Tag Archives: media

Holocaust Survivor Slams Top Immigration Official: "History Is Not on Your Side"

by deqc16rl Posted on March 29, 2017

Mother Jones

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On Monday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions made a surprise appearance at a White House press briefing to announce that the Justice Department would begin cracking down on so-called sanctuary cities that fail to comply with federal immigration laws. If local governments refuse to cooperate with federal efforts to detain undocumented immigrants, Sessions said, as much as $4 billion in grants across the country could be withheld.

Despite the stark warning this week, many residents opposing Trump’s anti-immigration policies don’t appear to be deterred. In the case of Sacramento County, where Immigration and Customs Enforcement Acting Director Thomas Homan was invited to speak at a town-hall style meeting Tuesday, hundreds of people turned out to blast the ongoing sweeps targeting undocumented immigrants in the state. The most powerful moment arrived when an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor named Bernard Marks took to the mic to warn Homan and Sheriff Scott Jones that “history was not on their side.”

The remarks, as noted by CBS Sacramento, below:

When I was a little boy in Poland, for no other reason but for being Jewish, I was hauled off by the Nazis. And for no other reason I was picked up and separated from my family, who was exterminated in Auschwitz. And I am a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau.

I spent five and a half years in concentration camps, for one reason and one reason only—because we picked on people, and you as the sheriff, who we elected as sheriff of this county—we did not elect you for sheriff of Washington, DC. It’s about time you side with the people here. And when this gentleman stands up there and says he doesn’t go after people, he should read today’s Bee. Because in today’s Bee, the Supreme Court Justice of California objected to ICE coming in and taking people away from the courts. Don’t tell me that this is a lie.

You stand up here Mr. Jones. Don’t forget—history is not on your side.

The remarks were met with loud cheers from the audience. Homan responded to the speech by saying his agency will continue to arrest undocumented immigrants inside courthouses.

Excerpt from:

Holocaust Survivor Slams Top Immigration Official: "History Is Not on Your Side"

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Bill O’Reilly Can’t Listen to Congresswoman Because He’s Too Distracted by Her "James Brown Wig"

by BiancaTravis44 Posted on March 28, 2017

Mother Jones

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Fox News host Bill O’Reilly is under fire after dismissing a speech by Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) with a racially charged jab at the 78-year-old congresswoman’s hairstyle.

“I couldn’t hear a word she was saying,” O’Reilly said during a Wednesday segment of Fox & Friends, after Waters spoke on the House floor about the dangers of President Donald Trump’s policies. “I was looking at the James Brown wig.”

As the male hosts laughed off the remarks, female host Ainsley Earhardt called O’Reilly out for “going after a woman’s looks.” Earhardt said she found Waters “very attractive.”

“I didn’t say she wasn’t attractive,” O’Reilly responded. “I love James Brown, but it’s the same hair.”

This isn’t the first time Fox has been accused of racially insensitive attacks on Waters. In 2012, host Eric Bolling used Whitney Houston’s death as a cautionary tale to suggest that Waters “step away from the crack pipe.” He later claimed he was “just kidding.”

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Bill O’Reilly Can’t Listen to Congresswoman Because He’s Too Distracted by Her "James Brown Wig"

Posted in ATTRA, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Radius, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Bill O’Reilly Can’t Listen to Congresswoman Because He’s Too Distracted by Her "James Brown Wig"

Major TV networks spent just 50 minutes on climate change — combined — last year.

by LarhondCraft Posted on March 23, 2017

Nanette Barragán is used to facing off against polluters. Elected in 2013 to the city council of Hermosa Beach, California, she took on E&B Natural Resources, an oil and gas company looking to drill wells on the beach. Barragán, an attorney before going into politics, learned of the potential project and began campaigning for residents to vote against it. The project was eventually squashed. In November, she won a congressional seat in California’s 44th district.

To Barragán, making sure President Trump’s environmental rollbacks don’t affect communities is a matter of life or death. The district she represents, the same in which she grew up, encompasses heavily polluted parts of Los Angeles County — areas crisscrossed with freeways and dotted with oil and gas wells. Barragan says she grew up close to a major highway and suffered from allergies. “I now go back and wonder if it was related to living that close,” she says.

Exide Technologies, a battery manufacturer that has polluted parts of southeast Los Angeles County with arsenic, lead, and other chemicals for years, sits just outside her district’s borders. Barragán’s district is also 69 percent Latino and 15 percent black. She has become acutely aware of the environmental injustices of the pollution plaguing the region. “People who are suffering are in communities of color,” she says.

Now in the nation’s capital, Barragán is chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus’s newly formed environmental task force and a member of the House Committee on Natural Resources, which considers legislation on topics like energy and public lands and is chaired by climate denier Rob Bishop, a Utah Republican. She knows the next four years will be tough but says she’s up for the challenge. “I think it’s going to be, I hate to say it, a lot of defense.”

Meet all the fixers on this year’s Grist 50.

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Major TV networks spent just 50 minutes on climate change — combined — last year.

Posted in alo, Anchor, Citizen, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, ONA, Ringer, solar, Ultima, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Major TV networks spent just 50 minutes on climate change — combined — last year.

