Though Crash has been nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Motion Picture, it is difficult to say how the film advances racial tolerance given its vilifying portrayal of Asians. Hailed as an honest and provocative depiction of post-9/11 racism in America, Paul Haggis's directorial debut dares to blatantly display common racial stereotypes, in order to deconstruct them through the reality of race. The film deals with society's perceptions of blacks, whites, Middle Easterners, Latinos, and Asians by depicting racial interactions that boil over, exposing the latent ethnic discrimination within the supposed melting pot of Los Angeles. Yet the film attempts to bridge these ethnic divides through unsettling sequences that dispel preconceived notions about race, advance universal tolerance, and promote understanding of people whose lives are ruled circumstance.

Crash brazenly shows skewed prejudices against minorities. Latinos become cheating Mexican gang bangers. Middle Easterners become stubborn and incoherent convenience store owners. Blacks become gun-toting criminals. Asians become greedy smugglers. And whites oversee this chaos with condescending bigotry. The film boldly takes the perspective of intolerant and quick to anger white Los Angelinos, a perspective filled with racial slurs, injustices, and narrow-mindedness, leaving viewers in disbelief.

VANCOUVER — Allegations of racism are being levelled at a member of Jennifer Aniston's staff while she shoots a film in Vancouver. A photographer trying to snap the Hollywood star's photo says the staffer repeatedly called his girlfriend, who is Asian, a "chink."

Rik Fedyck says the incident happened Monday after he tried to shoot photos of Ms. Aniston arriving on the set of the film Traveling, which began production in Vancouver this week.

It appears unlikely, though, that Mr. Fedyck, who has made paparazzi-related headlines before for an incident involving Denise Richards and Pamela Anderson, will be able to persuade police to lay charges.

Mr. Fedyck says his initial run-in with Ms. Aniston's staff happened Monday morning, when Mr. Fedyck was in his car with his girlfriend, who is Thai.

One month after the firing of radio host Don Imus, a pair of suspended New York shock jocks have been permanently pulled from the air by CBS Radio for a prank phone call rife with Asian stereotypes.

“The Dog House with JV and Elvis,” featuring Jeff Vandergrift and Dan Lay, “will no longer be broadcast,” CBS Radio spokeswoman Karen Mateo said yesterday.

CBS Radio dismissed Mr. Imus in April for a comment he made about the Rutgers women’s basketball team. He plans a $120 million breach of contract lawsuit.

The cancellation of the other show yesterday, nearly three weeks after Mr. Vandergrift and Mr. Lay were suspended, was another indication of the increased scrutiny on radio hosts and the heightened sensitivity of management to complaints in the wake of Mr. Imus’s firing.

“This is a victory not only for the Asian-American community, but for all communities who find themselves constant targets of racist and sexist programming,” said Jeanette Wang, an executive with the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Yesterday, I checked some foreign newspaper Web sites to see how they were covering events at Virginia Tech. A headline in the British daily, The Times, said: “Korean Student Named As Massacre Gunman.” Today’s Guardian says: “Gunman Was South Korean Student.” A headline in Liberation, the French daily, also identified the gunman as Korean, as did headlines in the Bangkok Post and the Middle East Times.

That usage struck me as evidence of yet another way in which people who don’t know this country don’t get this country.

I grew up in Toronto, which is one of the most multicultural cities in the world. It was common in a classroom of 30 kids to see 20 countries represented. While growing up, I saw that racism was virtually a non-issue. If you watched the news, you’d see a Jamaican woman doing the weather, an Indian woman covering entertainment, a Chinese man covering business, a black man doing sports, and the anchors were from Greece, Italy, Russia, or Israel. Talk about a melting pot, Toronto was like a utopia of peace and harmony among cultures. I’m so proud of my hometown, and I know for a fact that it’s had a very positive effect on my view of the world.

Having said that, in the poker world today, I’m not so sure that I see the same respect for other cultures that I did back in Toronto.

