Word: subhumanity
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...Manchu, Charlie Chan, and Singapore Sue. These racist depictions of Asians have returned to the screen and stage as vehicles of "sophisticated humor" in full technological splendor. Hasty Pudding's "A Little Knife Music" and Warner Brother's "The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu" featured stereotypic, sinister and subhuman Asian males (played by white actors) who lust after white women. Last month, Hasty Pudding offered us the female counterparts: Singapore Sue (so sweet and soft and gentle, my favorite Oriental) and Madame Sin-Sin, who together seduce and destroy Caucasian sailors...
When Asian Americans protest racist depictions we are often accused of being oversensitive. However, we see our protest as part of a continuing struggle for survival and dignity in this country which we worked so hard to build. The characterizations of Asians as cunning, inscrutable, and subhuman are integrally tied to American society's past condonement of the anti-Asian violence and Exclusion Acts (which prohibited Asian immigration) at the turn-of-the-century, the internment of 112,000 Japanese Americans during World War II, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the massacre at My Lai, and the present ghetto...
...other states, and with every chance of success. Court-ordered upgradings are to be welcomed and have already forced the betterment of prisons in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. But this method of progress is slow and not always effective. In most instances, too, it only raises conditions from subhuman to minimally lawful...
...also untrue that a ludicrous characterization of Ed Foo Yung makes him innocuous. Gross depictions of Asians as evil and subhuman have contributed to the condoning of Japanese internment during WWII, attrocities of the massacre at MyLai, and recent creation of the Gook Klux Klan in the United States...
...play's points that Caliban, for all his subhuman qualities, is superior to the civilized royalty who wilfully embrace a career of corruption and evil. Shakespeare distilled the idea in Sonnet 94, which ends, "Lilies that fester smell worse than weeds...