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I’m not sure how much this movie could offend me more. In The Love Guru, Mike Myers dons brownface to play an Asian Indian “love guru”, chock full of every anti-Indian stereotype he can dream up.

Much like in the Charlie Chan mysteries, Myers complements his own brownface with a Real Live Asian Indian sidekick, who, judging by the trailer, plays the foil for Myers’ stereotypical jokes. This sidekick also exists, however, to dupe the audience into believing the Asian Indian community is supportive of these insulting jokes: if you could find a real Asian Indian to go along with the insulting humour, the community must find these degrading jokes funny, and it must be okay to laugh at.

The racist brownface aside, the trailer also contained several jokes against little people which I found offensive. I was actually also annoyed by Justin Timberlake and his Quebecois caricature. Justin makes some awesome music, but he is making some poor acting choices.

Regardless, the Love Guru is Mike Myer’s brain-child, and he is milking the anti-Asian Indian stereotypes for all they are worth. On YouTube, the marketing for the film has created a pure car crash of Myers’ brownface caricature.

Update: Based on the Love Guru YouTube channel, Myers’ character is actually supposed to be an orphaned American raised in India. So it’s brownface without being brownface — Myers can be White and still play an Asian Indian caricature! Oh, that makes it all better.

Department of Homeland Security official, Julie Myers, nearly missed being appointed last year after she became embroiled in a controversy over blackface. At a Halloween party, Myer was photographed with an employee wearing a prison uniform, wig of dreadlocks, a paper bag labelled “Nasty”, and makeup to darken his skin. He was supposed to be an escaped convict, but he was also clearly in Blackface.

Myers initially saw no problem in the costume, judging it the most “original” of the party. However, when it later became clear that Myers’ tolerance of the employee’s blackface would be a scandal, she ordered photos of the party destroyed. However, apparently forensic scientists were able to recover the photos, and they were given to CNN (with the identities of the employee blocked).

An official who has seen the unredacted photos said that the employee was clearly wearing blackface, but Myers claims “I was not aware at the time of the contest that the employee disguised his skin color.”

As we reported on this blog earlier, Myers was clearly a victim of the Racism Fairy, for failing to discern blackface makeup, or at least making up a dumb excuse after-the-fact for thinking it’s “original”. I mean, did anyone really buy her argument that she felt the costume was inappropriate because she was recognizing an escaped prisoner?

Unfortunately, Myers was confirmed in the Senate last December, but there is some discussion as to whether the photos would have made a difference in her confirmation hearing.

This morning, the Oscars announced the nominees for this year’s 80th Academy Awards. After a few years of fairly diverse nominations (last year, Forest Whitaker and Jennifer Hudson won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress respectively), this year’s nominees for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress are almost exclusively White.

It’s hard to imagine that in a year when Denzel Washington was in two feature films focusing in part on the African American experience (The Great Debaters and American Gangster) and in a year when Will Smith delivered a powerful performance in I Am Legend, that the Oscars could include such a monochromatic group of nominees. I hope we are not seeing the reversal of diversity efforts amongst Oscar nods.

Meanwhile, does anyone else think it ironic that the Oscar nominations did include a nomination for the makeup person who was responsible for this yellow-face travesty?

It was immediately obvious from the trailer that Chuck and Larry was yet another in a long string of mainstream films intended to play off of stereotypes to engender a laugh.

The movie stars Adam Sandler and Kevin James as two heterosexual firemen who enter into a faux-domestic partnership in order to help James’ character transfer his pension benefits to his children. Universal Pictures decided to approach marketing the film by condensing as many anti-gay jokes as possible into the trailer as possible:

In the wake of the Isaiah Washington fiasco which resulted in a heightened sensitivity surrounding use of anti-gay slurs, it’s surprising to me that Chuck and Larry was lauded by prominent activist groups. Defending multiple uses of “fag” and similar anti-gay humour in the film, a spokesman for GLAAD said:

“Through this disarming type of comedy, there is this use of stereotypes and slurs, and it holds the mirror up for people to ask, ‘Where does this come from?’ ” Romine said.

“At the end of the day, this is a comedy that actually stresses the importance of family and treating others with dignity and respect. The film actually does send a very strong message.

