I can’t believe someone made a website about this…
http://asianposes.com
Make sure you have at least 10 minutes of free time before you click on the link. It maddeningly sucks you in, as reluctant though you may be. My favorite part is how the blogger breaks down and explains each pose. For example:
Pose #23: Heart Shape. There are a few variations of this pose, but the most is to take both hands and place your thumbs together with your other fingers in an arch shape. The top of your fingers are joined together to form the top of the heart, while your thumbs form the bottom of the heart.
Now that a black man has been elected to the highest office in the land, there’s a new oppressed minority in town. That’s right — the Asians! And we’re here with a vengeance.
To prove it, the Organization of Chinese Americans and the University of Maryland have released the most comprehensive study of Chinese Americans ever conducted. And it <gasp!> debunks the “model minority” myth that has denied us our rightful place as America’s discriminated minority of choice. Key highlights:
We may be doctors and lawyers but we earn 44% less than our white counterparts and we face additional barriers that other minorities don’t face.
Barriers like even though we’ve been hanging out in America for more than 150 years, we’re still not seen as being American.
There are just as many poor-as-dirt Chinese as there are richer-than-Solomon Chinese.
So now, my Asian brothers and sisters, we can embrace our oppression and proudly hold up our heads and know that we have it just as bad as other minorities. Booyah!
I’m so mad at myself for forgetting about this post!! I came across it weeks ago, courtesy of Angry Asian Man, and wanted so badly to pass it along.
Stephen Colbert is probably one of our best American satirists these days and what I love so much about this clip is that he only needs 29 seconds to point out the absence of Asians in our political process and, well, in diversity issues in general. Asian Americans make up about 5% of the U.S. population, yet we currently only have two Asian senators and five House representatives. I do thank President Bush for having appointed two Asians to his Cabinet (Norman Mineta as Secretary of Transportation and Elaine Chao as Secretary of Labor). I know it might seem silly for me to call attention to this fact, but role models do matter. Even with the excellent education I was privileged to have and parents who encouraged me to pursue whatever interests and careers appealed to me, it honestly never occurred to me that politics could be a career in which I could succeed — not until I was in my 20s and had the opportunity to share a dinner table with Secretary Chao. There was something about actually seeing an Asian female in a political position of power that suddenly made it click. It wasn’t as though I would have scoffed at the idea of an Asian woman in politics had I heard of it … but that’s just the thing. I hadn’t really heard of such an idea before that evening!
I guess my point is that visuals, and (gasp!) perhaps even tokens, can sometimes be useful.
