meself - oscar mike.

angryasiangirlsunited:

Hi guys! What are your guys’ thoughts about all the negative articles in Western media recently focusing on South Korean beauty standards? I just wrote a few of my thoughts down on my blog, but I’m not Korean, so I thought I’d ask someone more knowledgeable.

This is the most recent: http://www.buzzfeed.com/ashleyperez/i-wasnt-beautiful-enough-to-live-in-south-korea

But then there was that NPR article, this one on Jezebel: http://jezebel.com/5976202/i-cant-stop-looking-at-these-south-korean-women-whove-had-plastic-surgery

It’s hard because there’s some truth in them, but the way the facts are framed are often bullshit.

mod note:

I feel like the buzzfeed article is a different creature because it’s spoken from a Korean-American who talks about shadeism and things like that. It’s just bullshit that they chose to publish her story during all the talk about South Korean plastic surgery and beauty standards and that’s the context people come to the article with.

However, THOSE OTHER ARTICLES ARE SUCH BULLSHIT. Especially the ones that talk about how UNIFORM these women look.

Want to know why?

Here’s 2013 American pageant contestants from:

Arkansas

District of Columbia

Florida

Idaho

Kentucky

Nevada

Wyoming

SO FUCK THEIR RACIST BULLSHIT AND THEIR RACIST ARTICLES. I cannot fucking believe that those people have writing jobs. I seriously cannot. They need to stick to their own damn country and stop talking shit about places they know nothing about. 

You mean to tell me they AIN’T the same damn person? (And, why do we still have to host all these pageant thingies? What exactly for? To perpetuate this ultimate European beauty standard everlastingly?)

blackinasia:

So I was a little annoyed or whatever at the fuckery at English camp last Saturday where students specifically targeted me for harassment (since I was the only black teacher there). But at the end of the day, I was just meeting these kids so I really had no expectations (sadly), either way.

Earlier this week, though, at one of my schools where I’ve been working all year and feel like I’ve really connected with the students, I had my last period of class teaching 6th graders, and stayed after class for a bit to chat with them in Chinese. We were chatting when suddenly one of the students that I really like asked out of the blue:

“Teacher, why don’t you have blue eyes?”

Which was the exact same question that I’d gotten at English camp from students who’d never met me before, just days earlier.

This was followed in short order by a number of other students asking,

“Why don’t you have blonde hair?”

“Why is your hair curly?”

And they were all laughing while asking. Not maliciously, but in an “oh this is interesting and entertaining” kind of way.

I was surprised by all of this to say the least, as these are students that I’ve been working with for almost a year now, and yet they still conflated Americanness so blatantly with whiteness. My very presence at the school, the relationships that I’d built with them over the last 10 months— none of that seemed to mean anything to them, or to have made any type of real difference in changing their perceptions. It didn’t seem like any of my hard work over the past year had even made a tiny dent in challenging these entrenched white supremacist narratives that in order to be a “real” American, you have to be white.

And to my students, at the end of the day, as a POC I was still deficient in my Americanness by not being white. 

Still. After almost a full year with them. And these are 6th graders not 1st or 3rd.

When I challenged them on these questions, they just responded flatly that “most foreigners have blonde hair and blue eyes” and laughed. My Chinese isn’t good enough to have made that opportunity into a fully developed learning moment, even if I wanted to, but at this point, I can’t even bring myself to care really anymore. Because if my own students who I’ve worked with for this long STILL don’t see me as having equal value compared to a white person… then I don’t know what else to say.

19 Days until departure. 

It’s an interesting—yet quite meaningful to me—coincidence on the same day BiA posted this that I was told that Taiwanese youngsters, or at least women as the person who I talked to was a Taiwanese woman, take dating a White person as some sort of a status badge. That people around you such as your friends would interpret it as a sign that you’re now part of this quasi-upper class which only White people can be members unless you’re inducted into it by such relationships.

Although your parents might not entertain the idea of their children dating a non-Taiwanese person so much as it would entail a pack of trouble such as language barriers, cultural gaps, and sorts, they, along with the society, teach their kids explicitly and inexplicitly that things from the West are simply good (or better), thus you gotta adapt yourselves to them at the same time.

After being told of such ‘accounts’, I found myself dumbfounded for a moment. Then a revelation came to me how similarly we as in Koreans act back home as well. That there is always this public announcement on TV, newspapers, billboards, etc saying we have to behave ourselves because “the world” is watching us whenever there is some G20 or APEC summit hosted in Korea, or we should live up to “global standard” because the way we do—whatever that might be—is so hideously outdated and must be quenched.

And no one wonders why we as in Asians are doing this, when we started embracing this white supremacy without any questions and on occasions, more than often not, even proselytizing it so vigorously.