SPACED OUT

Childish Gambino- You See Me

Is singling out asian women as desirable okay?

It’s not a surprise to hear Donald Glover, as Childish Gambino chant “Asian Girls Everywhere, UCLA” I’m not here to demonize Glover, a black male with supposed yellow fever and propagating his preference in song and tune to the world, it dawns upon me to explore the matter even just a tad.

In other songs, Glover highlights his affinity toward Asian women as partly political, because for him being with a black or a white women presents itself as a racial issue. It may easier for Glover to have fun and relations with Japanese and Pilipinas as it circumvents the complexity of the Black and White paradigm that would go through the head of a post low income African American NYU grad.

I’m not suggesting Glover is inciting orientalism much like other hip hop contemporaries. I am suggesting that lyrics like “chilling with your pilipina in your local jollybee” isn’t suggesting race domination, but perhaps a process of sexual self identification occurring through mixed race politics. It isn’t Nicki Minaj using asian culture as a prop and ornamentation. However, much like Amy Chua’s Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, it is easy for the mainstream to misconstrue Glover’s actual intent with asian women.

Sure enough, he’s sexualizing Asian American women much like Chua is promoting her story of tiger mother ethos and practices, and this construction of Asian women as sex objects or mothers have racial consequences. It may perpetuate stereotypes, but results of simplistic representation, doesn’t denote simplistic origins. Whether this is an easy guess and check of the lotus blossom and dragon lady stereotype is not an easy answer, and easy cries of racism betrays the complexity of individualism which is at heart with Glover’s music and Chua’s life.

For Asian Americans, finding mainstream representation of us is an uphill battle, and as our representations garner even a small image in the voice of a black renaissance actor, writer, rapper or a Asian American professor turned author, denouncing it as racist or a step back is in itself ignorant. If we are to respect all views, all representations that have complexity in its origin is itself authentically respectable.

This is not to say that sexualization is okay, but rather it’s origin has to be analyzed to make a evident statement. By playing to the sexualization of Asian Women, Donald Glover is taking 2 steps backs in a cosmopolitan America, a multiracial sphere that betrays perhaps the black and white dichotomous paradigm where he’s making advancements in.

Sunrise- Childish Gambino