Book Review 1

Chrystal Colbert
Race in Popular Culture and the Media
September 15, 2008


A Review of Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture

“Orientals are rugs, not people,”[1] is the opening line to Robert G. Lee’s work on the Asian American experience and placement in popular culture. Lee’s work stresses the importance of remembering that these stereotypes about racial lines are merely tools used to alienate Asian Americans and thus make them palatable to the American public. Although Lee goes into depth describing the effects of labeling the Asian American as a pollutant to the American body, he does not do an effective job of giving the reader an idea where these ideas come from.

To begin any conversation about race it must be first noted that race is a cultural and not a scientific term:

Because the organizing principle behind the idea of race is ‘common ancestry,’
it is concerned with the physical, the biological, and the reproductive.
But race is not a category of nature; it is an ideology through which unequal
distributions of wealth and power are naturalized – justified in the language of
biology and genealogy.[2]

The power of racial stereotypes to enslave people – literally or figuratively – is well known. For a long time in American history stereotypes have been used as a justification for racial hierarchies. But where do these stereotypes come from? As in the case of blackface minstrelsy it can be easily pointed out that the idea of Uncle Tom and Mammy characters were used to instill the idea of a happy time in slavery, a time that even the slaves wanted to return to.

In Lee’s work he points to six different images that were used to stereotype Asians during different points in time, “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.”[3] Lee then goes on to describe these stereotypes and cite them in popular literature, movies, and even court cases. All of these stereotypes were used to alienate Asian Americans and put them in a place of otherness. This alienation was used, as Lee describes in his definition of race, to justify the subordination of certain races. He also states, “An analysis of the Oriental as a racial category must begin with the concept of the alien as polluting the body.”[4]
The ideas of America as a “body” and the Asian as a “pollutant” to that body are repeated throughout the text. He goes on to say, “Not all foreign people or objects are pollutants, only those whose presence disrupts the narrative of structure of the community.”[5] So here we begin to get an idea of where these stereotypes come from – they are used to pigeonhole the Asian American as a pollutant to the body.

Lee goes on to describe the modern idea of the Asian American as the “model minority.” While he does assert that the idea of a “model minority” is a myth, he does not really dig into where that myth originates. For example, he states that:

Despite the fact that 15 percent of Chinese families in New York City had
incomes below the federal poverty level, only 3.4 percent had enrolled to
receive public assistance. This statistic has often been used as an
example of a cultural trait of self-reliance and family cohesion. An
alternative explanation, grounded in recent Asian American history, would stress
apprehension and mistrust of the state’s intentions toward them.[6]

Here is addressing the idea that the “model minority” myth is untrue because in actuality it is mistrust of the American system that causes Asian Americans not to use welfare or other public assistance but he doesn’t state where the idea comes from that Asian Americans have superior familial values. Why would White America want to believe that Asian Americans’ traditional values are superior to their own? He also states that “Asian American ‘success’ is a product of an unspecified and decontextualized traditional Asian culture. Tradition is reduced to the values of obedience, discipline, and motivation enacted by the family, those traditions most valued in the late capitalist economy.”[7] Lee is citing that the views of Asians are skewed in that they are not really reflective of the realities of Asian American culture. He is not, however, clarifying why these myths are so skewed.

In general, his work really highlights the way that race can be used to exclude an ethnic/racial group from its rights. He also shows a good timeline for the appearance of different stereotypes about Asian Americans. He does not do a good job of clarifying where these stereotypes originated, especially in the case of the “model minority” myth.
[1] Lee, Robert G. Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture. (Temple University Press: Philadelphia 1999). ix
[2] Ibid, 2
[3] Ibid, 8
[4] Ibid, 2
[5] Ibid, 31
[6] Ibid, 151
[7] Ibid, 186