Quotes About Stereotypes

To recite my poems to an audience is to be slapped awake by my limitations. I confront the infinite chasm between the audience's conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look the part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We're not racial enough to be token. We're so post-racial we're silicon.

Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst

Readers, teachers, and editors told me in so many words that I should write whatever felt true to my heart but that since I was Asian, I might as well stick to the subject of Asians, even though no one cared about Asians, but what choice did I have since if I wrote about, say, nature, no one would care because I was an Asian person writing about nature?

Hollywood is still so racist against Asians that when there's a rare Asian extra in a film, I tense up for the chinky joke and relax when there isn't one.

The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem.

As I try to move beyond the stereotypes to express my inner consciousness, it's clear that how i am perceived inheres to who i am.

It's as if readers relish white male writers behaving badly but they demand that minority writers must always be good.

Dao was not everyman, because not every man would have been brutalized in that way. In the same way I saw Dao and thought, He is not any man, he is my father, Chicago aviation officers thought, He is not any man, he is a thing. They sized him up as passive, unmasculine, untrustworthy, suspicious, and foreign. Years of accumulated stereotypes unconsciously flickered through their minds

The ethnic literary project has always been a humanist project in which nonwhite writers must prove they are human beings who feel pain. Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?

I confront the infinite chasm between the audience's conception of Poet and the underwhelming evidence of me as that poet. I just don't look the part. Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We're not racial enough to be token. We're so post-racial we're silicon

themselves. During this period the model minority myth was popularized to keep Communists—and black people—in check. Asian American success was circulated to promote capitalism and to undermine the credibility of black civil rights: we were the "good" ones since we were undemanding, diligent, and never asked for handouts from the government. There's no discrimination, they assured us, as long as you're compliant and hardworking

But assimilation must not be mistaken for power, because once you have acquired power, you are exposed, and your model minority qualifications that helped you in the past can be used against you, since you are no longer invisible.

Asians lack presence. Asians take up apologetic space. We don't even have enough presence to be considered real minorities. We're not racial enough to be token. We're so post-racial we're silicon.

You have an Asian mother," she said. "She has to be interesting.

In the popular imagination, Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status: not white enough nor black enough; distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we're being used by whites to keep the black man down.

Racial self-hatred is seeing yourself the way the whites see you, which turns you into your own worst enemy.

Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.

The Korean girls I knew were so moody they made Sylvia Plath seem as dull as C-SPAN.

In her satiric play Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven, the playwright Young Jean Lee said: "The reason why so many white men date Asian women is that they can get better-looking Asian women than they can get white women because we are easier to get and have lower self-esteem. It's like going with an inferior brand so that you can afford more luxury features. Also, Asian women will date white guys who no white women would touch.

When I was growing up, black and brown kids were casually racist. Korean kids were casually racist.

Most feminists view women as a class whose presumed interests are to be given priority and see equality as a matter of convenience: women are as tough and aggressive as men when it comes to fighting wars or fires, but frail and helpless when it comes to domestic violence; as carnal as men when it comes to sexual freedom, but innocent and victimized in any sexual conflict.

She would have had to keep her headscarf on, never laugh, never smile—if she smiles at a man he will think, 'Ah, she loves me,' " Mohamed explained. As

Politics needs a certain mental ability," explained Ahmad Saati, the university's spokesman. "Very few women have this kind of mind." I

In either culture, women somehow managed to get the wrong end of the stick. Women bear the brunt of fending off social disorder in the Catholic