Stop Being Shocked That Teen Girls Give a Shit About Politics

by DNDHeikewgp Posted on March 5, 2017

Mother Jones

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Over the last few months, Teen Vogue‘s clear-eyed, accessible coverage of the Trump administration has caught the collective attention of the internet. A major force behind Teen Vogue‘s recent work is Lauren Duca, the magazine’s weekend editor. Her piece on Donald Trump’s gaslighting of the American people went viral back in December, as did her powerful response to Fox News host Tucker Carlson, after he suggested on air that instead of writing about politics, she should “stick to the thigh-high boots.” Cringe.

But Carlson’s comment was actually less annoying to Duca than the fawning masses who seem so surprised that a magazine for teenagers can also produce great news commentary. I talked to Duca, whose new column launched last week, about her role in shaping Teen Vogue‘s work—and why the magazine’s political coverage reaches far beyond its target demographic.

Lauren Duca

Mother Jones: How did you start writing politically opinionated pieces for Teen Vogue?

Lauren Duca: Their mode of coverage has been really rigorous and committed to informing their audience since I started in January 2016, and also earlier. I was on the weekend that the Pulse shooting happened. It was really a high level of support editorially for taking these things on in a way that was unflinching and honest. So it was honestly kind of an organic segue into becoming more political as things took on more urgency. My job on the weekends was just to be deciding what the coverage was for the weekend. So that meant everything from Selena Gomez has a new Pantene ad to Donald Trump is lying to the American public. That was the scope of possibilities.

I think the reason they hired me, too—it wasn’t just a random thing. I had a culture column called Middlebrow at HuffPost and a reporting background. But weekend editor is typically a more starting-level position, and they took someone who they knew did a lot of cultural analysis. And when I say “they,” I mean specifically Phil Picardi, the editorial director. So hiring me was a very deliberate choice. It was kind of like, these are the ethically driven people with skills that are already in place. And this was kind of the work that Teen Vogue was already doing. So people being shocked is a little annoying.

MJ: It seems like just since Trump was elected, Teen Vogue has really ratcheted up the coverage. Was there a particular moment that you felt a real shift at the magazine?

LD: When I came on, it was already the kind of place that was doing that kind of thing. The wellness stuff, for example, is political in a nontraditional way. LGBTQ work and mental health work and being frank about sexuality—all those kinds of areas where they’ve been “woke” for a long time. It’s just taking on that mode of informing young women, and just a natural segue into traditional politics.

MJ: So it’s annoying that everyone is kind of fawning and surprised that Teen Vogue is showing up with political coverage.

LD: Yeah, there’s a spectrum of those responses. There’s definitely a mode of stealthy condescension sometimes, where I’m almost relieved by the Tucker Carlson comment in a way. Because the sort of “stick to the thigh-high boots” denial of access to a political conversation is such an explicit version of what I was already kind of itching over with the response. Other versions of the Tucker Carlson comment: “Her last post was about Selena Gomez’s makeup.” And it’s like, yes, it’s possible to do both those things, especially because I was on weekends. That’s part of why I didn’t have a specific beat. But the moment we’re living in right now, a politically active voice is required of everyone, and they’re still allowed to have nonserious interests. And I don’t see why that’s not true for young women.

MJ: Right, it’s just sort of baffling, the idea that teens aren’t political.

LD: It’s so frustrating. Especially because there’s so much political potential for young people. Millennials are now as big of a segment of the population as baby boomers. If we can actually can get everyone to show up and vote and be active, there’s a potential to shape elections for the next 35 years based on those statistics. I think young people absolutely care. They care in different ways. That generational divide, how it shows up in political discussions is especially ugly. It’s all, “Ugh, millennials and selfishness and narcissism, and oh my god, they’re taking selfies.” It’s like, “No, this is how we’re interacting with our world, and it’s different from the way you interact with your world, and by the way, thanks for the mountains of debt.”

MJ: So when you write, are you writing for millennials or teenagers?

LD: The audience for Teen Vogue is young women specifically. I think the reason the Trump gaslighting article did so well was that it wasn’t like, “Hey, teen girls.” It was like, “hey everybody.” I think the idea of political coverage that’s accessible to young women, the reason it took off so much is because so much of political coverage—people feel alienated from it, they don’t necessarily have the news literacy to make sense of everything. Everything is legitimately confusing. I think that things that are accessible to more people are just going to empower more people with information. And I think there are more people reading Teen Vogue now. I certainly get a lot of letters like, “I’m a 64-year-old man, and I certainly never would have read Teen Vogue before.” It’s like, relax. In the column I’m starting, I’m hoping it can be breaking things down and providing resources on what to read and what to prioritize in thinking about all the drain clogging and disinformation from this administration. I would love if that went beyond the typical readership.

MJ: What are you hearing from the actual teen readers of Teen Vogue?

LD: I’m hearing some really cool stuff. I have people doing school projects on me, which is insanely amazing. Yesterday I got an email from a high school junior who was doing a speech on me and my work, and do I have a message for her audience. I was like, this is insane, this is incredible. So yes, it’s reaching the people it’s meant to reach, too.

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Stop Being Shocked That Teen Girls Give a Shit About Politics

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There Are So Many Reasons Why This "Saturday Night Live" Skit Will Drive Trump Nuts

by PearleneKfe Posted on March 5, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

It’s getting late; have you seen my mates

Ma, tell me when the boys get here

It’s seven o’clock and I want to rock

Want to get a belly full of beer

My old man’s drunker than a barrel full of monkeys

And my old lady? she don’t care

My sister looks cute in her braces and boots

A handful of grease in her hair

Don’t give us none of your aggravation

We had it with your discipline

Saturday night’s alright for COMEDY!

