide a voice for the Asian American
community with regard to issues of representation while also reworking what it means to
be a media personality in the age of the internet. I argue that these celebrities should be
viewed as skilled mobilizers and creators of an Asian American counterpublic, and point to
the political potential of these individuals using their celebrity for social causes, as some
have begun to do. I then move on to examine the Asian American blogosphere and the way
that media representations are discussed and challenged within an array of Asian
American blogs. Given that there are few print media outlets or traditional broadcast
venues that specifically target a pan-Asian audience—particularly in comparison to the
black press, Latino television, and other thriving media outlets for minority communities—
the growing number of prominent Asian American bloggers marks an important shift in the
Asian American public sphere. The visibility and popularity of this growing network of
blogs provides a space for this new generation of Asian American online celebrities to
propagate their stories and messages. I conclude with an examination of the activist
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community at Racebending.com, which was initially organized around the casting
controversy of The Last Airbender. The organization later became focused on broader
issues of equality in entertainment and casting, providing a rich case study for examining
the ways that the skills developed as active online participants can translate into a new
kind of Asian American media advocacy and activism.
As generations of media consumers begin to shift their viewing habits from solely
mainstream outlets to a more diverse array of information sources—including web videos,
mobile platforms, blogs, and virtual discussion forums, among others—our notion of what
constitutes media representation cannot remain stable. Although mainstream images
within film and television like those addressed by MANAA are still incredibly powerful and
cannot be ignored, this chapter examines the activist interventions that Asian Americans
are making within new media. Popular bloggers like, for example, political analyst Paul
Krugman, mommyblogger Heather Armstrong, or pop culture critic Perez Hilton are
enormously influential in their own digital spheres. Given these shifts, the emergence of
Asian Americans on YouTube, within the blogosphere, and in other online communities
clearly contributes to the overall visibility of the Asian American community. But what is
the connection between all of this online activity and mainstream media representations?
Do these new voices for the Asian American youth generation contribute to or replace
activist efforts to challenge the power structures that have historically limited and
oppressed their community? On the one hand, this chapter explores the way that YouTube
and the Asian American blogosphere provide interventions within the space of an Asian
American counterpublic that does not intersect with mainstream media. But within the
efforts of groups like Racebending.com we can also see the possibility of using new media
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to speak to a broader, multiracial community of activists who can be rallied around a more
general call for change in the racial politics of entertainment media. Ultimately I argue that
the way Asian Americans are utilizing digital media and online social media offers new
ways of understanding the creative labor behind media representations and new
possibilities for media activism that both circumvent and contribute to traditional
mainstream media.

Asian Americans and the Internet
Before beginning an examination of the way that Asian American communities are
using and responding to the changing technologies of representation and participation, I
want to acknowledge the dominant (and problematic) discourse around Asian Americans
as somehow preternaturally wired. The hypervisibility of the Asian cyborg has come to
stand in stark contrast to the invisibility of Asian Americans in mainstream media. As one
article on a technology site asks, “Do the Asians have technology running through their
veins?” (Rusu, 2006). Similarly, there continues to be a trend of portraying Asian men as
the “tech guy” in advertisements (Farhi, 2011), as though the speed of technological
innovation in Asia—with their ever-shrinking cell phones, advanced gaming technology,
and fascination with robots—is somehow biological. Images of the e-proficient model
minority continually recreate a kind of high-tech Orientalism where technology and Asian
bodies are inextricably bound. Within techno-Orientalism, historical competition between
Japan and the US, as well as China and the US, is manifested in negative depictions of Asians
as alien and dehumanized—a contemporary version of Said’s Orientalism, in which the
East is essentialized as primitive, exotic, and less than human. In an era when the United
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States fears the economic power of Asia, techno-Orientalism casts a threatening pall over a
population that possesses the ability to manipulate and profit from technology (Morley &
Robins, 1995).
The fear of the Asian predilection for science and technology is particularly alive
and well in the world of fictional representations—from the evil Dr. Fu Manchu and his
technological warfare to an entire category of cyberpunk that relies on a decidedly
orientalized notion of the future. Science fiction movies like Blade Runner, The Fifth
Element, The Matrix, and Serenity consistently include oriental tropes in their speculative
vision of the future, portraying Asians as efficient technocratic robots who have somehow
managed to influence every aspect of the urban landscape. As Timothy Yu states,
The postmodern city of science fiction, while sharing some of the attributes of the
globalized, transnational, borderless space of postmodernity apotheosized in the
notion of ‘cyberspace,’ remains racialized and marked (if superficially) by history,
exposing the degree to which Western conceptions of postmodernity are built upon
continuing fantasies of—and anxieties about—the Orient. (Yu T. , 2008, p. 46)
The connection between technology and the yellow peril lurks behind any discussion of the
way that Asian Americans are using technology for political empowerment, community
organizing, or identity development.
These stereotypes are complicated by the fact that the positioning of Asian
Americans as proficient in technology is not entirely unfounded. Many Asian countries are
indeed on the forefront of technological innovation, exporting their high-tech goods across
the globe. Moreover, research has shown that Asian Americans are the highest users of the
internet and broadband amongst all racial groups, even when compared to White users
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(Pew Research Center, 2011). This data is used by marketers, media producers, and other
commercial bodies to better understand how to communicate with and reach Asian
Americans. As with all studies on Asian Americans, the relatively small sample size and
prevalence of English-language surveys renders much of this data suspect, yet the
connection between Asians and technology remains deeply embedded. Sau-Ling Wong and
Rachel Lee, in their introduction to AsianAmerica.Net, conjecture that Asian Americans are
well-suited “to take advantage of virtual reality’s community-building potential given the
very ‘virtualness’ built into the group’s founding concept” (Lee & Wong, 2003, p. xix). Given
the diasporic sensibility of many Asian Americans, building and learning to utilize a
virtually networked community is clearly a powerful endeavor.
In this chapter I want to take note of the way that certain members of the Asian
American media activism community have skillfully adopted new media platforms and are
using technology in innovative ways, but still avoid the assertion that Asian Americans are
somehow particularly suited to the use of new media. More importantly, we must also
remember that not all Asian Americans have equal access to new media technologies, and
that those we see becoming prominent in online forums are not necessarily representative
of the full spectrum of the Asian American population. From the reports on the Asian
Americans who number among the highest users of the internet, the population clearly
skews young, English-speaking, financially privileged, well-educated, ethnic-specific to
Chinese and Indians (Pew Research Center, 2011). Thus, those who are not proficient in
English, who are not well educated, or who are not financially stable are being left out of
these conversations. This question of who is being represented and who is being left out is
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important to keep in mind when examining the explosion of Asian American
videographers, bloggers, and media personalities online.

