Page 89 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Ethnicity 73

society. Korean children, if they wish to be accepted by their peers, must

attend Japanese schools and make Japanese their first language. They are
made to feel ashamed of their Korean ethnic identity and culture. A similar
movement on the part of conservatives in the US has sought to make
English mandatory for foreign - born citizens. Such moves have the effect
of making children feel stigmatized because of their ethnicity, and they turn
that hatred from outside on themselves. Ethnic minorities, as a result, are
usually characterized by higher levels of pathology, both physical and emo-
tional, than the dominant population.
Ethnicity is also one of the languages with which we think about the
world. And like so much of the information that circulates in the media and
in everyday discourse (rumor, gossip, small talk, etc.), ethnic information
is a mix of truth and inaccurate or incomplete representation. Indeed, the
danger culture poses for the issue of ethnicity is that cultural representations
exist on a spectrum from the objective and factual on the one end to the

fictive and conjectural on the other. With cultural representation, we make
fictions, but we use the same tools to make truths about the world, and the

two often blend and mix in ways that can be harmful. To represent the world
is to put an image between you and it, and such representations always risk

being more fiction than fact. In the US, for example, Asian Americans have
undergone a remarkable change of representational status. Often in the past,
they were pictured in the popular imagination as an opium - ridden “ yellow
peril. ” As late as 1994, one could find a movie in American theaters – Falling

Down – that used yellow - tinged backgrounds in scenes that stereotyped
Asian Americans as animalistic, irrational, and anti - American.
More recently, Asian Americans have been pictured as nerdy over -
achievers who are by nature smarter than others. The character of Harold
in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle is just such an academic over -
achiever, a stereotype of the socially inept but innately intelligent Asian.
Such an image arose in part because of stories in the media regarding the
high number of young Asian Americans who were being accepted to highly
competitive universities such as the University of California, Berkeley.
While it is true that 38 percent of Asian Americans have college degrees in
comparison to 20 percent for the White population, studies have shown
that those numbers correlate with parents ’ level of economic success and
level of education, a correlation that holds true for Whites as well. Asian
Americans from poor backgrounds do not fare as well as Asian Americans
from professional class background, and they do not fare better than
Whites of any economic background. In other words, economic status