Get a little action in

See more here: 

There Are So Many Reasons Why This "Saturday Night Live" Skit Will Drive Trump Nuts

Posted in FF, GE, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , | Comments Off on There Are So Many Reasons Why This "Saturday Night Live" Skit Will Drive Trump Nuts

Love in the Time of Mass Migration

by ErnestineAddis3 Posted on March 4, 2017

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

You can get through Mohsin Hamid’s latest in an afternoon. Not to suggest that Exit West, Hamid’s fourth novel, is frivolous reading. In just over 200 pages, he spans the globe as he tells the story of Nadia and Saeed, a young Muslim couple forced to flee an unnamed homeland—first to Greece and then to California. Falling in love as their city descends into conflict and chaos, the two eventually escape through magical portals, landing in refugee camps and squatters dens where they are confronted by nativist mobs. The crisis and the characters are fictional, but the circumstances feel almost journalistic. “It’s a love story,” Hamid assures me.

Exit West is, in fact, a classic boy-meets-girl tale, but like much of Hamid’s previous work it also tells a larger story of globalization and its discontents. With great compassion, he portrays the profound ruptures in a rapidly changing world. His characters are average people with average ambitions who bear the burdens of mobility—westward, upward, or forced. Given the anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States, it feels both urgent and much needed.

Hamid knows a thing or two about culture shock. He was born in the Pakistani city of Lahore, where he now lives with his wife and two children, a short drive from the Indian border. But he spent some formative childhood years playing on the manicured lawns of Palo Alto. Since releasing his first novel, Moth Smoke, in 2000, Hamid has won a Man Booker Prize, has had his work adapted for film and translated into 35 languages, and has been named one of Foreign Policy magazine’s “Leading Global Thinkers.” His novels, which also include The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, enjoy international acclaim and bestseller status. But Exit West may be his most prescient to date—an antidote of sorts (one can only hope) in this moment of xenophobic fear and mistrust.

Mother Jones: What was it like growing up between Pakistan and the United States?

Mohsin Hamid: When I was three, my dad went to do his Ph.D. at Stanford, so my mom and I moved with him and we lived in California for six years. I moved back to Lahore when I was nine, in 1980, and went back to the US for college and law school. I worked in New York for a while, then London for the better part of a decade. I have been back in Lahore for about seven years now.

MJ: Was there a sense of culture shock moving back and forth?

MH: There was pretty huge culture shock when I was nine! I had no memories of Pakistan. We hadn’t been back to visit in the six and a half years we’d been in California, and phone calls were expensive so I never really spoke to anyone. There was no internet. I’d never seen Pakistani movies or television, and I’d forgotten how to speak Urdu. So basically I was a Californian kid. I arrived in Pakistan completely unfamiliar with where I was going—and then utterly lost connection with where I’d just been. When I moved back, in 2009, with my wife and our daughter, it was still very strange. Maybe at a certain point, if you’ve moved around enough, everywhere feels a little bit foreign.

MJ: Do you consider Urdu your first language?

MH: This is the weird thing. My second language has become my first, and Urdu has become my second or third language. I started speaking at a very young age, a lot, but in Urdu. So in America, I go play outside in front of the townhouse by the Stanford campus where we live. All those townhouses look identical and I start crying. Outside the townhouse next to ours, the neighbor looks down at this befuddled Pakistani kid, and I’m looking at him like, “This is not my house! These are not my parents!” I’m surrounded by a bunch of kids and they ask my mother, “What’s wrong with him? Why can’t he speak?” She says, “He speaks fine.” And they say, “Is he retarded?”

For a month after that I didn’t speak a word. They were quite worried. I just watched cartoons. A month later, when I next spoke, I spoke in English with an American accent. I guess I spent a month somehow transitioning. It must have been quite traumatic to have made me silent for so long. Perhaps it’s shaped who I am, and my nomadic and multinational, multicultural view of life.

MJ: Were you drawn to books as a kid?

MH: Very early on. I was really into fantasy worlds and I loved stories—comic books in particular. My dad had this outlook: It doesn’t matter what I want to read—reading was a good thing. So whatever I was curious about they’d get for me from the library. Books were a kind of a resistance to reality. I liked to imagine worlds that were different. I still do.

MJ: Were there books or shows you couldn’t get in Pakistan because they were too salacious?

MH: Books, nobody bothered to censor them. You could find everything from full-on porn to soft porn in the guise of fantasy and sci-fi, and books like Lolita that had controversial sexual themes. There was much more censorship of images, though in the ’80s the VCR became quite popular, and you could get all the films you get in the US on pirated videocassettes.

MJ: What are the biggest misunderstandings between American and Pakistani cultures?

MH: The monolithic view that many Americans have of Pakistani culture is as inaccurate as the monolithic view that many Pakistanis have of American culture. In America there are people advocating for trans rights and people like Vice President Pence, who is vehemently opposed. In Pakistan, too, you have all kinds of folks—from flamboyant gay fashion designers and female Air Force pilots to the Taliban. A cross-dressed man used to be the top TV talk show host. It was actually quite radical. So the diversity of these societies is often lost on people. If an American teenager were to come to Lahore, they’d have wildly different experiences depending on whom they met. They could party and get drunk and smoke hashish with some, while others would say, “Let’s get some religious instruction.”