The Reach of YouTube Celebrities
As one of the most popular websites on the internet, the video hosting service
YouTube has been heralded for its ability to allow anyone to upload and share videos.
Since the site premiered in 2005, it has given amateur and professional videographers alike
the opportunity to garner audiences of all kinds—from a handful of close friends to
millions of strangers clicking through from across the globe. In 2006, YouTube was
acquired by Google for $1.65 billion. Although YouTube continues to operate
independently and it is unclear whether or not it has yet become profitable, the site is now
supported by advertisements. Sites like YouTube can be seen to foster a more
participatory culture, where the ease of accessibility supports the creation and
dissemination of creative work and allows users to freely seek out content and develop
social connections (Jenkins, 2006). As YouTube states on their own website, they “provide
a forum for people to connect, inform, and inspire others across the globe” (About
YouTube). Many Asian Americans have done just that—they have created thousands of
their own original videos and shared them with an international audience that continues to
grow at an astounding rate. From comedians like Kevin Wu (KevJumba) and Ryan Higa
(NigaHiga) to musicians like David Choi and Jane Lui, to makeup experts like Michelle Phan,
Asian Americans consistently number amongst the most popular channels on YouTube.
With millions of subscribers flocking to their videos, their online popularity outshines even
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mainstream stars like Lady Gaga and Justin Bieber—an artist who himself was discovered
and brought to fame on YouTube.
This trend has not gone unnoticed by the Asian American community or the
mainstream news media. A New York Times article in July 2011 stated, “on the
democratized platform of YouTube… a young generation of Asian-Americans has found a
voice (and millions of eager fans)” (Considine, 2011). Josh Kun also noted in an article
about the success of the Filipino-American singing group Legaci that YouTube had become
“a crucial launching pad for Asian-American artists seeking the kind of exposure rarely
afforded them by the mainstream recording industry” (Kun, 2010).
This wave of exposure has lead to the growth of a handful of Asian American online
celebrities. These individuals are particularly well-known within Asian American youth
communities, and are often invited to speak on panels at film festivals, appear at
fundraisers, or even perform entire concerts consisting of YouTube talent. Despite the
mass appeal of these few stars, any discussion of celebrity on YouTube must take into
consideration the fact that the site is not necessarily purely democratic or populist. These
individuals have each clearly emerged as leaders in the competition for hits and
subscribers, but their celebrity status can be seen as manipulated in some ways. First, the
algorithms that run the site are designed to boost the popularity of only a small percentage
of their users. Videos that have a lot of hits are highlighted on the main site and elevated to
the top of the suggested set of links that run beside every video. Although YouTube may
seem to be a democratic forum, the reality is that not all users are equally visible, and only
a small percentage of creators get most of the hits. Of course it is highly likely that these
stars rose to the top due to their talent and likeability, but the unstoppable popularity of
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stars like KevJumba, NigaHiga and Filipino comedian HappySlip can also be seen as a self-
perpetuating machine that actually makes it difficult for new voices to join into the
conversation.
Nevertheless, a handful of Asian American videographers have managed to gain and
maintain a place of immense popularity within the ranks of YouTube, becoming what I
would argue are a new kind of Asian American online celebrity. David Marshall argues that
our modern sense of celebrity, or celebrated public characters, is historically distinct from
the celebrity of old wealth or legitimate hierarchical power. Celebrities today actually
embody a democratic sense of emerging from the public sphere; they have “not only the
connotation of famous but also that of ‘thronged.’ The celebrity, in this sense, is not distant
but attainable—touchable by the multitude” (Marshall, 1997). This distinction is helpful in
looking at popular YouTube users, given that “celebrity” might seem an odd term to use for
individuals who are conspicuously absent from the mainstream media or even within non-
Asian audiences, and who rarely are able to monetize their popularity and fame. Burgess
and Green (2009) actually argue that celebrity on YouTube is not the same thing as
celebrity in the mainstream media world because of the ways in which YouTube celebrity
status remains connected to and measured by the standards of mainstream media celebrity
status:
More accessible new media technologies and platforms can open up possibilities for
the commercialization of amateur content, and in some cases turn the producers of
that content into celebrities. But…the marker of success for these new forms,
paradoxically, is measured not only by their online popularity but by their
subsequent ability to pass through the gate-keeping mechanisms of old media—the
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recording contract, the film festival, the television pilot, the advertising deal. (23-
24).
On Burgess and Green’s model, there are only a handful of Asian Americans who have
managed this kind of crossover success. Kevin Wu of KevJumba was a contestant on
Season 7 of The Amazing Race along with his first-generation Chinese father, and musician
Kina Grannis secured a record deal after winning the Doritos “Crash the Superbowl”
YouTube contest. Vietnamese American makeup artist Michelle Phan also rocketed to
popularity on YouTube with her well-edited beauty tutorials, contributing to (or perhaps
inspiring) an entire subculture on YouTube of makeup “how tos.” Although her YouTube
success has not lead to a sustained media opportunity, such as a makeup show on HGTV or
the Home Shopping Network, she has reached her personal goal of becoming a
representative for Lancôme—a position that, when denied to her in 2007, initiated the
birth of her makeup-centered vlog.
But this model does not seem to make sense for Asian Americans online, many of
whom actively participate in the creation of an Asian American counterpublic that does not
necessarily intend to appeal to a diverse, non-Asian audience. Rather, the Asian American
community online serves as a space where Asian Americans can safely communicate
amongst themselves. If mainstream entertainment media is part of the homogenizing
public sphere, then internet communities like those circulating around these Asian
American stars enable participants to discuss and develop oppositional identities away
from the public eye. As theorists like Nancy Fraser (1992) and Catherine Palczewski
(2001) have argued, subaltern counterpublics play an important role in creating identities
for disenfranchised groups, serving to “enable marginal groups to overcome the discursive
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barriers to participation because, by definition, they expand discursive space and provide
discursive systems counter to those that exist” (Palczewski, 2001, p. 169). Palczewski
worries that the potential for emancipation can be limited by barriers to access—and, as
already mentioned, the internet is certainly not accessible to all Asian Americans—but the
existence of specific ethnic-identity closed communities online can still provide
opportunities for conversation, skills training, and identity development precisely because
it is not connected to more mainstream venues.
In the case of Asian Americans, we must also consider the possibility that not all
artists, producers and media personalities want to become part of the mainstream media—
a historically racist, sexist, homophobic industry that has long ostracized and mistreated
their own community. Given the many difficulties that Asian American actors and
producers face, it is certainly possible that these Asian American stars are perfectly
satisfied to participate in a media subculture that offers them more autonomy and less
public glare, and that speaks more directly to their community. In this arena, Asian
Americans are able to articulate their own perspectives and participate in the formation of
new interpretive frames, regardless of whether or not this kind of content appeals to a
broader audience.
Moreover, there is no reason to think that the failure of YouTube videographers and
artists to cross over into mainstream stardom does means that they are not celebrities—it
is just a category of celebrity that operates on slightly different principles. As Matt Hills
argues, "the internet has offered a potentially liminal cultural space where the usual
mechanisms of media-industry celebrity cultivation can be supplemented or even side-
stepped, as in the generation of 'net celebrities' where cultural consumers turn producers"
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(Matt Hills, Not Just Another Powerless Elite?). Hills calls internet celebrities liminal, and
although this seems like a pejorative term for distinguishing between real celebrities and
merely near-celebrities, the emphasis on a DIY aesthetic and ethos marked by both
sincerity and accessibility does seem distinct from more traditional celebrities. Many stars
who have become famous on YouTube make videos talking about their own lives, rather
than playing characters or taking on fictional roles. Given their pointed lack of monetary
reward or mainstream success, they can remain within the category of being “just like you
and me” rather than a distant, inaccessible star. Kelli Burns argues that much of the appeal
of user-generated videos on YouTube can be connected to a frustration with scripted
television, even so-called reality television, that leads viewers appreciating something that
seems “more organic, more natural, more real” (Burns, 2009, p. 63). Of course, the ability
to connect with fans on a more authentic level is not specific to YouTube celebrities. Many
celebrities today are now exposing their behind-the-scenes lifestyles or tweeting about
their mundane everyday activities as a way of growing closer to their fans. As Holmes and
Redmond argue, the desire to be seen as “real” increasingly underwrites the actions and
motivations of all kinds of celebrities:
"the digital and the virtual media technologies have also opened up the number of
spaces where the star or celebrity can be found out, re-written, and seen in the flesh
as they really are. The desire...to get behind or to see through the manufactured
nature of the star or celebrity is key to this search for the 'truth.'" (4, Holmes and
Redmond, Framing Celebrity)
While I would be careful to not imply that YouTube celebrities are in fact more authentic
than actors or even reality television stars—particularly given that their highly edited
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video performances could easily be distinct from their “real” personalities—the majority of
Asian American YouTube stars do seem to want to portray themselves, and much of their
content is based around experiences that they purport to have actually had. Although
many of the most popular Asian American YouTube stars will sometimes participate in
dramatic skits and sketches that are clearly fictionalized and scripted, they also create
many videos that consist of them speaking into the camera in a way that seems designed to
represent their own experiences. In order to more fully understand the kind of celebrities
who are accumulating all the hits on YouTube, let us examine a few key players.