In fact, the only major controversy surrounding this film as far as its anti-gay content has been around an image taken from the set in which James and Sandler are seen kissing, and captioned by The Star as “not normal”.

A lesser publicized but equally weighty concern over this film, however, is its prominent use of yellowface for Rob Schneider’s (surprisingly) uncredited role as the minister who weds Chuck and Larry. Schneider’s scenes are within a few seconds of the trailer embedded above.

Bearing a stereotypical mushroom cut, bucked teeth, jaundiced skin, and glasses reminscent of Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Schneider plays up the ‘r/l’ slurs and stilted “Chingrish” typically used to mock recent Asian immigrants. Below is an image from the Official Chuck and Larry website:

MANAA has already come out against Chuck and Larry, specifically citing Schneider’s repeated dependence on race-based stereotypes to obtain a cheap laugh:

MANAA Blasts Rob Schneider For Offensive Racial Caricature in Chuck & Larry Movie

LOS ANGELES-MANAA (the Media Action Network for Asian Americans), the only organization solely dedicated to monitoring the media and advocating balanced, sensitive, and positive coverage and depictions of Asian Americans, is offended by Rob Schneider’s “yellow face” portrayal of a Japanese man in the current #1 movie in the country, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry starring Adam Sandler and Kevin James.

In a scene where the main characters journey to Canada to get married, Schneider plays a minister who makes their union official, donning prosthetic make up (slanted eyes, bigger nose, darker skin color, etc.) to play a stereotypical Japanese nerd with thick eye-glasses and a bowl-style hair cut who speaks in broken English with missing “r”s.

Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum wrote, “I felt victimized by the stereotype shtick of … Schneider.” And Emmy-nominated actor Masi Oka (“Heroes”) told USA Today he was also offended by the yellow-face portrayal. Says MANAA Founding President Guy Aoki, “In August of 2006, shortly after Mel Gibson’s tirade against Jews, Schneider, pointing out he was half Jewish, took out a full page ad in Daily Variety promising to never work with the writer/director/actor. We wish Rob had the same pride about being part-Asian. Somehow, we don’t think he’d make the same assertion against someone who spouted anti-Asian hatred because the actor has himself done quite a good job of putting down people of Asian descent. As Richard Roeper of ‘Ebert and Roeper’ recently said in his review of Chuck and Larry, ‘Rob Schneider’s Filipino background [he’s a quarter] hardly excuses his portrayal of an Asian minister in perhaps the most egregious stereotype of its kind since Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.’”

Rob Schneider also repeatedly perpetuated the tired stereotype that Asian men have small penises in a 2005 movie he co-wrote, Deuce Bigalo: European Gigolo” (e.g. an Asian male prostitute says in broken English, “I no more man-whore! Too much danger! I take my three inches elsewhere!”).

Besides an Asian American fireman who gets no lines, the only other Asian faces we see in Chuck and Larry are five Asian women who come out of a van wearing Hooters-like clothes to “pleasure” Chuck (Sandler) and who’re later seen “having fun” with each other while waiting for Chuck to come back to bed. “Therefore,” Aoki points out, “the impression people get from watching this film is that Asian men are disgusting-looking geeks and that Asian women are sluts.”

“Sandler showed his movie to GLAAD (Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) and edited out scenes they deemed offensive because he didn’t want to make a movie that would offend the gay community. He should’ve shown it to MANAA; we would’ve had quite a few things to say to him (MANAA has consulted with studios about their films, including Rising Sun and Pearl Harbor).” MANAA is reachable at manaaletters@hotmail.com, (213) 486-4433, and P.O. Box 11105/Burbank, CA 91510.
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It was immediately obvious from the trailer that Chuck and Larry was yet another in a long string of mainstream films intended to play off of stereotypes to engender a laugh.

Although defenders of Schneider will invariably cite his part-Filipino heritage, anti-racist activists are keenly aware that membership in a particular racial identity hardly excuses racist behaviour. Consider, after all, Lucy Liu’s and Bai Ling’s repeated acceptance of roles which has them playing up the stereotypes of the hypersexualized, objectified Asian female. For Schneider to continually resort to anti-Asian humour only emphasizes his lack of comedic talent and the need for him to exit the stage, post-haste.