MJ: There’s been a lot of hand-wringing over the migrant crisis, but we seldom really get to know the refugees themselves. Did that factor into your reasons for writing Exit West?

MH: I’m not sufficient to act as their voice. But I thought it was important to imagine a narrative where a migrant was the hero, the protagonist, and enjoyed all of the narrative sympathies that come with that role. Because all over the world, the nativist perspective is being privileged over those who are more recent arrivals.

I also think massive migration is inevitable. As sea levels rise, as climate change happens, as fertile fields become arid, as wars are fought, people are going to move. They always have. I think we should be prepared, given environmental and political change for large-scale migration. If sea levels rise and 200 million people in Bangladesh and 300 million people in Indonesia need to move, and the entire Chinese seaboard, New York City—that’s going to be huge. So I thought it was important to imagine a future of immense migration and compress that into just a couple of years. And to imagine this future not as just a dystopian horror, but as something more complicated—that might even have elements of hope.

Partly, it’s our failure to imagine how change can be hopeful that empowers nostalgic narratives that try to take us back to the past in ways that are very dangerous.

MJ: People will inevitably call this a refugee story, but it almost seems like a love story first and foremost.

MH: In a way, all of my novels have been love stories. This one’s about young love, which two people as they grow and develop potentially leave behind. But also for the possibility of friendship to outlast the love. We’re not condemned to this titanic struggle of possession. This is about a different kind of relationship. I think all human stories are migration stories because everyone is a refugee from their own childhood. Even if you don’t move localities, time moves. The California of your childhood is over. So to say it’s a refugee story is true—and it’s also a love story. The notion of love as a potentially destructive and potentially redemptive human force is something that comes across in all my books.

MJ: So we should call you a romantic novelist?

MH: Laughs. In a weird way, yes! I’m not uncomfortable with the term. We think of the romance novel as a lesser form of literature, but I don’t think that’s true. Love is a very important aspect of human life and worth exploring. In Italian, the word for novel is romanzo, “the romance.” The English is “novel”—something new. Both of those elements, experimentation and love, are fundamental to the form.

MJ: Do you have any favorite love stories?

MH: I don’t have a single archetypal one, but for example, Charlotte’s Web is this beautiful story about love and death. Charlotte becomes kind of like a best friend for Wilbur, but also like a mother for him. That’s a novel about how love endures and how it makes weathering the experience of mortality more possible.

MJ: The discussion about migration right now seems to be dominated by fear. Is love the antidote?

MH: Also the need to empathize with, and insert oneself inside, experiences that are different than one has had. Literature and art and movies all play a very important role. They can help disarm this feeling. When we aren’t collectively imagining hopeful futures, then the way things are going almost invariably seems negative and frightening.

MJ: I understand you take walks to catalyze your writing. Your pace of publication has improved. Is walking to thank?

MH: It might be that I’m getting older. This novel felt quick to me—it took four years. But walking is very good for writers. There’s something fundamentally useful about not talking to anybody, not looking at a screen, and being in nature—even if that nature is an urban environment. It’s definitely helped me, especially when I’m completely stuck.

In that sense, the mobile phone is very dangerous. If you’re walking and looking at your phone, you’re not walking—you’re surfing the internet. If you keep your eyes open, walking is a meditative act. It’s so rare that we allow ourselves just to be. It’s a space in a day that we almost never carve out for ourselves. I think it’s very useful, like sleeping and dreaming, as something that’s important to my ability to write.

MJ: So you leave your phone at home?

MH: I keep it in my pocket. But I believe in digital detox. We’re all so terrified in the world right now partly because of the digital—that’s TV, radio, reading your favorite conspiracy theory blog. That stuff activates a sort of fight-or-flight response, and that’s not a state human beings feel good inhabiting. When I’m really plugged in I find it difficult to write. It’s like digging a well. If you make a void, something moves in to fill it. Writing books is like that. It’s mostly about freeing up time, doing nothing, and in that time some writing starts to happen. We need to figure out how to maintain those voids.

MJ: What’s it like to be in Pakistan living so close to India?

MH: Lahore is a very weird place in that sense. I can drive to the border in 30 minutes, walk across a line painted in the cement, and I’m in India. It’s bizarre. India to someone who lives in Lahore is like Queens to someone who lives in Lower Manhattan—it’s not far away, and yet it doesn’t exist. Lahore really is on a fault line. The animosity between India and Pakistan is deeply unfortunate and dangerous, and it’s something I’ve long campaigned to reduce. But right now, when there’s artillery being exchanged in Kashmir—which is not for from here, either—and there are 100-ish nuclear weapons on each side of the border, there’s never really been a case like this where two nuclear armed countries are happily shelling each other.

MJ: Was your family growing up very religious?

MH: There were differing degrees: Some people never did anything you would describe as outwardly religious, like praying or fasting. Others prayed five times a day. My mother has been to Mecca to perform her hajj; my dad hasn’t. I come from a very liberal family, so even the people who are outwardly religious tend to subscribe to gender equality, the importance of open-mindedness, all that stuff. My family is generally nonprescriptive.