NigaHiga, Wong Fu, and Kollaboration
One of the most popular YouTube stars is NigaHiga, or Ryan Higa, who started
making his own comedic videos with a friend in 2006 when he was in high school. With
over 4.5 million subscribers, his channel has consistently been ranked within the top 10
most subscribed of all time, currently ranking at 2
nd
most popular. His videos generally
consist of humorous sketches, lip-synch performances to popular songs, rants and spoofs.
The videos do not always call attention to his Asian American identity, although his
background as a Hawaiian-raised Japanese American is well known. In 2008, he made a
feature film called “Ryan and Sean’s Not-So-Excellent Adventure” that parodied several
mainstream films and premiered to sold out audiences in his hometown of Hilo, Hawaii, as
well as in the Bay Area where it was filmed. He has also starred in videos, songs, dance
numbers, spoof projects, and live performances with YouTube stars KevJumba, HappySlip,
and others.
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Another important group of celebrities within the Asian American YouTube are the
creators behind Wong Fu Productions—Wesley Chan, Ted Fu and Philip Wang. The three
Chinese American filmmakers started making short films in 2003 when they were in
college together at the University of California San Diego. After graduating, they
established a media company to manage the production of their music videos and short
films, which range from darkly dramatic to comedic satire and farces. The filmmakers and
their videos are wildly popular amongst Asian American youth, as evidenced by their 1.1
million subscriber base, invitations to over 100 events on college campuses around the
country, the existence of multiple fan-created websites devoted to tracking their every
move, numerous fan videos featured on the group’s own site, and even a Facebook group
devoted to bringing Wong Fu on tour in Europe. Together with the pop music group
Far*East Movement, they started the concert series ISA (International Secret Agents) in
2008. The tour, which traveled to LA, San Francisco and New York, featured Asian
American artists and musicians in sold out performances, and also features YouTube stars
like NigaHiga and KevJumba. Wong Fu Productions is funded by their t-shirt company,
called Nice Guy Design, as well as the events they produce as they travel around the
country speaking to college students.
We can see from these two examples that YouTube stars often participate in
transmedia endeavors such as musical recordings, collaborative skits, and live
performances to expand their fan base beyond the confines of their single-authored
YouTube channels. This kind of activity reinforces the fact that a performer’s success on
YouTube does not necessarily remain isolated to the confines of the website; for the most
popular performers, their success on the website has been successfully parlayed into a
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number of other projects. It is important to note that the frequent act of bringing famed
YouTube stars together to promote a project or performance creates the sense that there is
somewhat of an elite YouTube “club” for the few top performers. Indeed, this is not far
from the truth, as mentioned earlier with regard to the way that popularity on YouTube is
manipulated. Nevertheless, despite the insularity of these few YouTube stars, their
popularity is still important to examine due to the community that has developed around
them. Although it may be difficult to find examples of YouTube celebrities who have
converted their online stardom into record deals or television pilots, there are also many
ways in which they have managed to create new venues for their unique brand of fame. As
mentioned earlier, within the Asian American media community there have been dozens of
concerts, events, panel discussions, film screenings, and parties that revolve around
featuring Asian American YouTube stars. As with the ISA tour, an organization called
Kollaboration also provides a performance venue to capitalize on the popularity of these
new Asian American stars.
Kollaboration is an arts and entertainment organization that started in Los Angeles
with the mission of promoting positive and accurate perceptions of Asian and Pacific
Islanders through live performances. Founder PK Kim, a stand-up comic, directed the first
show in 2000, featuring Asian American vocalists, rappers and dancers in a talent
competition. Since then the show has expanded to 13 cities across the U.S. and has
included talented spoken word artists, bands, singers, beat boxers, comedians, magicians,
freestyle MCs, and dance crews. They have also produced targeted “Hip Hop” and
“Acoustic” versions of the show, as well as “All Star” shows rounding up past winners.
YouTube stars play a prominent role within Kollaboration, with at least a handful of
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performers who are specifically advertised as “YouTube Comedian” or “YouTube
Sensation” on both the posters and in press about the show. One blogger advertised the
show with the statement, “This is a proof of successful on-line marketing to gain fame as
reputable musician. Instead of auditioning to get endorsement from record labels, each of
them gain visibility showing their music talents on YouTube” (YouTube Celebrities at
Kollaboration 9, 2009). It is difficult to tell from this statement whether or not the poster
believes that the visibility gained by YouTube musicians is successful because it will
eventually lead to mainstream fame, or if they are using the artist’s success in being able to
perform at Kollaboration to demonstrate the fame that they have already achieved. In the
first case, as mentioned earlier, this would seem to be a bit of false advertising given the
small number of Asian American musicians who have achieved mainstream success. But
the latter seems to be true—indeed, within the Asian American community, making it to
the stage of Kollaboration is an enviable accomplishment. The shows are nearly always
sold out, and the events provide a venue for thousands of Asian Americans and other fans
to see their favorite performers live and vote for a winner. Judges for the performances
frequently include YouTube personalities as well as executives from the entertainment
industry—a move that implicitly marks the equivalence of YouTube celebrities with
powerful industry insiders, while also offering an opportunity for the YouTube celebrities
to network with Asian American allies within the mainstream media.
The popularity of these YouTube stars is also evidenced by the many other social
events within the Asian American media community that are marketed around the
appearance or performance of YouTube performers. At the 2010 Los Angeles Asian Pacific
American Film Festival, an entire seminar was devoted to the new generation of Asian
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American celebrities. The event was titled, “The New Buzz: The Rise of the New Asian
American Star” and featured the filmmakers from Wong Fu Productions, comedian
KevJumba, actor Justin Chon, dancer Yuri Tag, and musician Tim Be Told. The event
featured a meet-and-greet where dozens of Asian American teenagers waited in line for the
chance to take a picture with their favorite stars. In 2011, the Asian American magazine
Hyphen, threw an issue launch party in Los Angeles that featured a handful of performers
who had made their fame on YouTube, including spoken word artist Beau Sia, and singers
Jane Lui and Dawen. These events reveal the incredibly high social capital that Asian
American online celebrities wield within the Asian American community. They are a
compelling attraction for gathering a crowd and exciting an audience—particularly a youth
audience—and are often relied upon for both their popularity and their expertise on how
to be a successful artist or performer. It seems clear that there is a wealth of activity taking
place online with regard to Asian Americans, and that this flourishing of participation is
intimately related to the idea of representation. Yet how is this work connected to the
media activism—indeed, is it appropriate to call this kind of participation activist at all? I
now turn to the political possibility and importance of these kinds of Asian American
internet celebrities, and the way that I see their work overlapping with activist efforts.