Meanwhile, Chuck and Larry furthers stereotypes not just against Asian males, but also against Asian American females. In a scene involving five Hooter’s girls, the films producers cast all five as Asian females — including Tila Tequila who achieved online infamy for her salacious photos. These five women are later involved in a sexually explicit scene with one another, for the benefit of our White male protagonists, perpetuating the stereotype of Asian American women as sexual accessories existing purely for the gratification of White America.

That the mainstream media has not picked up on the APIA community’s outrage against Chuck and Larry suggests to me that we have not done enough to signal our disgust. I encourage you to write Letters to the Editor in your local entertainment news sources, documenting the anti-Asian nature of this film. Further, you can contact Universal Pressure and express your displeasure using this form.

As always, if you intend on writing a letter, please feel free to re-post a copy in the comments of this thread to help us document the actions being taken.

(Hat-tip to Angry Asian Man)

Like most of y’all, I am desperately addicted to Heroes. I mean, where else can I get my dose of smart drama, good acting, good plot and comic book geekdom all in one sitting. Even though most found the Season 1 finale anti-climatic, I loved the emphasis on familial bond, the emotional evolution of The Flying Man, and the cheeky tinge of pre-destination. Who needs an epic battle? I was good with brief Peter vs. Sylar showdown, a certain foreshadowing for even more epic battles to come.

So, it is with great anticipation that I look forward to Season 2 next year, when we will pick up with amiably incompetent time-traveling Hiro, potentially trapped in samurai era Japan. However, I’m a little miffed with the news released today that among six new actors hired for recurring roles for Season 2 of Heroes is the unmistakably Caucasian David Anders, formerly of Alias cast as the legendary samurai, Takezo Kensei. Angry Asian Man speculates that Anders might have been cast as some sort of bizarre yellow-face verrsion of Kensei, however, I believe that this will be a Last Samurai twist to the Kensei legend: the greatest master of Asian martial arts and a legendary Japanese figure will be a White man. Either that or Takezo Kensei will be a “figurehead”, with different men assuming the mantle at different times or according to some sort of mantle-passing tradition.

This is just the kind of plot device that White writers think are clever, and it certainly is in keeping with a long line of similar characters in Marvel and DC comics. After all, the writering staff of Heroes includes Jeph Loeb, a huge name in the comics world. And in both DC and Marvel, many of the genre’s best martial artists trained in Asian fighting styles are White; Batman, Nightwing, and Black Canary to name just a few from the DC Universe.

More promising about today’s announcement, however, is that the show’s creators are keeping up with their reputation for cultivating one of the most diverse casts in a primetime television show. The other actors that have been announced as joining the show include (left to right, top to bottom) Barry Shabaka Henley, Holt McCallany, Eriko Tamura, Lyndsy Fonseca, Dianna Agron, Nick d’Agosto, and Dania Ramirez.

I can’t believe we’re going to have to wait until next year to find out about who all these new heroes are! Although I’m not too thrilled about the Anders/Kensei plot twist, I’m still optimistic that the show has a long ways to go before it jumps the shark.

I’m guessing that someone somewhere is trying to set the record for the most yellowface “classics” can be released onto DVD at one time. This week marks the release of “The Mask of Fu Manchu” on DVD, starring Boris Karloff (who’s not Asian) playing the sadistic, hyperfeminized, super-sexualized, pure evil Asian character, Fu Manchu - the grandaddy of modern Asian American race caricatures and Yellow Peril intolerance.

It’s ironic to me that the news article describing the historical significance of “The Mask of Fu Manchu” notes that at the time when an actor was donning yellow makeup and taped-back eyes to play an Asian caricature, parts of the film were edited as too racially offensive — to White people.

[Fu Manchu is] spouting racist rants with such vehemence that someone at MGM saw fit to clip the more demented passages (“I will destroy your entire accursed white race!”) from the negative later used for television showings.

Of course, it’s not like racial sensitivity has changed much with this new release. The NY Times article notes Warner Oland used to don yellowface to play Fu Manchu before this movie. Oland is more famously known for his portrayal of Charlie Chan — and yet, this article describes Charlie Chan as a “more benign Asian American stereotype”.

Right, because being stereotyped as a bumbling, kow-towing idiot is infinitely more pleasurable than being a sadistic, power-hungry villain.

