The difficult life of being Asian in the Western Universe
___
Firstly, this is NOT a story about feeling miserable about being Asian while going through life with stereotypes, racism, and having the victim mentality. This is far from feeling sorry for oneself or other fellow Asians. It’s a message about conflict, change, growth, and empowerment. So, let’s get started.
Throughout history and contemporary times, Asians have become the highest rate in America to be more likely than any other racial/cultural groups to be victims and survivors of abuse and bullying perpetuated from their peers. In my own experiences and of many others, we have noticed internalized and externalized prejudice about Asians has been prevalent in both the U.S.A. and Canada. Even positive stereotypes and generalizations can be malicious due to lack of understanding, personalizing, and humanizing people on an independent case by case basis.
That has to all change for the better through holistic approaches to achieve progress while going through a selective and diverse journey to succeed and lead. Thereby, empowering not only ourselves who go through discrimination, but every single one of us because we’re ALL HUMAN. Discussions and actions for growth must be established congruently through our consciousness of self. Also known as: The Discipline of Self-Awareness!
Fellow Asians! Take charge and be in control of your own lives rather than complying with society and media to allow them to dehumanize and degrade us. Fight the good fight! The Bad, The Ugly, and The Evil may win the battle. However…
We win the war against evil by decisions we make for ourselves whether our empowering actions are unconsciously or consciously committed.
Asian, aren’t exactly positively represented, both historically and contemporarily, in the mainstream media of the Western world, especially when it comes to being a prospect for dating or relationship material.
As Asians from all diverse backgrounds, we go through may perpetuated and stigmatized biases, prejudices, stereotypes, and discrimination from our childhood, adolescence, to adulthood.
These are many of the following (whether good or bad) ridiculous comments we hear again and again and continuously throughout our lives from the general public:
- Asians are physically small (this racial slur is worse for fellow, Asian men) which sub communicates the label of being weak and submissive and sexually incompetent and incompatible.
- Asians eat dogs (Misinformed assumption that everybody does the same thing, lack of cultural education due to ignorance and sometimes, arrogance)
- Asian women are submissive (Media portrays them as dehumanized beings- i.e. sex objects)
- Asian men have small penises (implies that Asian men are sexually weak and unconfident based on generalizations and presumptions)
- Asians are good at math, are computer geeks, nerds, good at video games, know martial arts and self-defense, are well educated, socially awkward, rich, don’t like to date non-Asian people.
- Asians are always indifferent, also known as poker faced (non-expressive).
- Asians always look furious.
Logical Reasoning: Flawed vs. Factual
Assumptions are innately within us to a certain degree. However, there are two types of assumptions:
- Misinformed Assumptions [without any existing legitimate and supporting evidence] which results with conjecture
- Educated Guesses or Informative Assumptions (with prior insightful knowledge to support a premise and a conclusion) thus resulting in a factual premise and sometimes conclusive outcome.
In order for deductive (general to specific premises/conclusions) reasoning to work effectively, there must be complete solid evidence to support a premise and conclusion. The same applies to inductive (specific to general) reasoning to a certain degree.
Human Nature’s Irrationality and Need to be Ignorant
Generalizations form because we like to know things even when we don’t, and what we think we know may be heavily flawed due to our ego. Having the explanations comforts us rather than having to suffer from the fear of the unknown, even if we’re wrong and arrogant. No wonder the saying, “Ignorance is bliss.” exists. With that being said, I respectfully disagree with the argument that unconventional yet effective wisdom is Bliss.
Higher Purpose, Meaning, Education, Altruism and Free of Judgment
In a well developed world, if one’s provided with the resources for education and learning, there’s no excuse for ignorance, generalizing, and stereotyping of people. Ne excuse for using labels and misleading information, despite irrationality being part of human nature. Through a nurturing environment, highly valude and intelligent individuals set themselves to a higher purpose and make themselves accountable for their actions while helping others evolve too.
WE’RE HUMAN, NOT OBJECTS!!
As an Asian, and more importantly as a human being, all these stereotypes are intellectually absurd. NOT everybody is the same. Not anywhere in the world is everybody and anybody the same.
The IMPORTANT Lesson here is to continuously practice the Principles of Altruism, Respect, Equality, Self-Love, Self-Awareness, and Togetherness!
<3 Diversity for ALL is the ULTIMATE Journey! ☺
Feature Photo Credit: Getty Images All other images courtesy of the author
My good online friend Jack Yan has shown me that Asian identity can be a very rich, diverse, robust one. In fact, I recall specifically that his definition of Asian includes more than just Chinese, Korean, Japanese and other related ethnicities– but also Russian, Indian, and other cultures east of Europe. We’ve talked on this very subject in different ways, but we also talk about technology trends, publishing (he’s a typographer and publisher at Lucire), linguistics and more. If you’d like to see someone that really breaks stereotypes– he sure broke any I had– visit Jack at jackyan.com (especially his… Read more »
Thank You, Jonathan Pratt on your journey with Asian Identity and its cultures. Your online friend, Jack Yan and his site is interesting. Thanks for the comments! 🙂