Mobilizing Asian American Fans
One way of connecting the growth of Asian American celebrities to media activism is
simply to consider the importance of having public figures who can help communicate
different ideas about what it means to be Asian American. I have earlier argued that we
should be worried about the concept of visibility because if we cannot see a minority
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population or hear from them in their own words about their lives and experiences, then
their inclusion and participation as cultural citizens of our imagined nation becomes
difficult or even impossible. But if YouTube provides a venue for more Asian Americans to
become hypervisible, even if only within their own community, there are more
opportunities for individuals to better articulate their own perspectives and realities.
Within NigaHiga’s stories about how awkward he can be around girls, KevJumba’s videos
about his relationship with his father, and HappySlip’s silly songs about Filipino Christmas,
we can see different takes on what it means to grow up Asian American. Within public
performances like those at Kollaboration and the ISA tour, we can see that Asian Americans
are singer/songwriters, dancers, rappers, hip hop artists, pop stars, and a number of other
possibilities that are otherwise never seen or imagined within the mainstream media.
Within the articles, analyses, and hilarious commentary of Asian American bloggers, we can
hear up-to-the-minute reports on the everyday goings-on of Asian Americans across the
country and the globe.
Yet I do not want to call these individuals activists simply because they participate
in the Asian American counterpublic and contribute to the creation of a new kind of Asian
American online community. Although their work can be seen as somewhat contributing to
activist efforts, I defined activism in the introduction as intentional participation in a
political act designed to remedy a social injustice. Although the work of these cultural
workers is politically important in the ways that it redefines Asian American identities,
provides alternative Asian American narratives and voices, and contributes to community-
building, this impact is often unintentional, and their participation can most often be
characterized as based on a desire for personal success rather than social justice. By these
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definitions, the existence of Asian American celebrities seems to have little to do with
activism, and has little in common with the kind of media activism I have discussed in
previous chapters. But I want to point to the potential that exists within the deployment of
this kind of celebrity, and further to argue that the increased strength of participatory
cultures and Asian American online communities can intersect—and has intersected
already—to create moments of intentional activist action.
One important element of the Asian American YouTube celebrity as activist is that
the existence of Asian American virtual celebrities is evidence of the power that these
specific individuals have in mobilizing their base. For each of these Asian American
celebrities, their fame is the result of being able to draw responses from millions of
followers without any assistance from well-established promotional industries. There
were no million-dollar advertising campaigns plastering their faces on billboards, no
scheduled interviews with talk shows or entertainment tabloids, no large-scale tours or
corporate tie-ins. Rather, it is simply the talent and personality of each performer that
compels their fans to subscribe to their channel, buy tickets to see them in person, and
respond with their support. In this sense, we can see that each Asian American celebrity is
an adept mobilizer. Although in many cases this ability to mobilize their fans is simply
used for increasing hits to their own websites, there are many ways in which this capability
has also been seen to contribute activist agendas.
First, at its most basic level, some Asian American stars have used their celebrity to
contribute money to various causes. For instance, in 2009 KevJumba’s Kevin Wu created a
second channel called JumbaFund. Given that YouTube pays channels with a large enough
subscriber base, Wu could post his signature humor videos on the second channel and
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collect money for various charities, such as earthquake relief in Haiti. In 2010, Wu asked
for nominations to help decide which charity he should donate the $4075 he had collected
from JumbaFund. After tallying up the 1500 votes, the money went to the World WildLife
Fund, a conservation organization that works to protect animal habitats and conserve
biodiversity across the globe. Interestingly, another organization that received many votes
was LiNK, an organization that works to protect refugees from North Korea and reframe
the North Korean crisis through creative storytelling. Although it is difficult to read too
much into the prominence of this charity, it seems likely that it is Wu’s Korean and/or
Asian American fans who wrote in to vote for LiNK, particularly given the organization’s
goal to change the way that the Korean debate was being framed in the media. Ultimately,
however, the money went to an environmental charity whose work is unrelated to social
justice or Asian American communities.
But KevJumba is not the only Asian American celebrity to mobilize for charity.
Prompted by KevJumba’s contributions to charity, Filipina comedian HappySlip also
created an alternate channel called “ChristineGambito” that collects money for the charity
Operation Smile. The filmmaking trio at Wong Fu Productions has held an online dance
contest where fans were asked to post videos of learning a line dance, with each video
leading to a donation to Ecomagination. They have also contributed to a number of charity
auctions, and worked with Invisible Children in 2005, creating a video that educated
viewers about child soldiers being abducted in Uganda and promoted some of the
organization’s awareness campaigns. It is important to view the strategic use of celebrity
in service of charity within the context of celebrity philanthropy. As Trope (2012) argues,
the philanthropic efforts of stars who, “even if genuinely invested in a cause, are reminded
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of the symbolic, and in turn, commercial value of giving and encouraged to pursue public
displays of charity and altruism” (Trope, 2012). In Trope’s analysis of Angelina Jolie as a
Hollywood star who publicly participates in both charitable and activist efforts, she argues
we should be careful not to naively celebrate these acts. Although in many ways a star’s
efforts toward philanthropy or charity can be seen as altruistic, these same efforts are also
often criticized for falling into quick-fix, overly simplistic approaches or for highjacking a
cause with their own one-sided perspective. Indeed, when a high-profile celebrity becomes
involved in a cause, the nuances of that situation are often lost in favor of a “simple, familiar
and easy-to-digest imagery and product for the public” (Ibid.) Nevertheless, as Trope
argues, the participation of celebrities in giving does indeed have the potential to change
public perceptions of those causes, and is reflective of long history of the complicated
interplay between celebrities and philanthropy.
For Asian American celebrities, supporting a charity or nonprofit seems to
demonstrate a very simple way for these individuals to mobilize their fans into civic
action—by turning their participation (their viewership) into monetary donations for a
charity, or by inciting their viewers to donate or participate in a cause. Of course, charity is
not necessarily the same thing as activism. Charity has often been critiqued for focusing on
emergency relief or local impacts rather than the structural reform or root causes of
societal issues that activists hope to impact (Poppendieck, 1998; King, 2004). Yet these
individuals are nevertheless taking the first step toward using their fame for a cause
outside of their own celebrity. Further, there are many other ways that Asian American
online celebrities have converted their online popularity into concrete social action,
specifically with regard to media representation.
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One example of an Asian American celebrity using his star power for social justice is
in career of blogger Phil Yu, otherwise known as Angry Asian Man. Although anyone who
maintains a public blog and identifies as Asian American might fall under the category of
the “Asian American blogosphere,” in the last few years there has been a move toward the
deliberate creation of a racialized community amongst bloggers who strongly identify as
Asian American. Such writers structure their blogs to only tackle issues that directly affect
or are of interest to Asian Americans, and have also demarcate their identities through
participation in a conference called “Banana” that is specifically dedicated to the Asian
American blogging community. Yu’s blog is widely considered the most influential blog
within the Asian American blogosphere, with over a quarter-million unique visitors per
month. Since 2001, he has been writing daily commentaries and blog entries about Asian
American news, events, and gossip. Yu himself has also become an Asian American
celebrity, speaking at numerous community events, serving as a juror and programmer for
Asian American film festivals, and visiting college campuses for invited talks 4-5 times
every semester. Yu’s posts represent a carefully curated blend of links to external news
and information about the Asian American community, each accompanied by Yu’s
commentary and the judicious use of his signature catchphrase, “That’s racist!” This
function of calling out racism and the connection of individual incidents to larger societal
inequalities reveal a clearly political intent. Yu considers himself a reluctant activist for the
cause of confronting racism and prejudice. As he states, “I’m trying to communicate
information and also entertain, and also get people to take action…As much as our country
has progressed, we have so much more to do. I try to point out that hate crimes are not an
isolated incident but are part of a larger problem.” (Yu P. , 2010) In particular, he believes
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that his blog has made a difference in calling attention to issues that might otherwise have
gone unnoticed by the Asian American blogosphere, such as the assault on Asian American
high school students by gangs in south Philadelphia. In December 2009, he began posting
stories about the violence in Philadelphia, calling upon his readers to contact the school
officials who denied that the problems existed. “I took it upon myself to do what I could do,
spread the word about what’s going on there, shine a brighter spotlight on it. I hope it had
an impact. I have no way of gauging or measuring my impact, but I just put it out there and
hope for the best.” (Yu P. , 2010)
One of Yu’s particular areas of interest is media representation, given his
educational background in film and critical studies and his professional work for Yahoo!
Movies. Although the blog spans a broad range of subject matter, issues about Asian
Americans and the media are particularly highlighted. Yu serves as a media sponsor for
Asian American film festivals in San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, and Washington D.C.
As a result, he promotes the festivals on his site and often writes about the films and
filmmakers that emerge from these venues in an attempt to “create consciousness about
the Asian American independent film scene.” But he also frequently posts information
criticizing media representations that are stereotypical or racist, praising the use of Asian
Americans in commercials or non-stereotypical roles, promoting casting calls for Asian
American actors and talent amidst a sea of whitewashed media, and otherwise educating
his readers to become more literate in analyzing images of Asian Americans in the media
and to take action when possible. Regular readers of his site have ample opportunity to
learn more about Asian American actors and members of the film community, and to point
out problems in the mainstream media. Although Yu clearly does not play the role of
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organizer and in fact does not even allow discussion in the form of comments on his site, he
nevertheless feels that his posts inspire conversation and action. He says, “When people
come to the blog and see something they’re mad about or inspired by or want to react to,
they have to blog about it themselves or put it on Facebook or put it out there themselves,
so the conversation doesn’t just stay on my blog. That’s a good thing.” (Ibid.)
Another example of the possibility for internet celebrity to impact media
representation is in the blogging community at You Offend Me You Offend My Family
(YOMYOMF). As mentioned in the last chapter, YOMYOMF is a pop culture group blog that
was started in the summer of 2009 by filmmaker Justin Lin and some of his friends and
colleagues from the entertainment industry. The contributors include filmmakers, actors,
writers, festival programmers, producers, and writers, representing a wide range of
industry affiliations, although they blog using only their first name and generally discuss
humorous topics rather than industry information. Lin plays a somewhat controversial in
the world of Asian American film, given the course of his career. His first feature film Better
Luck Tomorrow embodied the spirit of Asian American independent filmmaking—Lin
funded the project on a shoestring budget and cast all unknown Asian American talent.
When the film was acquired by MTV Films and debuted to rave reviews at the Sundance
Film Festival, Lin’s career began to take a different trajectory. His next two films—
Annapolis and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift—were decidedly mainstream fare, and
Lin’s reputation as a sought-after Hollywood director continued to grow. He received some
flak from the Asian American community for his failure to introduce more Asian American
actors and content into his blockbusters, but Lin continued to carefully balance his projects
between big pictures and small independent Asian American fare. Finishing the Game, a
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low-budget mockumentary that takes place in 1973, comically explores a producer’s hunt
for a replacement for Bruce Lee. The phrase “You offend me, you offend my family” is used
to audition each actor for the role, and is used for great comic effect in the film as each
actor must give their own rendering of the line.
The use of this phrase as the title for the YOMYOMF website is a nod to Lin’s efforts
to embrace the community, even as they fail to support him—with a budget of $500,000
Finishing the Game only made around $50,000 at the box office, prompting Lin to write the
blog post on YOMYOMF titled, “Am I ‘retarded’ for making Asian American films?” that I
discussed in the previous chapter. The blunt provocation headlining Lin’s blog entry marks
yet another important aspect of the YOMYOMF website—it creates a space for Asian
American industry insiders to tell their own stories about their struggles, to debate the
challenges of Asian American representation, and to initiate wider conversations about the
work that they are doing. In this way, YOMYOMF offers a much more interactive space for
their fans and readers to learn about and participate in conversations about media
representation than a blog like Angry Asian Man that does not allow comments. Bloggers,
or “Offenders,” as they like to call themselves, often participate in lengthy debates with
their readers through the comments section, particularly with regard to serious media
issues.
But there are other ways in which the community at YOMYOMF is visibly dedicated
to changing the media landscape for Asian Americans. In 2010, YOMYOMF launched an
initiative called Interpretations. It began with a contest where aspiring filmmakers were
given the same brief script and a three minute time limit to create their own original short
film. A panel of judges, including studio executives, actors, and filmmakers, reviewed the
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works and selected a number of diverse films that demonstrated a diverse range of styles.
Five finalists received a cash prize for their next project, a subscription to the Writers Guild
of America Magazine, and the promise of mentorship within the industry to help the
filmmakers to network and improve their craft. Although it is unclear exactly what became
of the various finalists, the YOMYOMF website indeed showcased a number of submissions
and clearly offered opportunities for helping unknown filmmakers reach a broader
audience with their work. In October 2011, the staff of YOMYOMF announced that The
YOMYOMF Network would have its own YouTube channel as part of YouTube’s initiative to
launch more original content within their existing channel lineup (YOMYOMF, 2011),
offering even more opportunities to disseminate original content from Asian American
artists.
Within their blog, the writers at YOMYOMF deliberately blend more serious
commentary about Asian American representation and the challenges of creating Asian
American media with more humorous fare. Indeed, the great percentage of posts on the
website cover a hodgepodge of light-hearted topics like “the Lunch Lady” in Saigon who
sells soup noodles, unfortunately named Asian foodstuffs, cosplay contests, parenting
disasters, oversized sunglasses, Japanese ice cubes, anime box lunches, and the Sex Fairy.
In fact, the topics of the blog can become quite risqué and even border on the obscene. Yet
these topics are seamlessly mixed with posts that discuss things like Asian American film
festivals across the country, Asian American theater events like David Henry Hwang’s
opening of Chinglish, or why there should be more Asian American hosts on Saturday Night
Live. Even these more serious posts with politicized perspectives on Asian American
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representation can often be written in a humorous tone so that they seamlessly fit in with
the rest of the site.
Humor is clearly the lingua franca of the internet, with funny videos, images, and
memes spreading rapidly through personal online networks. Many popular Asian
American bloggers seem to be wary of being seen to take themselves too seriously and
keep a jocular tone on even their most scathing political critiques. For instance, the
popular Asian American blog “Disgrasian,” run by Jen Wang and Diana Nguyen, clearly
maintains a humorous tone with its regular naming of Disgrasians (shameful member of
the tribe) and Amazians (Amazin’ Asian), among countless other monikers. Along with
humor, the success of many of these blog and blogging communities can also be seen as
connected to their integration with popular culture. Popular culture provides an easy entry
point for everyday audience members who are not particularly seeking out a politicized
perspective or even a specifically Asian American community. But from an engagement
with celebrities, discussions of film and television, musical artists, consumer culture, comic
books and the like, there is a possibility to call attention to political issues that are
connected to popular culture, such as media representation. This potential to turn
engagement with a fictional world or a pop culture object into media activism can clearly
be seen in the case of mobilizing fans of The Last Airbender to protest the lack of Asian
American casting in the live action film. In a close examination of the fan-activists who take
on the cause of discriminatory casting, we can see some of different ways that online
organizing stemming from an engagement with pop culture can contribute to new modes of
civic engagement for Asian American consumers and fans.

