So why should RiceDaddies care about Mainstream Hollywood?

After reading RakuMon's post, some of you may have wondered okay, so what does this have to do with being a RiceDaddy? After all, mainstream Hollywood is all about fluff, fantasy and fiction, while we RiceDaddies concern ourselves with parenting within the context of Asian culture and tradition, right?

Well, since many of us are Asian-American dads, RakuMon's post is especially relevant to our experience because it's important to know how mainstream American media affect our children, and their relationships with their peers.

It's an undeniable fact that as a modern component of culture, the media play a primary role in shaping Americans’ perception of who exists within and outside of the human, and thus the moral realm. We are eight years into the 21st Century, but the lack of meaningful portrayals of Asian-Americans still relegates us to the periphery of the American experience. It is this cultural exclusion that makes it difficult for our peers to relate to us as human beings, let alone fellow Americans.

So, considering the fact that the psychosocial causes of bigotry and genocide are rooted in the process of moral exclusion, is there any wonder why a group of teenagers thought it was acceptable to assault Filipina student Marie Stefanie Martinez on a New York City bus simply because she “looked Chinese?” Is there any wonder why Kwok Po Lui was beaten with brass knuckles by classmates who exclaimed, "Hitting Chinese is very fun?"

As red-blooded American fathers, we RiceDaddies want our children to be seen as they truly are: multifaceted, three-dimensional human beings, capable of experiencing the same joys and sorrows as every other red-blooded American. We want their non-Asian peers to see them as Americans to whom they can relate, and not as perpetual foreigners in the land of their birth.