(Courtesy of Racialicious and Mac)

Remember the news way back when that Angelina Jolie had been cast to play Mariane Pearl, the half-Cuban widow of journalist Daniel Pearl infamously executed early in Bush’s War on Terror? We wanted to dimiss it as silly fantasy, the product of mindless Hollywood gossip, soon to be shut down by some Hollywood executive who could see into the racial nightmare that would accompany the casting of a White woman to play a living, biracial person.

When I heard the news, even succumbing to my usual cynicism, I expected Mariane Pearl’s race to be swept under the rug with some liberal use of “artistic license” in the guise of White-washing, as was done with the recent Oliver Stone film, World Trade Center. 

But instead, the makers of the Daniel Pearl/Mariane Pearl movie decided on the more traditional treatment of people of colour in Hollywood: they put Angelina Jolie in brownface.  

In this picture captured by Gawker, we see that either Jolie has caked on about a hundred pounds of cheap bronzer and has even thrown on a wig of curly hair. Sure, Mariane Pearl also has a brown skin-town and curly hair twisted into an up-do, but on Angelina Jolie, it’s almost immediately obvious to the viewer that the makeup is intended not just to render the actress less Angelina Jolie and more Mariane Pearl, but also less White Angelina Jolie and more Brown Mariane Pearl. The use of the wig is reminscent of “nappy hair stereotypes”, and the bronzer is just an incorrigible implementation of brownface.

However, in this same week, it was revealed that biracial Halle Berry was cast to play Tierney Cahill in the upcoming movie, “Class Act” (news also courtesy of Racialicious). Cahill, a White woman (on the left in this picture), was encouraged by her sixth grade class to run for Congress in 2000, although ultimately losing her bid. The synchronicity of these two events caused me to consider the differences between a woman of colour like Halle Berry playing a White woman on-screen, compared to a White woman cast to play a woman of colour.

It struck me that the difference ultimately has to do with existing underrepresentations or people of colour, biraciality, and the history of “colour”-face. The reality of Hollywood is that actors of colour still line up around the block for any role in which casting directors are willing to deviate beyond the Whiteness as normative mindset, or play the racial clown by accepting the few roles explicitly written as minorities but which play up existing racial stereotypes. To accept Halle Berry playing a real-life White woman is to send the message that minorities need not be cast strictly in the few, one-dimensional roles delineated for them.

On the other hand, for Angelina Jolie to don brownface in order to play a person of colour is to fit into a history of racial makeup used by White actors to not only caricature the real-life “inspirations” but to deny actors of colour jobs in Hollywood. It was this use of colour-face that encouraged Hollywood to become an Old Boys Network of White men and women, and which directly resulted in today’s abysmal representations of minorities.

Nonetheless, I am not completely willing to get behind the casting of Berry as Cahill in “Class Act“. This problem reminds me of, surprisingly, Jade, a contestant on a recent cycle of America’s Next Top Model.

Jade was also multiracial, and claimed in one of her earliest interviews that she could play “any look” — by which she meant any race or ethnicity. Jade’s comments epitomize the treatment that multiracial actors in Hollywood face — they are constantly treated as racially amorphous, able to capitalize on the phenomenon of passing in order to play any and all races. Though this might seem like a benefit, or, at the very least, a by-product of the craft of acting, it has several potentially harmful ramifications.

First, by making the multiracial actor racially amorphous, it removes the self-identity of the actor in question. What Jade’s race actually is becomes irrelevant because she is seen to be able to adopt the race of Asians, Middle Easterners and South Americans. This is unfair and almost dehumanizing, as the person behind the look is less emphasized than the look itself.

It also results in race, itself, being de-emphasized by the perception that one can adopt another race simply by looking the part. Racial identity becomes unimportant in comparison, since all Angelina Jolie needs to assume the identity of biracial or Cuban is some brown makeup and a wig.

Ultimately, I am wary of trans-racial casting — I don’t really think there’s a right way to do it, and even if the result is an increase in the visibility of actors of colour playing “White roles” (as with Halle Berry), I feel there is a trade-off in only more “White-looking” actresses of colour getting these roles and ultimately White-washing minority actors. 

I’d much rather that Hollywood work towards more racially authentic roles for minorities of colour rather than continued trans-racial casting. There’s no good reason why actors of colour can’t get jobs, and the quick fix of putting them in White roles still doesn’t help the overrepresentation of Whiteness in Hollywood, in general.