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Fan-Activists and The Last Airbender Controversy
In December 2008, producers of the film adaptation of the Nickelodeon cartoon
Avatar: The Last Airbender set off a firestorm of criticism when they announced their
casting decisions. Despite the fact that the television show seemed to have appropriated
cultural practices, architecture, religious iconography, costumes, calligraphy, and other
aesthetic elements from East Asian and Inuit cultures, four white actors had been cast in
the lead roles. Many fans became irate, demanding that the roles go to Asian actors
because they had always imagined that the characters were racially Asian. When one of the
lead actors dropped out of the project he was replaced with Dev Patel, who is of Indian
descent, as is the film’s director, M. Night Shyamalan.
9
But fans insisted that the nation his
character belonged to were the villains of the series, so now the problem was that three
white stars were heroes and the non-white actor and his people were villains. These
conversations continued in heated online debates and culminated in a number of protest
activities, ranging from the creation and spread of counter-media to a boycott of the
upcoming film.
Their battle offers a clear example of how the tools of new media can be utilized
within Asian American media activism. One of the ways that they are able to so clearly
embrace this kind of digital activism is because of the reliance on fans for the base of their
organizing. Fan communities have long been active in online arenas, using digital tools to
connect with like-minded individuals, share ideas and creative content, and create large
communities of practice. In this case, we can also see the unique ways in which fans are
poised to use their skills to become politically engaged, and align themselves with media

9
To be explicit, Patel was born to Gujarati parents who were from Kenya, and he was raised in
England. Shyamalan was born in India but raised in Pennsylvania from the age of six weeks.
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activism movements. Usually when we talk about “fan activism” we are more accurately
simply describing active fans—passionate viewers of a particular text who unite with like-
minded individuals for a singular goal. Such fans participate in multi-textual activities such
as interacting in online forums, creating works of fan art and fan fiction, or consuming
collectibles. Yet their goals often remain within the world of the text itself, in “nonpolitical
claims…culturally-oriented and consumer-based claims” (Earl & Kimport, 2009: 220). Fans
have used their collective power to demand that a certain romantic relationship blossom
within the show’s narrative (Scodari & Felder, 2000; Tabron, 2004), that a show stay on the
air despite low ratings (Scardaville, 2005), or as sometimes is the case with anime, that a
show be imported to the U.S. (Levi, 2006). Work that focuses on this type of fan activity has
been necessary in helping to counteract the stereotype that viewers are passive, easily
duped, or simply foolish. Yet fan activism can encompass a broader range of activities,
some of which are distinctly political and may contribute to an increased level of civic
engagement. Academics are now beginning to recognize the ways that fans engage with
issues that extend beyond the world of their fan text—in this case, allying themselves with
established nonprofit groups and seeking to expand their knowledge of political discourse
and the real-world implications of their fandom. In this case we can see that fans of The
Last Airbender are able to transition from everyday fans to political activists—but more
significantly, we can see the way that this transition is facilitated through the language and
culture of participatory culture and digital media literacy. Indeed, protests against The Last
Airbender demonstrate the wide range of digital skills that can be used for media activism,
and the points of intersection between these particular skills and the goals of traditional
Asian American media activism.
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One of the first responses to the news of the casting was from artists who had
worked on the show. Under the handle “Aang Ain’t White,” they anonymously created a
LiveJournal website and initiated a letter-writing campaign. Although hundreds of fans and
non-fans learned about the issue through the site and mailed letters, most were returned to
sender unopened. Soon thereafter, casting for the film was completed and production
began with no changes to the cast. Although it is difficult to say why the traditional media
activism tactic of letter-writing failed in this instance, the participants did not lose hope
and simply modified their strategies. As a result of creating the online forum to initiate the
letter-writing, like-minded fans had a chance to meet each other in a virtual arena and
establish a basis for future conversations. Two such individuals, known on the site as
glockgal and jedifreac, decided to start a new forum. They created a site called
Racebending.com, as well as a corresponding community on LiveJournal.
The name was a playful riff on the notion of “bending” that was an important part of
the universe of The Last Airbender—each tribe is based on a natural element, and
individuals known as “Benders” have the ability to manipulate that element. The creation
of this term can be read as an example of “textual poaching,” (Jenkins, 1992) or the act of
fans repurposing ideas from their beloved texts to demonstrate resistance and agency. By
referencing “bending” the activists mark their fandom and attachment to the world of the
franchise, even as they use the same term to articulate their frustration with an industry
where roles are systemically taken from Asian Americans and replaced with white actors.
The filmmakers seemed to be saying that audiences would only support movies starring
white actors, and as dedicated fans of a fantastical world populated by multiracial,
multicultural peoples, they knew that this was not the case. Members of the community
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also noted that the casting call had used the phrase “Caucasian or any other ethnicity”
when looking for these lead roles, which they found troubling and discriminatory, as it
seemed that Paramount Pictures had specifically sought out white actors. In this sense,
their definition of “racebending” can be seen as more than simply changing the race of a
character, but necessarily changing the race of characters of color to white for reasons of
marketability.
10

By the spring of 2009, the Racebending.com website was managed by six main
contributors, including three based in Los Angeles, one in British Columbia, one in New
York, and one in Washington. Out of the six leaders of the movement, only one had been an
active fan, participating in fan communities and engaging in fannish practices such as fan
art and fan fiction. Four considered themselves general fans of the show but not at a
serious level, and one had never seen an episode of the show and only joined the group to
protest the casting. Nevertheless, the leaders of the group relied heavily on fan
communities to provide the base for rallying individuals to take action. In an informal poll
of 1200 Racebending.com supporters, the movement is seen to be spread across 50
countries, and racially nearly half of their supporters are white, with only a quarter of their
participants identifying as Asian (Racebending.com, 2012).
This focus on the desires of the fan community brings up another important
question—why was the Racebending.com movement so focused on fans? In interviews
with the primary leaders of the movement, it was clear that only one had been a serious fan
of the show, and the others could not be said to be part of the show’s dedicated fan
community. Thus, their continual reliance on fan communities for support of their cause

10
The group is identified throughout as members or participants of Racebending.com—an
important distinction, since they are actually “against racebending.”
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can be seen as deliberate and strategic. This might seem counterintuitive at first, since
passionate fans would seem the most difficult group to convince to boycott the film version
of their beloved show. Yet from this example we can see how the set of skills exercised and
utilized by fan communities have the potential to translate effectively into skills for a new
mode of activism that takes place largely online. Van Zoonen (2004) makes a strong case
for the similarity between fan communities and political constituencies, arguing that their
emotional investments are both a result of performance, and that their activities are
similarly concerned with things like knowledge, discussion, and participation. But the
mobilization of fans around this particular issue takes us one step further—not only do the
activities and affective realities of fans resemble those of political constituencies, but fan
activities can be seen to facilitate the development of a set of skills that are particularly
suited to political activism in the era of Web 2.0.