What a difference a decade can make. The year 1993 gave rise to a pivotal celluloid event in Asian North American culture when director Wayne Wang adapted Amy Tan’s novel The Joy Luck Club into a film showcasing an all-female, all Asian-American leading cast. The weepfest hauled in over $32 million at the box office. In its wake, East Asian females have been popping up everywhere on both small and silver screens with increasing frequency, from CBC’s This Is Wonderland (Siu Ta, Mung-Ling Tsui) and ABC’s Lost (Kim Yoon-jin) to film stars like Korean Canadian Sandra Oh (Under the Tuscan Sun, Sideways, Cake) or Eurasian American Devon Aoki (2 Fast 2 Furious, D.E.B.S., Sin City). Even the latest Harry Potter features Cho Chang (Katie Leung) as Harry’s love interest.

Now, almost 13 years after The Joy Luck Club, another predominantly female, all-Asian lead cast is set to mark a new milestone with Memoirs of a Geisha.

Pat Morita, the Japanese-American actor, died on Thanksgiving Day in Las Vegas. He was 73. News reports over the weekend were not specific about the cause of death or funeral details. Also not clear was what Hollywood would do now that Mr. Morita is gone.

The movie and TV industry has never had many roles for Asian-American men, and it seemed for a while that they all went to Mr. Morita. He made his debut as "Oriental No. 2" in "Thoroughly Modern Millie" in 1967 and never stopped working. He hit two peaks - as Arnold the diner owner on TV's "Happy Days" and the wise old Mr. Miyagi in the "Karate Kid" movies - and spent the rest of nearly 40 years roaming an endless forest of bit parts.

With the release of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter #6, “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” across the world, Asian fans and readers of the book are looking critically at how Asian Americans fit into the Hogwarts world by looking at Asian roles in previous Harry Potter books.

Harry’s romantic relationship with an Asian female named Cho Chang ended in “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” (Harry Potter #5). The upcoming release of the film this year, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” debuts Scottish Asian actress, Katie Leung, playing the role of Cho Chang.

So far, Asian Americans are paying attention.

A repentant San Francisco 49ers owner John York ventured into the heart of Chinatown on Tuesday expecting to be blitzed and pummeled.

And The City's Asian-American community did not let him down.

Two weeks after a 49ers training video mocking gays, Asians and Mayor Gavin Newsom was leaked to the media, York formally apologized to about 150 Asian-American community leaders and residents packed into the Chinese American Citizens Alliance hall.

Revolutions aren't always ignited with an explosion. Sometimes they start slowly, where metal meets earth in the flying dirt of new construction.

That may have been what Japanese department store magnate Yasujiro Tsutsumi was thinking on that warm October day 45 years ago in Los Angeles where he broke ground on Seibu, a multilevel monument to Asian retailing just a short throw from Beverly Hills. These were the days when U.S.-built iron bullied the highways, Ken and Barbie ruled in toyland, and chow mein conveyed wild exoticism.

Define “Asian”: An Asian is either a pre-med or an econ major; they like to have their own clubs and communities. They are generally smart and hardworking; that’s why they do well. Stereotypes are prevalent, and we frequently use them as if they conform to the people we see. As recent incidents on the airwaves indicate, racist stereotypes and labels remain a problem in the States; and, unfortunately, this is not something from which our campus is insulated.

Asians cheer Hyundai and Cingular for dropping NJ 101.5

By Suleman Din
©2005 Newark Star-Ledger
May 11, 2005

Hyundai Motor America has suspended advertising on NJ 101.5 in response to complaints that a recent broadcast of "The Jersey Guys" afternoon drive-time show was offensive to Asian-Americans.

Cingular Wireless has also pulled advertising from "The Jersey Guys" show after hosts Craig Carton and Ray Rossi ridiculed Edison mayoral candidate Jun Choi, who is a Korean-American. Carton also mimicked Asian accents, complained about too many Asians at Atlantic City's gaming tables and said Americans should vote for Americans.

"The King of Queens" is set in a New York City borough where almost one in five residents is Asian American — yet none of the CBS sitcom's regular characters is Asian. And of the dozens of regular characters in CBS' entire prime-time line-up, not one is Asian.

At most other networks, the situation is slightly better.

A study of Asian Americans in prime-time television, released Monday, shows that Asians, who make up 5 percent of the U.S. population, play 2.7 percent of regular characters. It also shows virtually no Asian actors are on situation comedies, and the characters they play in dramas tend to have less depth than most regulars, with minimal on-screen time and few romantic roles.

"Television is still the place where people get to know other people from other cultures... if they don't have regular contact with them in real life," said Karen K. Narasaki, president of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, the Washington-based civil rights group that commissioned the study. "If Asian Americans are absent, it tends to reinforce the stereotypes."