MJ: Are you religious yourself?

MJ: It’s not something I like to talk about publicly. One reason is the politics, but also I think spirituality is deeply personal. My aunt used to say, “It’s between me and my god; it’s got nothing to do with you.” It was a good enough answer for me as a snot-nosed college kid angling for a religious debate, and I still think it’s a good way of putting it.

MJ: How do you feel about mandates on religious clothing?

MH: I’m not a fan. We should be very skeptical of people who want to place limits on how we express ourselves. If my daughter wanted to wear a headscarf and dress in a religiously conservative way, I would be heartbroken. But if she were to decide to do that and she were to live in a place where people said she couldn’t do that, I would be entirely committed to her right to do so. The ban on the burkini, which is basically a wetsuit, seems particularly ridiculous. We know nuns will wear something like that, and we know the bikini was only invented 50 or 60 years ago—people wore more clothing until recently. The ethnocultural connotations of the burkini ban are very strong. It’s as absurd as mandating that women have to go topless on the beach. If I were a woman, I definitely would not want to wear a burkini or a headscarf. But it’s not about what I want.

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Love in the Time of Mass Migration

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Sallie Ford’s Raucous Self-Help

by TaneshaDorsey90 Posted on February 27, 2017

Mother Jones

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Sallie Ford
Soul Sick
Vanguard

Courtesy of Vanguard

The ingredients of Sallie Ford’s stunning fourth album are easy to identify: ’50s teen ballads, ’60s reverb-heavy surf guitar, and plenty of timeless garage rock, among other familiar sounds. (Love those trashy organ riffs!) But that doesn’t begin to hint at the passionate immediacy she brings to these vivid stories of mental health struggles and the attempt to rise above “that feeling when you feel like giving up.” A deceptively powerful singer who splits the different between an earnest folkie and a fiery punk shouter, Ford reveals her darkest thoughts with fearless candor, daring to “imagine the worst that it could be/Fantasize, romanticize, my demise,” in the raucous “Loneliness Is Power,” and confessing, “It’s the feeling of failing that’s freeing,” on the lovely “Failure.” If she bends, Ford never breaks, concluding with the rousing, soul-inflected “Rapid Eyes,” exclaiming, “I need professional help…Gotta try and fix what’s inside.” Soul Sick is a riveting self-help session that could buoy the spirits of others facing their own challenges—and it’s great Rock ‘n’ Roll to boot.

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Sallie Ford’s Raucous Self-Help

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The "Pristine" Films That Got Snubbed by the Oscars

by StephenGalindo Posted on February 25, 2017

Mother Jones

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Jackie Chan flicks are no longer the only place where you’ve seen an Asian or Asian American actor play a meaty role onscreen in the US: On TV, they’ve appeared in trail-blazing shows like Fresh Off the Boat, Master of None, and The Mindy Project. Director Jon M. Chu wants to assemble an all-Asian cast for a film adaptation of Kevin Kwan’s novel Crazy Rich Asians, making it one of the first films from an American studio to do so in years.

But the demographic still remains one of the most invisible groups in the media. In 2014, more than half of films and TV shows had no speaking or named roles for Asian characters, according to a recent study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism. Controversies over the whitewashing of Asian characters took center stage last year, with several prominent actors and producers speaking out. For instance, the creators of Ghost in the Shell, a film adapted from a Japanese manga and anime film, faced backlash after casting Scarlett Johansson, a white actress, as the lead Japanese character.

Melissa Powers and Matthew Eng, both 23 year-old NYU graduates, decided they’d had enough of the whitewashing. Last year, they began producing Asian Oscar Bait, a podcast entirely devoted to Asian stories that, they argue, deserve to be on everyone’s television. The podcast has gotten a few nods from indie publications and it caught my eye for the specificity of its approach: In each episode, Powers and Eng take a story about Asians or Asian Americans and pitch it as a film, suggesting actors, directors, and even writers who could possibly take on the work.

The podcast retells lesser known stories in history, such as Fred Korematsu vs. United States, a Supreme Court case in which a Japanese man, Fred Korematsu refused to go to an internment camp in 1942. Another episode, “The Donut King,” digs into the story of Bun Tek “Ted” Ngoy, a Cambodian refugee who made a fortune selling donuts in California, until he lost everything—a “Wolf of Wall Street meets Krispy Kreme” kind of tale, says Powers. The podcast is a response to the notion that there aren’t enough Asian directors or actors in Hollywood, she says. “Our tagline is: There are no excuses.”

I spoke with the Eng and Powers to get their take on Asian representation at the 2017 Academy Awards.

Mother Jones: What got you interested in Asian representation and diversity?

Melissa Powers: I am Singaporean American, but I grew up in China. I never realized there was a lack of Asian representation in media until I came to the US for university. One moment in particular stuck out me: I was watching Tomb Raider 2, which is a very mediocre film, but there’s a scene where Gerald Butler interrogates a family of Chinese fishermen and speaks to them in Chinese. Obviously his accent is terrible, but I just replayed that scene over and over because I was like, “Oh my God, someone is speaking Chinese in a big Hollywood film.” I just watched it for hours. That really showed me how starved I was for Asian representation, without actually realizing it at the time.