Using Participatory Culture for Action
The first move that the leaders of the community made toward engaging with fans
of the show was to create a website called Racebending.com and a community on
LiveJournal. LiveJournal, a blogging website that has been a platform for fan communities
since 2003 (Derecho, 2006), was already a hub of fan activity surrounding The Last
Airbender, so the community quickly grew in popularity. The Racebending.com leaders
were able to tap into an already existing network of individuals who had a strong
connection to the show. If they could make the argument that their beloved property was
being mistreated, that passion could be redirected against the live action film. We can see
that this move has been extremely effective—the LiveJournal community continues to be
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the most active site for conversation surrounding the issue, with daily posts written by a
large number of community members and an extremely active base of commenters turning
each post into a rousing debate. It is not uncommon for a single post to have anywhere
from 40 to 80 comments following it.
The Racebending.com community on LiveJournal makes use of the already existing
online network of individuals, but also puts them to work in sorting through and
accumulating new information about the issue at hand. Fans have long been known as
great collectors of information about their fan object; in an exploration of the wiki called
Lostpedia, Mittell finds that the community website’s “core function is as a shared archive
of data, culling information from the show, its brand extensions, and its cultural references
to make sense of the show’s mysteries and narrative web” (Mittell, 2009). The high level of
fascination and attention to shows like Lost are multiplied when fan communities unite to
pool their resources, making their data set incredibly comprehensive and detailed. Jenkins
(2009) further expands on this phenomenon, comparing the advantages of Pierre Levy’s
notion of collective intelligence to Peter Walsh’s more traditional “expert paradigm.” He
argues that there are many pleasurable reasons for people to participate in the production
of collective knowledge: the exercise of generally unacknowledged skills, the assumption
that individuals have something worthwhile to contribute, and the generally democratic
principles that lead to a dynamic process of acquiring knowledge. This notion of collective
labor maps perfectly onto the case of Racebending.com, where it is not always the leaders
who provide the latest news regarding the production and promotion of the film. Rather, it
is a collective of motivated individuals who sporadically contribute, leaving no stone
unturned in their search for new details and developments.
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Beyond updates on the making of the film, the site is also a place for a host of related
discussions, including questions about racial politics, re-examinations of episodes of the
show in the context of this new politicization, and attention drawn to similar issues in other
media representations. In his examination of the cultural economy of fandom, Fiske (1992)
finds that fans are “particularly productive,” and that “all such productivity occurs at the
interface between the industrially-produced cultural commodity…and the everyday life of
the fan” (37). He specifically outlines three kinds of productivity, two of which we see in
action here—enunciative productivity, or fan talk, and textual productivity, or fan art. With
regard to enunciative productivity, we can see these regular conversations and debates on
LiveJournal as evidence that fan talk is productive of deeper knowledge about the text
itself, as well as the political implications of the way that the film has been cast. Through
these discussions and debates, participants are able to sharpen their own arguments and
solidify their stance on what is clearly a politically fraught issue.
With regard to textual productivity, we can look to the copious production of fan
artwork and fan videos as additional components of knowledge creation. Coppa defines
vidding as, among other things, “a visual essay that stages an argument” (2008), and indeed
the videos made by Racebending.com participants articulate nuanced arguments through
their humorous montages, sarcastic rants, and compelling collections of evidence. There
has also been a movement to create videos of individuals stating why they are participating
in a boycott of the movie, which can contribute to a show of strength in numbers. In
addition to these videos on YouTube, many fan artists have turned their visual arts skills
toward the cause, creating original works of art that can be used as banners, t-shirts,
buttons, icons, or personalized avatars. In this way, the artistic and creative skills that fans
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regularly employ in the creation of fan art and vids has been used to propel the arguments
of the Racebending.com cause.
The group’s collective use of “comment-bombing” can also be seen as related to
Fiske’s notion of “enunciative productivity.” Any time that a news organization publishes
information about the upcoming film, new behind-the-scenes information, interviews with
actors and cast members, or promotional material for other whitewashed projects,
Racebending.com participants will direct members of the community to post comments.
The community is very comfortable with the act of commenting since they participate in
regular online dialogues with members of their own community, and dozens comply with
these requests, overwhelming the article with their viewpoint and offering counterpoints
to any opposing arguments. In the era of online newswriting, comments can be seen as an
important component of online discourse, and can even contribute to the creation of
further legitimized conversation. For instance, The Los Angeles Times wrote an article
based on an interview with director M. Night Shyamalan, and members of the
Racebending.com community were encouraged to comment on the article. This action lead
to the writing of another article with the headline “The Last Airbender is causing a casting
commotion,” (LA Times Blog, 2010) which was published in the Los Angeles Times blog.
Although this blog often focuses on discussions that take place in the online comments, the
fact that a respected newspaper like the Los Angeles Times would take note of online
comments legitimates the commenting arena as important and worthy of concern.
Conversations around commenting are also important to note because they serve
the purpose of policing the boundaries of acceptable fan behavior. This helps the group to
retain their image as a respectable group of activists rather than flamers or trolls who are
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only interested in inciting anger or stymieing discourse. One LiveJournal post directing
individuals to comment on a recent blog post included the warning, “Just remember to be
polite and keep your cool. If you come off as angry (Season 1 Zuko!) they have yet another
excuse to dismiss you. Make your points calmly and confidently” (Topless Robot says
"Settle Down", 2010) Since fan communities spend so much time engaging in online
discourse, there are often strict rules about the kinds of participation that are allowed and
the kinds that are discouraged. In her examination of soap opera communities, Baym finds:
Politeness is a criterion of communicative competence…If conflicts were to become
personal (or degenerate into “flame wars”), people would be inhibited from
contributing potentially controversial opinions, and the primary function of the
group as an interpretive forum would be disrupted. (1997: 117)
If we apply this logic to the Racebending.com community, we can see that a similar desire
for the primary function of the group—propelling the cause into mainstream media and
convincing viewers to boycott the film—could be inhibited by allowing a lack of respect
and decorum.

