Yes. I agree with Jay Caspian Kang agreeing with Jeff Yang: I attended a panel that featured Jeff Yang, a columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Asian Girlz, a wildly offensive, wildly bad song by a wildly dumb band called Day Above Ground, came up in the conversation. Yang acknowledged the offensiveness of the song, but wondered aloud if we had become too easy to troll. After all, Asian Girlz had almost no YouTube views and the songs notoriety came almost entirely from people who shame-linked it through social media. Why, Yang asked, were we paying so much attention to these sorts of easily shareable, mostly meaningless offenses? I tend to agree with Yang. If the lasting imprint of Linsanity is that Asian Americans can now express their outrage on the Internet, as they did with Ark Music Factorys video for Chinese Food, or for Asians in the Library: UCLA Rant, or for the racist shit that racists say on Twitter, that means the legacy of that great month comes more from Chink in the Armor than from Jeremy Lin. I wonder why so much of the upswing in media attention on Asian American issues has targeted the worst parts of the Internet and not any of the more worthy issues within the community. Are we just lazy? Have we run out of things to complain about? Or is this simply the product of a larger trend in media, in which the only things we cover are exactly those things we can access through one glowing screen or another?
Posted on: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 20:14:38 +0000
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