Matthew Eng: I’m half-Chinese—my dad grew up in America and is Chinese—and I don’t look Chinese at all, but it’s a part of my background, undeniably so. While I was in a screenwriting course and producing my own screenplays for class, I began to notice this inclination to create characters who were always white. That’s not an accurate representation of the world I grew up in or the types of stories I think should be told, but it was something I tended to do anyway.

Going off of that, I became more attuned to the film industry and the entertainment world. I began to notice that whenever an Asian actor would appear in a film, they would only be playing roles that could only be played by Asian actors, and those roles weren’t necessarily the meatiest parts of the films or TV show.

MJ: You tackle the Oscars in one of your episodes. How was representation this year when it comes to Asians?

MP: Atrocious! Ai-Ling Lee is the first Asian woman to be nominated for sound editing for La La Land, which is cool, but at the same time, Dev Patel is one of the very few Asian people ever to be nominated for an acting role in Lion. It’s very distressing. But hopefully it won’t be worse than last year’s Oscars with Chris Rock and Sacha Baron Cohen making fun of those poor Chinese kids.

If you consider Iranian people to be Asian, which I do, though not everyone does, Asghar Farhadi is nominated for best foreign language film for The Salesman. He won’t come into the US because of the Muslim ban, and I think he says he plans not to. I think his absence will be felt and I hope people will acknowledge that.

ME: Dev Patel is fairly good in Lion, but I think there’s a lot of other Asian actors who I would have liked to see get nominated. It really fucking boggles me that Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden was not nominated in any technical categories, when that film could not be any more pristine a piece of filmmaking. The actress, Kim Min-Hee, is totally phenomenal. In an ideal world, her performance would be an Oscar contender.

I also talk about Andrew Ahn’s independent film Spa Night a lot, which is a story about an Asian man’s queer sexuality. It’s something I’ve never seen portrayed before with that remarkable detail and attention. But it’s not going to be on the radar of Oscar voters.

Melissa and Matthew with their producer, Caroline Pinto. Asian Oscar Bait

MJ: So what Asian films should have been at the Oscars this year?

MP: We’re both in agreement that The Handmaiden should have been there. But in the future, I’d like to see the Academy’s be more generous towards genre films like sci-fi and horror, because I think those genres tend to be places where people of color get to do more in the role.

ME: The Handmaiden is my number one egregious absence from the Academy. But there’s another film that came out last year called Dheepan by Jacques Audiard. It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes but completely disappeared when it came to the States. It’s about a Sri Lankan couple who are refugees, and find this young French girl and pose as a family to get into France. It really reflects the times, and the performance by this first-time actress, Kalieaswari Srinivasan, is just beyond words for me. If an American director made this story, it would have received a modicum of attention. There’s amazing cinematic craftsmanship that’s going on in all corners of the world, and you just have to look beyond your backyard.

MJ: If you could make one of your episodes into a film, which episode would that be, and why? And how likely would that story get an Oscar nomination?

MP: I think the Fred Korematsu story would be a shoo-in for an Oscar nom. However, the one I’d be more interested in seeing is the Mazher Mahmood story. His name is going to be familiar to most Brits—he was a tabloid journalist involved in a ton of scandalous stories for News of the World, and is currently in jail for tampering with evidence.

He’s the kind of anti-hero that enthralls Hollywood critics and audiences. Think of Wolf of Wall Street—you have drugs, celebrities, and this razor sharp focus with being number one. At the same time, his story has more than a traditional rise and fall narrative. Mahmood has a strange relationship with his own background (British Pakistani) that no one seems to address. Even though he grew up amongst South Asians, he consistently used his minority status to put other people of color at ease and weasel stories from them, usually putting them in jail in the process. There was an incident where he collected buses of illegal immigrants under the guise of giving them jobs, and instead drove them straight to a detention center. As an Asian person, it really amazes me that he could betray “us” like that.

We don’t really see this kind of betrayal onscreen. In fact, we rarely see Asian antiheroes onscreen. This would easily score Best Actor, Best Screenplay (Mahmood has a book so possibly Best Adapted Screenplay), and potentially Best Director. This would require a minority screenwriter and director, to navigate how Mahmood used and abused the fact that he was an Asian man. And I’m just saying, Riz Ahmed needs that Oscar vehicle.

ME: I would definitely love to see Merle Oberon’s story, chronicled in our second episode, as the basis of a film. It’s such a fascinating, eye-opening, and totally dramatic story of lifelong deception, but it also intersects with the golden age of Hollywood history, making it the type of film the Academy loves to honor any chance it gets. Oberon concealed her half-Indian origins in order to attain cinematic stardom in the 1930s, concocting an entire back story that involved a false upbringing in Tasmania and forcing her Indian mother to pose as her live-in maid in order to ward off any suspicions from her famous friends and consorts. Insane, right?

That being said, I’m not sure it would score any nominations beyond Best Actress for whoever plays Oberon (and, I don’t know, possibly a costume nomination) because the Academy has an annoying tendency of under-rewarding films that could traditionally be described as a “women’s picture,” meaning any movie that puts a woman at its forefront.

Even so, I would love to see this movie made and, preferably, with an actual Indian actress playing Oberon. If this actress were nominated, she would become only the second Asian performer to ever receive a Best Actress nomination. The only other Asian nominee in this category happens to be Oberon herself, for 1935’s Dark Angel, which means that yes, the only Asian woman ever nominated for Best Actress in Oscars’ nearly ninety year history didn’t even want people to know she was Asian! You truly can’t make this stuff up.

