{"id":9521,"date":"2010-01-24T11:23:36","date_gmt":"2010-01-24T18:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9521"},"modified":"2010-01-24T11:23:36","modified_gmt":"2010-01-24T18:23:36","slug":"on-being-a-nerd-of-color","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=9521","title":{"rendered":"On Being a Nerd of Color"},"content":{"rendered":"

A likable essay<\/a> in the Minnesota Star-Tribune by poet Bao Phi<\/a>:<\/p>\n

But then how do nerds of color like me fit in, and how do we deal with fellow nerds who don\u2019t want to talk about things like race and class in comic books, video games, role playing games, and movies? I\u2019ll be the first to admit, I got into all of that stuff for the escapism it allowed. It was invaluable to me, as a refugee from a war growing up in an economically poor urban area, to fantasize that I was someone else, somewhere else. I\u2019d rather be a paladin with a war horse riding to battle a chimera than be the Vietnamese ghetto refugee nerd running from the dudes on my block who tried to jump me on my way to and from CUHCC clinic to get my teeth cleaned.<\/p>\n

However, there was a discomfort about some of my own internalized issues. I always chose to ignore the weird feeling I got when I realized that, in my dreams, I was always, literally, a white knight. When I dreamt I was a superhero, I was a white dude with superpowers and the Mary Jane to my Peter Parker was always white. […]<\/p>\n

As I got older, I wondered more and more about certain things: like, why Wolverine seemed to have an Asian fetish, why the only Asian men in the nerd worlds seemed to be the bad guys or some servant like Doctor Strange\u2019s assistant Wong. I wondered why the only Asians in comic books, movies, and video games seemed to be \u2018exotic\u2019 Asian women. […]<\/p>\n

I became a fan of the new Battlestar Gallactica<\/em> and yet wondered how Grace Park\u2019s character seemed like a sci-fi stand-in for Miss Saigon, and despite my skepticism stuck with the series through its entire run and watched in horror as the show literally and figuratively dumped almost all of their characters of color out of an airlock by the time the show ended. I dug Firefly <\/em>a lot, but was annoyed that Whedon predictably relegated Asian culture to a neo-Yellow peril future where the extent of China emerging as a superpower means that people throw in a couple of badly pronounced Mandarin words into their everyday conversations, and despite the idea of this looming Asian culture, there are no actual Asian characters to be seen.<\/p>\n

None of this was easy for me personally, because I had to confront my own internalized racism. There was a part of me that said, no, don\u2019t ask these questions. It\u2019d be easier to just go with the flow. Don\u2019t rock the boat. No one cares about this stuff. Do you really want to challenge yourself about how you want to be white? You\u2019re a man of color from Phillips \u2013 are you really ready to out yourself as a self-hating nerd?<\/p>\n

And you\u2019d think that fellow nerds, regardless of race and gender, would understand given that our status as freaks and geeks and outcasts would give us some humility and common ground to stand on. Unfortunately, this is not often the case. Try bringing up issues of race, class, gender, and homophobia on a video game message board and see the vitriolic response you get, no matter how diplomatic you try to be. Bring up issues of representation and race to fans of Battlestar <\/em>and Firefly <\/em>and get told that you\u2019re a killjoy or one of the \u201cPC police\u201d who doesn\u2019t understand what their favorite show is trying to do. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The comments at the Star-Tribune include headings like “I really feel bad that people have to view everything view ‘colored’ glasses” and “It’s all economics, not racism,” of course. *rolleyes*<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A likable essay in the Minnesota Star-Tribune by poet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[93],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9521","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-race-racism-and-related-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9521","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9521"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9521\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9521"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9521"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9521"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}