The Angry Asian Man brought my attention to a well written article that does a great job of outlining the unique problems and challenges faced by Asian American students today on all college campuses from the elites, such as Princeton to the state schools like most recently at University of Colorado where the pretense of "satire" has provided an oft convenient vehicle for attacking Asian American classmates with racial stereotypes, images, and symbols. While browsing through the reader comments for some of these essays, I found this to be the most frequent response from defenders: B-b-but First Amendment! I feel that when these people first learned about our constitution, they listened to only the first five minutes of the lecture and then left class or fell asleep. And afterwards, never ever took another history, political science or government class again.
Imagine for a minute if student leaders at elite college campuses devoted themselves to mocking black people or Jewish people or gay people. I’m not talking about drunk students posting pictures of their offensive parties on Facebook, but student newspaper editors – thought of as being both smart and progressive – giving space over for the sole purpose of making fun of people because of their background. It’s hard to imagine. And yet recently this phenomenon of racial caricatures as “satire” has emerged with Asian Americans as the object of the jokes.