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The "Pristine" Films That Got Snubbed by the Oscars

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Trump Just Held His First Campaign Rally for the 2020 Race

by SusanneWPA Posted on February 19, 2017

Mother Jones

On Saturday, just one month into his presidency, President Donald Trump held the first rally of his 2020 presidential campaign.

Trump was introduced by several Florida congressmen before making a dramatic entrance. To the soundtrack of the movie Air Force One, the presidential aircraft pulled into the airplane hangar where the rally was being held. Earlier this week, the White House said in a statement that they would not use the plane in the background as a prop, something Trump did often during the campaign with his own airplane.

After Melania Trump recited the “Our Father” and said a few words, Donald Trump opened his rally with an attack on the media. “I also want to speak to you without the filter of the fake news,” he said, accusing news outlets of writing false stories about him using made-up sources. “When the media lies to people, I will never, ever let them get away with it.” For the next 45 minutes he returned to his familiar themes of the wall on the US-Mexico border, keeping out unvetted immigrants, the unreliable judiciary, and America’s return to greatness.

In one particularly odd moment, Trump forced the Secret Service to let a man who had complimented his presidency during a pre-rally interview join him on stage. Trump instructed the man to climb over a fence to get to the stage and then briefly gave him the microphone to address the crowd. Trump acknowledged that the Secret Service was probably not pleased with this, but “we know our people,” he said.

Trump also lashed out at the Ninth Circuit appeals court that overturned his executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim nations, saying that thousands of immigrants have been allowed into the country with no vetting. “There was no way to vet those people. There was no documentation. Nothing,” he said. In fact, the immigration process for refugees and other immigrants requires extensive vetting and documentation. Trump also said he’s ordered the Department of Justice to protect police and sheriffs “from crimes of violence,” and reiterated his plans to cut taxes, while also promising to implement a trillion dollar infrastructure program around the country.

You can watch the full speech here:

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Trump Just Held His First Campaign Rally for the 2020 Race

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Why Does a White Guy Always Have to Be the Hero?

by RuthieMoeller Posted on February 18, 2017

Mother Jones

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Chinese director Zhang Yimou, of Hero and House of Flying Daggers fame, made his English-language debut with The Great Wall, which opened Friday. But in a story set in ancient China, Matt Damon’s character sticks out like a sore thumb. The presence of his pale mug in movie posters and trailers drew backlash even before the film’s release. “We have to stop perpetuating the racist myth that only a white man can save the world,” Fresh Off the Boat actress Constance Wu wrote in a Twitter tirade. “We don’t need salvation.” Damon and Yimou felt compelled to publicly defend the film, with Damon calling it “historical fantasy.”

The lack of people of color in starring roles is a longstanding Hollywood problem, and things are especially bad for Asians. A 2016 study (PDF) by the Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism at the University of Southern California found that more than half of films and TV shows had no speaking roles for Asian characters—and it’s exceedingly rare to see Asians in lead roles. Producers often claim there just aren’t enough roles for Asian actors, which is true—or vice versa, which is not. Often, when the opportunity arises to cast Asian characters, Hollywood decision-makers hire white actors to portray them. Sometimes they simply rewrite nonwhite characters as white ones. These things are called whitewashing.

The Great Wall exemplifies a related Hollywood trend wherein white characters play a dominant role in a foreign situation, while nonwhite locals are reduced to sidekicks or people “to be killed or rescued—or to have sex with,” as the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen put it recently. Vogue recently added to the outrage over cultural tone-deafness by presenting Karlie Kloss, an American model of German and Danish descent, as a geisha—for the magazine’s diversity issue, no less. Vogue later removed the photographs from its website and Kloss apologized for her participation, but it was yet another episode in America’s long history of whitewashing Asians. We’ll leave you with this brief history of the same. Dig around and you’re sure to find plenty more.

1926

The first Charlie Chan film is released, starring Japanese actor George Kuwa, but the films fail to win large audiences until Warner Oland, a Swedish actor, takes on the role. The Chan films become extremely popular, with more than 40 made, but are later criticized for racist stereotypes.

Wikimedia Commons

1935

Merle Oberon, whose partial Indian ancestry she keeps a secret for most of her life, is nominated for a Best Actress Oscar. She is later credited as the first (and only) Asian-American ever nominated in that category.

1944

In Dragon Seed, Katharine Hepburn, plays Jade, a Chinese woman who stands up to Japanese invaders. Turhan Bey, who is of Turkish and Czech descent, co-stars as her husband.

Katharine Hepburn and Turhan Bey in Dragon Seed. Wikimedia Commons

1945

Rex Harrison portrays a Thai king in Anna and the King of Siam, the film adaptation of a semi-autobiographical novel of the same name. A 1951 remake continues to use non-Asian actors in the role—Russian-born Yul Brynner is the new king.

1956

Marlon Brando plays Sakini, a Japanese translator on the island of Okinawa after World War II, requiring hours of daily makeup work. “It was a horrible picture,” he later writes, “and I was miscast.”

1961

Mickey Rooney dons yellow-face, prosthetic teeth, and taped eyelids for his role as Audrey Hepburn’s temperamental landlord in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. (His “bucktoothed, myopic Japanese” is “broadly exotic,” the New York Times writes.) Rooney is later taken aback to learn that his portrayal is considered racist. “It breaks my heart,” he tells the Sacramento Bee in 2008, adding, jokingly, “Those that didn’t like it, I forgive them.”