The case of protesting The Last Airbender is also an interesting within the realm of
Asian American media activism because of the way that the leaders of Racebending.com
positioned their cause internationally, intentionally extending their work beyond the
borders of the U.S. In an informal survey of 1200 of their participants, they found that 25%
were not from the U.S., with supporters hailing from over 50 countries around the world.
Some of the largest contingents were in the UK, Australia, Singapore, and the Phillipines.
As a result of this data, they began to think about their cause as internationally relevant,
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and expanded some of their strategies to new locales. For instance, when the movie came
out, they wrote to film critics to the UK, and articles about the casting began to appear in
some of the largest and most influential British newspapers. Beyond the reach of their own
base, they also took into consideration the fact that international sales contribute millions
of dollars toward a film’s bottom line. Blockbuster films like Shyamalan’s are international
media that have a much wider impact than in the domestic context of the US, and the film’s
financial success or failure would also be an indicator as to whether or not Paramount
should produce a second or third installment of the film. In this sense, it was actually very
important for the group to attempt to impact ticket sales beyond the US.
Their outreach to international news media resulted in news about the
discriminatory casting extending to Canada, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan. One of the
founders of Racebending.com, a Chinese American woman, explained another impact of
this extensive media coverage at a more personal level—when a Chinese language
newspaper in the US covered the story, she was able to send the article to her Chinese-
speaking family in Irvine to finally show them what she had been working on all this time.
These international efforts reflect the strength of online organizing, given the ease with
which an activist in Los Angeles can find the resources to reach out to international press
organizations. But this story also reminds us that the relationship between Asian
Americans and Asia is sometimes as close as our own living room, where many Asian
American families still prefer to learn about the world through in-language ethnic media
and are highly attuned to stories from the country of their origin. These transnational,
cross-cultural connections provide an important base for conducting continued work in the
politicization of Asian Americans through popular culture.
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Beyond their work on The Last Airbender, activists at Racebending.com sought to
sustain their momentum by taking on the more general cause of promoting equality in the
casting of Asian Americans and other minorities. As Scardaville finds, many fan activism
groups share a common origin story: “A single act or a pattern of offending acts mobilize
individuals to unite. After the goal is either achieved or no longer attainable, the protesting
group may, with time, evolve into a watchdog organization” (2005: 886). The
Racebending.com movement seems to follow this typology, since the casting decision lead
to the mobilization of the group, but the ongoing issue of racism in representation is what
continues to motivate their collective. The Racebending.com website lists as their mission:
“We are a coalition and community dedicated to encouraging fair casting practices. As a far-
reaching movement of consumers, students, parents, and professionals, we promote just
and equal opportunities in the entertainment industry.” (Who We Are) This statement
clearly moves beyond the film itself to advocate for a change in casting practices in general.
One campaign that epitomized this expanded goal was against the whitewashing of
a comic book called “The Weapon.” The comic book starred an Asian American hero named
Tommy Zhou, but when the story was set to be remade into a film, a white actor was cast to
play him. Members of the Racebending.com communities were very supportive of efforts
to protest this casting. The coordinators wrote a letter condemning the decision in the
name of Racebending.com, and one coordinator actually had an extended phone
conversation with the executive producer of the film to convey their message. The group’s
support for these actions revealed an interest in working on projects outside of The Last
Airbender. Overall, in the period between the movie’s production and the premiere, the
majority of new posts were about issues outside the world of The Last Airbender, and only
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infrequently contained updates on the progress of the film’s promotion or the occasional
tidbit of new information from the main contributors.
The case of Racebending.com and their work is also important to consider in light of
the work of the traditional media activists discussed in Chapter One. In some ways, the
goals of MANAA and Racebending.com could be seen as overlapping—both groups took on
the cause of protesting The Last Airbender, first attempting to call for a change in casting
and then to impact ticket sales. Yet in this close examination of the tactics of
Racebending.com, we can see that their goals are actually much more expansive—they also
seek to educate themselves, to participate in an expanding dialogue about race and
representation, to intervene into fannish discourse about authenticity and the fluidity of
identity, and to disrupt mainstream conversations about the film. When it comes to the
traditional tactics of protest and boycott, members of Racebending.com are seen to be
difficult to call into action, particularly early in the course of their organizing. For instance,
a Racebending.com leader in New York organized a protest at the film’s casting call for
background actors in March 2009, but only a handful of people showed up. Together they
held signs and tried to gain visibility, but with the lack of bodies their impact was minimal.
Similarly, the Los Angeles “Street Team” organized a group of Racebending.com supporters
at Comic-Con in San Diego in July 2009, but the two leaders ended up doing most of the
work by themselves, “full-on yelling into the crowd, handing out flyers and buttons, getting
signatures” (SDCC 09 Update and Recap, 2009)

with little support from their fellow
Racebending.com members. Another missed opportunity for on-the-ground activism came
when MANAA organized a protest at Paramount Studios against an offensive scene in their
recent film The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard. MANAA approached Racebending.com to see if
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they wanted to use the protest to promote their cause, since Paramount was also the studio
producing The Last Airbender, but only one member of the Los Angeles Street Team showed
up to the protest. It was not until the premiere of the film on July 1, 2010 that members of
Racebending.com finally were able to successfully organize their members for an in-person
event. Partnering with MANAA, the National Korean American Service & Education
Consortium, and the Korean Resource Center, over 100 total activists gathered outside a
movie theatre in Los Angeles and attracted television news coverage from a variety of
networks. We can see that the seemingly boundless enthusiasm for the cause online did
not always translate into offline action, and making it initially difficult to get even the most
vocal members of the group to put a name to their face and show up for a local event.
These examples of the group’s less successful campaigns are interesting to view in
the context of the successful utilization of digital media skills for activism. It is possible
that these more traditionally political activities veer too far from the everyday activities of
fan communities, and this is why they have floundered. Given that this particular
community resides largely online with very few members ever having met face to face, it
makes sense their most successful collective actions take place virtually. Malcolm Gladwell
has suggested that demonstrations and protests, or what he calls “high-risk activism,” are
reliant on strong ties that cannot be built or activated using social media. In a 2010 New
Yorker article, Gladwell asserts that “Facebook activism succeeds not by motivating people
to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they
are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice” (Gladwell, 2010). The example of
Racebending.com is a rich example for exploring Gladwell’s claims, given the group’s
reliance on social media as well as its struggles to organize in-person actions. We might
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worry that the work of this group is all talk and no outcome, and that their 100% virtual set
of activities is somehow a weakness. Yet we must be careful to say that their struggles to
organize face-to-face action represent a failure to become truly politicized, or that the
group could not be considered to be engaged in “real activism.” Although disputing the
casting of a film may not be as significant an action as Gladwell’s examples from the civil
rights movement, where physical violence and legal battles were imminent threats, the
group is still participating in important discursive and educational work. As we have seen
in this discussion, the group effectively propagates their message using online organizing
and has communicated their message to a broad audience of fans and non-fans. Further,
they successfully moved their mission toward general casting and racial representation
issues that are not even related to their original fan object—a trend that can only be seen
as political, since it no longer relies on the affective ties of fandom—and through this shift,
they have become part of important conversations with industry executives.

Conclusion
The strategies employed by activists within the Racebending.com community
demonstrate some of the versatility of online social media with regard to mobilizing
individuals and spreading a message of social change to a wide audience. When petitioning
the filmmakers to respond to their request failed, the leaders at Racebending.com quickly
reorganized to establish a new set of goals that more efficiently utilized their new media
literacy and creative abilities. Given the creative talent demonstrated by this large group of
fan-activists, Asian Americans on YouTube, the filmmaking community at YOMYOMF,
writers and comedians within the Asian American blogosphere, and all of the content
195

producers and mobilizers described in this chapter, it seems as though the Asian American
digital landscape is poised to provide a wealth of opportunities for Asian Americans in the
world of media production and distribution. Whether these opportunities are the result of
an online campaign stemming from activists like those within Racebending.com or through
the collective support of fellow artists and activists, the only question remaining seems to
be whether or not the world of mainstream entertainment will respond to what is
happening online. Further, it is important to ask whether or not mainstream media should
even remain a primary goal of these digital activists and participants, given that Asian
Americans are currently thriving in an arena that might well become the future of
entertainment media. In this sense, Asian Americans can be seen as leading the charge in
developing their abilities to use and understand digital media, and it is the rest of the world
that will soon be forced to follow suit.
In March 2010, the Asian American community media organization Visual
Communications held a workshop called “Web 3.0” that explored the internet as a new
screening venue for Asian Americans. Focusing on the advent of webisodes and webseries,
the workshop examined innovative possibilities for the development of web-only
programming created by both independent filmmakers and more established film
companies. In particular, Cherry Sky Films—the production company behind Better Luck
Tomorrow and other feature films—screened work from their new webseries “Megabot,”
which aired on Comedy Central’s sister site, Atom.com. The show was written and directed
by Asian Americans, and featured a diverse multiracial cast that included Asian American
actor Randall Park. Park has starred in mainstream feature films such as Dinner for
Shmucks, Asian American films such as The People I’ve Slept With, Nick Cannon’s hit TV
196

show “Wild N’ Out,” general marketing advertising campaigns for KY Jelly and Wells Fargo,
as well as YouTube shorts for Wong Fu Productions and comedic appearances at
Kollaboration shows. He has also directed a number of short films of his own that are on
YouTube.
The versatility of a performer like Park and the rise of such productions
demonstrate the importance of taking digital media into consideration. While Park is by no
means a mainstream celebrity, or even a well-known name amongst the few most popular
Asian American actors, he is clearly positioning himself to move between mainstream and
online platforms. Moreover, his success and marketability within the Asian American
community relies on a sense of transmedia legitimacy that is bolstered by the burgeoning
success of other Asian American media stars. It is the growing strength of the legitimacy of
online representation and media creation, the portability of online stars, and the
development of dependable mobilization tactics that offer new possibilities for media
activism in the age of the internet. Although we have yet to see all of these elements
converge in a successful activist campaign or in the support of a single project, there clearly
is a rising momentum within the Asian American media community that cannot be
contained, shifting and spilling into new creative projects that continue to explore the and
push the boundaries of Asian America.