The script told him to wail like Bruce Lee and to get into a martial artist's fighting stance. But when it came time for Karl Hahn, a New York actor, to shoot his scene, he refused because he thought it perpetuated a stereotype about Asian men.

Instead, he suggested to the director the idea of giving his fictional adversary a cool glare. It worked.

"You're not allowing the perpetuation" of a stereotype "that's going to harm our image," he said later in an interview.

Presented with the same script, other Asian-American actors might not have been so vocal, either because they didn't see anything wrong with it or because they feared losing the role.

Views on career paths of an Asian American comedian

I first saw William Mar perform at a small night club when I was invited to audition a dozen stand-up comedians for a charity fundraiser. He was the only Asian American comic among a predominantly White crowd. After viewing his act, I decided that he was a rising talent for one basic reason: He is good.

At a glance, Mar looks like a typical Chinese American. He has black hair, stands 5'8" and weighs 135 lbs. His style is genteel, his mannerisms are polite, and at the same time, his material focuses on the Asian American experience. Unlike Asian American comics of the past, Mar does not mire himself in cultural depreciation. Instead, he provides insight into stereotypical views of Asian Americans as well as the commentary of an American of Asian descent staring back at people who are looking at him.

Outrage and accusations have been targeted at the New York City radio station Hot 97, WQHT-FM, for airing what some say is a racist satire of the tsunami tragedy in Southeast Asia to the tune of “We Are the World,” a song created in the 1980s to fight hunger in Africa.

Over the last week, the station has been bombarded by protestors — listeners and advertisers — some who have called on the Federal Communications Commission to penalize the station for the incident.

The parody of the song aired repeatedly during the “Miss Jones in the Morning” program throughout the week of January 17th until it was pulled on January 21st. The song contained racial slurs that made light of child slavery in the region and the manner in which over 200,000 people perished in the natural disaster on December 26th.

Owen Lei looked around his graduate class of 36 at Northwestern University's Medill School of Journalism last year and noticed he was the only male Asian American broadcaster.

If Lei lands his dream reporting job, he's likely to still find himself among a tiny minority — about 3 percent of broadcast journalists are Asian American men.

By Yayoi Lena Winfrey
©2004 Northwest Asian Weekly
July 31, 2004

In a perfect world, everyone would be treated equally without regard to race, gender or sexual orientation. But in Hollywood (an institution not exactly known for its unbiased portrayals), accusations of fostering racist stereotypes and perpetuating false images of people of color have been alleged for ages. That a major studio would cast two Asian American men as co-stars in “Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle” — a somewhat updated version of the old Cheech and Chong classics — is just short of miraculous.

By Gil Asakawa
©2004 NikkeiView
December 6, 2004

We're making great headway in the United States in getting public names changed when they are reflections of an older era when racially charged terms were considered acceptable, or at least, not controversial.

In the past few months, for instance, Japanese American community groups including the Japanese American Citizens League (full disclosure: I'm the editorial board chair for the JACL's membership newspaper, the Pacific Citizen) have managed to change the name of a couple of byways from "Jap Road" to more appropriate names that honor the Japanese immigrants who settled near those roads.

FORT LAUDERDALE — Running back Reggie Bush, who can fill up a reporter's notebook as well as he does a stat sheet, was present and accounted for. So was quarterback Matt Leinart, who has become almost as big a media darling as Lindsay Lohan since winning the Heisman Trophy last month.

The USC players were ready to roll Friday after a morning news conference. A cursory head count revealed one member of their caravan was missing.

Paul Goldberg, a USC sports information assistant, was sent to retrieve Norm Chow, the Trojans' offensive coordinator, from the interview room where he was holding court. "Norm's gotta go," Goldberg said as he shepherded Chow to the exit. "The engine's running."

In one hour Chow had effectively hit the kill switch on a years-old fallacy fueling the perception that he's not cut out to be an effective head coach in college football.

The images of the tsunami are overwhelming, the grief incalculable as the death toll rises to 80,000 and beyond.

As many as a third of the victims have been children, unable to withstand the force of the monstrous waves that struck without warning.

Amid this carnage, some of the leading media outlets in the United States have focused undue attention on the fact that some Westerners have died along with tens of thousands of Asians.