Breakfast at Tiffany’s Wikimedia Commons

1967

Sean Connery, 007, goes undercover Japanese in You Only Live Twice. (His makeup job would fool nobody, let alone a Bond villian.)

1972-75

In the TV series Kung Fu, David Carradine plays Kwai Chang Caine, a Buddhist monk versed in the martial arts. Bruce Lee had originally pitched the series and hoped to star in it, but the producers went with Carradine instead. Kung Fu became one of the most popular shows of its day.

David Carradine in Kung Fu. Wikimedia Commons

1981

Asian actors and artists in California protest Hollywood’s attempt to revive Charlie Chan with Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen. “I don’t think racism is funny any more,” San Franciscan Eliza Chan tells the Washington Post. “We have been called “Charlie” for so many years. We have been made fun of—the way we speak, the way we act—people expect us to be like Charlie Chan, and we can’t stand that any more.”

1982

British actor Ben Kingsley, whose father is Indian, wins a Best Actor Oscar for Ghandi. He is the first—and as of 2017, the only—actor of Asian descent ever nominated in the category, much less win.

Director Richard Attenborough, left, and actor Ben Kingsley pose with their Ghandi Oscars. Reed Saxon/AP

1984

Japanese-American actor Gedde Watanabe portrays the (ostensibly) Chinese exchange student Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles. Mainstream audiences find the caricature hilarious, but many Asian-Americans cringe. “Because there were so few Asian actors onscreen at that time, people were looking for Kurosawa in a comedy,” Watanabe recalls in a 30th anniversary interview. “Sixteen Candles wasn’t that kind of movie.”

Gedde Watanabe as Long Duk Dong in Sixteen Candles.

1990

A British theater production of Miss Saigon, a retelling of Madame Butterfly in the context of the Vietnam War, almost doesn’t make it to Broadway after a union protests the casting of British actor Jonathan Pryce in a Eurasian role. Although Pryce, who wears eye prosthetics and bronzer for the performance, wins a Tony and the play goes on to become one of Broadway’s longest-running hits, Miss Saigon continues to be criticized for its stereotypical portrayals.

2003

Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai features Tom Cruise as Capt. Nathan Algren, a guilt-wracked former Union Army soldier who gets to be the hero when he helps some rebel samurai fight a corrupt Japanese empire—it’s all about Cruise, of course. Washington Post critic Stephen Hunter savages the film: “Basically what Zwick has done is to take Kevin Costner’s Dances With Wolves and insert it into the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, with a samurai clan in the role of an Indian tribe.”

Warner Bros.

2006

Ang Lee is the first Asian director to win an Oscar, for Brokeback Mountain.

Director Ang Lee accepts his Oscar from Tom Hanks. Chris Carlson/AP

2010

White actors play the leads in the live-action film adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, previously an animated series with characters of Asian and Native American descent. Fans pan it and the movie flops.

Avatar: The Last Airbender series. Nickelodeon

The Last Airbender movie. Paramount Pictures

2012

White actor Jim Sturgess dons yellowface and doctored eyes to play a Korean character in Cloud Atlas. Director Andy Wachowski defends the casting: “The intention is to talk about things that are beyond race. The character of this film is humanity.” It’s not Sturgess’ first brush with whitewashing: In 21, a film based on the true story of college card-counters who gamed the casinos, he plays a student who in real life was Chinese-American.

2015

Emma Stone stars as a half-Asian character in Aloha, which flops at the box office. The role, she says later, opened her eyes to Hollywood’s diversity problems and “flaws in the system.” Director Cameron Crowe also apologizes, calling the casting “misguided.”

Feb. 2016

In an otherwise spot-on monologue—”I’m here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards”—Oscars host Chris Rock rips Hollywood’s lack of diversity, yet manages to stereotype Asian Americans, who are all but invisible in American films

April 2016

The creators of Ghost in the Shell, adapted from a Japanese manga and anime film, face backlash after casting Scarlett Johansson as the Japanese main character. Tilda Swinton also gets hit with criticism for her role as the Ancient One, a Tibetan character, in Dr. Strange.

Ghost in the Shell, 1995. Production IG

Ghost in the Shell, 2017. Paramount Pictures

May 2016

Comedian Margaret Cho, Nerds of Color blogger Keith Chow, author Ellen Oh and other Asian Americans start a monthlong #WhiteWashedOut campaign that calls on Hollywood to stop whitewashing Asians and urging white actors to reject Asian roles.

Nov. 2016

Hong Kong actor and director Jackie Chan accepts an honorary Oscar at the Governors Awards in an emotional speech: “After 56 years in the film industry, making more than 200 films, breaking so many bones, finally this is mine.” He is one of four filmmakers to receive the lifetime achievement award.

Jackie Chan at the Governors Awards. Chris Pizzello/AP

Feb. 2017

Matt Damon plays a European mercenary who saves China from monsters in The Great Wall. Actress Constance Wu takes issue: “We like our color and our culture and our strengths and our own stories,” she writes. “Hollywood is supposed to be about making great stories. So make them.”

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Why Does a White Guy Always Have to Be the Hero?

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