197

Conclusion
The Real Politics of Online Media

Throughout the dissertation I have made the argument that fighting to change
representation in the mainstream media is a political act, and that there many ways of
doing so that have yet to be theorized in conversation with one another. Whether it is
through waving signs outside a movie theater, serving on an advisory board for a media
ratings corporation, creating advertisements for life insurance to be placed within ethnic
media, or making a silly YouTube video, these acts of calling attention to the inequalities
and injustices facing the Asian American community are deeply interconnected. Together,
each helps to redefine the nuances of an ever-changing Asian American identity, and insists
upon recognizing and remedying the injustices that media industries and practices have
long upheld. Although not everyone who participates in these acts should necessarily be
called an “activist,” the connections between these activities helps us to see that each level
of participation nevertheless supports and shares the goals of what I have defined as Asian
American media activism. By participating in these activities, as well as in this discussion
about media representations, Asian Americans are also enacting cultural citizenship—they
are fighting for inclusion, belonging, recognition, and a voice within the national collective.
Moreover, they are helping to transform narratives of national belonging to include a
broader definition that makes use of transnational alliances and media flows.
Although my investigation throughout has focused on the impact of mainstream
entertainment media, the turn toward self-created and self-promoted imagery within Web
2.0 forces us to consider the political power of turning oneself and one’s stories into
potentially spreadable media representations. In particular, the use of YouTube videos for
198

“coming out” as queer, undocumented, or both, constitutes a rich site for better
understanding the impact of media representation on the politics of citizenship and
visibility within Asian America. For gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender people, or for
those who are undocumented, there is a real risk to making oneself visible. This includes
the threat of physical violence, ostracization from one’s community, being kicked out of
one’s home, or in the case of the undocumented, deportation from the U.S. Despite these
threats, there is a growing movement for the creation and dissemination of “coming out”
videos for queer and/or undocumented youth.
In 2011, Suny Um posted a video on YouTube called “My Mini Story: Gay 2
nd

Generation Cambodian American.” In the simply shot video set to a song by Bruno Mars,
Suny uses hand-written placards to tell the story of his family immigrating to the U.S. from
Cambodia as refugees. The placards then reveal that when he was 16, his father disowned
him and kicked him out of the house for being gay. Suny became depressed and suicidal.
But with a smile on his face, he writes, “I’m gay. So what? I’m still human; my heart still
beats like yours. This is only a part of my story.” The video is earnest and moving,
demonstrating Suny’s resilience while also providing a relatable story about the difficulties
of growing up as a refugee, in poverty, with depression, or with a family who cannot accept
who you are. Indeed, many of the comments on the video are from fellow Khmer youth
who admit to having cried when watching the video, or who see themselves in his story. As
one commented, “U r not Alone in this world and thanks for sharing his cuz even me, it
makes me feel like im not the only one cambodian gay kid.” Another wrote, “You’re an
inspiration to many gay Khmers out there. Like myself.”
199

There are countless such videos on YouTube of young lesbian, gay, bisexual and
transgender people telling their coming out story. YouTube and other video hosting sites
clearly provide a way for these otherwise isolated or alienated individuals to find a
supportive community online and connect with like-minded peers. Queer youth have
found many different ways to connect using online social media and social software, from
posting on YouTube to using online social networking sites, to sharing poetry and artwork
or joining queer fandoms online. But there are important differences between the act of
posting a coming out video on YouTube and joining an LGBTQ networking community like
TrevorSpace or Downelink. In creating a video starring themselves and telling their own
person coming out story, these individuals are broadcasting very public messages about
their own experiences and identities, and contributing to the broader collection of stories
that comprise YouTube’s vast database. Although I have earlier demonstrated that not
everyone on YouTube is famous or popular, and certainly many videos fail to garner more
than a handful of hits, there are countless videos of ordinary, everyday users that are
passed around and begin accumulating audiences. Given the high risks for queer youth in
revealing their sexuality in such a public, unrestricted way, it follows that there must also
high rewards for doing so as well.
In connecting these stories to the fight for improving Asian American
representations in entertainment media, it seems clear that one reason queer youth are
interested in disseminating their own coming out stories on YouTube is because of the
power and strength that come with media visibility. This is even more clearly
demonstrated in the coming out videos of undocumented youth, given the real threat of
deportation that undocumented individuals face in the U.S. Arely Zimmerman has pointed
200

to a shift in YouTube videos by undocumented youth—from carefully protecting their
identities and obscuring any identifying information to boldly revealing one’s face and
name in the act of coming out as undocumented on YouTube (Zimmerman, 2012). As
Nancy Mesa, an immigrant rights activist in Los Angeles stated, "Yes, it is dangerous, there
are risks that we face in being so publicly active, but it is even more risky if they don't know
we exist" (Zimmerman, 2012). From this statement, we can clearly read the significance of
making one’s story public, no matter what the risk. These undocumented individuals
refuse to hide, and refuse to deny their right to exist within the U.S., even if their paperwork
says otherwise. In this sense, cultural citizenship—creating online videos that tell stories
of growing up in the US, going to school in the US, having hopes and dreams of living and
working in the US as an adult—seems almost more important than legal citizenship, given
the insistence on these participants to remain active within this cultural sphere. But we
can also recall that visibility can lead to political mobilization. Many immigrant rights
organizations use these kinds of YouTube videos as part of their campaigns to save
individuals from deportation. These coming out videos and others are linked, emailed and
posted so that their network of supporters will be activated to sign petitions, write news
articles, and make phone calls to Senators, members of the Department of Homeland
Security, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The narrative of New York Times reporter Jose Antonio Vargas also reinforces the
importance of telling one’s story in public, no matter what the risks. In June 2011, Vargas
wrote a story called “My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant,” in which he comes out as
gay and undocumented. The story details his inability to go to college and his attempts to
secure his status and eligibility to remain in the US. He was able to achieve an incredible
201

level of success as a reporter, working for The Huffington Post, creating documentary films,
and eventually writing for the New York Times, all while living in fear that the holes in his
temporary paperwork would expose him and he would be deported. As he writes, “I’m
done running. I’m exhausted. I don’t want that life anymore.” He first revealed his story to
his editors and bosses, and then to the world with the publication of his article. Although it
seems unlikely that Vargas will be deported, the high risk these very public coming out
stories demonstrate the desperate need for these otherwise invisible members of society to
be seen, heard, and recognized, no matter what the consequences.
These stories of undocumented and queer communities rallying around YouTube
videos reminds us of the overlap between visibility as an issue within entertainment media
and visibility as a political issue. In the case of the media activists I have studied thus far, I
argue that improving the representation of Asian Americans within mainstream
entertainment media is connected to the issue of seeing Asian Americans as full members
of society and thus reducing racially-motivated discrimination and violence. Yet in
connecting the homemade videos of comedians like Kevjumba and Niga Higa to the coming
out stories of people like Suny Oum and Jose Antonio Vargas, we are reminded that
visibility in all arenas is politically transformative, contributing to a wider belief that
individuals from all backgrounds deserve fair treatment and inclusion. Those who we can
see are those who we empathize with, stand beside, and fight for.
These stories of undocumented and queer youth being rallied through spreadable
media also remind us of the ways that new forms of digital media can be utilized to connect
geographically separated communities, and provide a new space for discussing and taking
action on issues that affect these communities. Although this seems like a hopeful moment
202

where we are poised to see media activism utilize these tools in new and innovative ways, I
want to include a word of caution. Our old and deeply entrenched models for Asian
American activism that rely on stereotype analysis and national modes of identity will be
difficult to shake, and the dominance of this discourse within already existing activist
circles provides a strong incentive to stagnate, rather than to rethink and regroup. As we
continue looking for new ways to change media representations, it is important for media
activists to continue to challenge currently existing modes of operation and to recognize
the strength of making alliances with overtly political communities—the queer and
undocumented, for example—who are working on the same issues of visibility, citizenship,
and belonging. Moreover, issues of political and economic inequality and injustice need to
be viewed in connection to these issues of media representation. It is only through the
recognition of these connections and overlaps that media activism can continue to make an
impact in the continued fight for justice and equality.

203

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Asset Metadata

Creator Lopez, Lori Kido (author)

Core Title Asian American media activism: past, present, and digital futures

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Communication

Publication Date 05/30/2014

Defense Date 04/10/2012

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Asian American,media activism,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Banet-Weiser, Sarah (committee chair), Jenkins, Henry (committee member), Nguyen, Viet Thanh (committee member)

Creator Email littlelori@gmail.com

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-44198

Unique identifier UC11289309

Identifier usctheses-c3-44198 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-LopezLoriK-869.pdf

Dmrecord 44198

Document Type Dissertation

Rights Lopez, Lori Kido

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA