Author Archives: The Stripes

INSULARITY AND IDENTITY: THE 2013 AASA SURVEY

In an article in The Daily Princetonian back in November, Ben Dinovelli wrote about “forgetting” his Asian identity. As a person of Asian descent adopted by White parents in the US, Dinovelli talks about how integration into campus culture is difficult because he feels the need to either embrace his Asian heritage or be part of a larger White society at Princeton. He seems to feel as if he is an outsider to both cultures and is actively trying to decide in which culture he’d be more comfortable. Dinovelli is dealing with a question that Asian Americans on campus often have: how does being an active member of the Asian community at Princeton affect you? Continue reading →

BLACK LOVE: A DISCUSSION

In honor of Valentine’s Day and Black History Month, The Stripes was excited to capture some of the action at the Black Love discussion this past Wednesday in our very first multimedia special! To respect the event as a safe/open space, we did not include audio from the actual discussion and instead interviewed students afterwards.

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REVISITING ZOE: EXPLORING THE EFFECTS OF A WHITE LITERARY TRADITION

When I was a child, I wanted to be a writer.

My reasons were not heroic. I did not initially see writing as a way for me to think about my role as an African immigrant in America. As a child, I did not fully understand how the lack of black heroes and heroines in the books I read affected my writing and my self-worth. For me, writing served was just a fun outlet.

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THE MISREPRESENTED AND HYPERSEXUALIZED LATINA

Growing up, I always struggled with finding a stable identity of my own. I knew I was Latina, but I felt like I could only relate to Latina women in my family and never the ones on television and film who show how an “actual” Latina was supposed to be and act. In television programs, terms like “exotic” became the norm when describing tanned skinned, seemingly typical Latinas. Yet, it wasn’t until adolescence, when I began religiously immersing myself in pop culture, that I started to realize just how pervasive and damaging this one idea of what a Latina is actually was. Continue reading →

WHY I LIKE YELLOW FEVER

I remember the first time I listened to Childish Gambino. It was my senior year, his album Camp had dropped that past November, and while surfing the web, I came across his music video for “Freaks and Geeks.” Although at first I was confused as to why Donald Glover from Community was filming himself rapping and moving sporadically (was that dancing?) around some random warehouse, I was quickly won over by his flow and his wit. Halfway through the song, one of his lines caught me by complete surprise. I paused the video and replayed it to make sure I had heard it correctly: “Love is a trip, but fucking is a sport / Are there Asian girls here? Minority Report!”.
What?! Did Asian girls just get a shout-out in a rap song?! I listened to the rest of the tracks in Camp, and there was no denying: Childish Gambino had yellow fever.

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ON RACIAL APATHY

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‘Uncle Ruckus,’ a character from the series The Boondocks, who despises everything that involves black people.

Since I began working to develop The Stripes, searching for contributors to help foster our campus’s racial and cultural discourse, I have become familiar with a certain type of dissenter.

This person is not like those who most need The Stripes, neither ignorant nor contemptuous in his stance against advancing racial relations. Instead, this type of person, usually a minority himself, and well aware of the conditions that face his community, holds resolute indifference towards the struggle that activists engage. Continue reading →

LOST HISTORY: EXCLUSION, INTERNMENT, AND CITIZENSHIP DENIED

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This article is the second part of a series on the field of Asian American studies.

My high school US history teacher was a staunch progressive. This fact was blatantly clear in the way she structured her curricula. As a result of my high school having a program called “Advanced Topics” – or “AT” for short – teachers have a freer hand in creating college-level courses. My ATUS teacher took full advantage of this freedom, creating a curriculum that focused on many often-overlooked aspects of social history and omitted discussion of military battle history. Continue reading →