Tuesday, February 19, 2008

Seeing Pink


***originally posted at Anti-Racist Parent***

Before my daughter was born, I knew what kind of father I wanted to be for her. My babygrrl was going to be raised to be a fierce, strong woman of color. I was going to make her iron-on onesies emblazoned with portraits of Yuri Kochiyama, Angela Davis, and Frida Kahlo. Her toybox would be filled with both dolls of color, preferably made by either anti-corporate crafters or small indie companies, and things traditionally coded as “boy” like trucks and cars and tools. Both toy guns and Barbie would be equally verboten in our home, and her closet would be a pink-free zone. I knew the constricting, restricting and damaging messages the world would soon bombard her with about race and gender, and dammit if I wasn’t going to all I could inside our home to inoculate her against them.

So yeah, it would’ve only served me right to have been gifted with a stereotypical “girly girl,” a little karmic payback for putting all my crap on my poor baby’s head before she was even born. That hasn’t happened, luckily–while my Pumpkin’s favorite color, for clothing and everything else, is, of course, pink, she does not, like her best friend since birth, demand to wear Disney Princess costumes as casual wear. As for my plans for a line of “Radical Mama” toddler-tees and stacking the deck toy-wise, well, the first toy I ever bought her was a “Little Frida” doll, and we dubbed the racially ambiguous doll we got her from a line of multiculti dolls by an alum of color from our alma mater “Angela” because of her hair-do. bell hooks’ children’s books are on her overstuffed bookshelves. And because I’m not anti-commercial per se but more anti-certain things (you know?), she’s got more than her fair share of mass-produced goods featuring a certain brown-skinned Latina girl who likes to have adventures and help her animal friends, as well as her current favorite, the Backyardigans (who, I’m convinced, are kids of color–I mean, Pablo? Tasha? Tyrone? Uniqua?)

Suffice it to say that as much as possible, her mother and I try to mediate potentially negative messages embedded in popular and commercial culture by controlling what she consumes (at least in our home) and by talking with her about things that might be problematic. But of course, none of this gets any easier as kids get older, with more and more outside influence impinging on them. During her year in day care, she’d come home talking about t.v. shows we didn’t watch at home, or pretending to shoot things with her fingers like one of the little boys there. “Where did you learn that, Pumpkin?” we’d ask, before explaining why we didn’t shoot things or people. Now that she’s started preschool, I know there will be more of these teachable moments, even though we found as progressive and diverse a school environment as we could in our town.

But what’s really got me thinking, about the subtle and insidious effect of both popular culture and the influence of other kids on how our Pumpkin learns to see the world and her place in it, is how she’s started to label things as gender-appropriate or -inappropriate. It started cropping up during the recent holiday consumption season, during our trips to the local Target and Costco. One time, she was looking at some kids’ room furnishings at Target, which, of course, are separated into a mostly blue boy aisle and a mostly pink girl aisle. There was some Thomas the Tank Engine stuff in the boy aisle, and she called out “Thomas!” happily when she saw it. “Want to look at that stuff, sweetie?” I asked. “No,” she said, “that’s for boys.”

I stopped the cart. Say what now? She’s always loved trains in general and Thomas specifically, so where did this come from? “No, love, anybody can play with Thomas, boys and girls, right?” But the moment was past and her attention was already on something else. But I was disturbed. I mean, I wasn’t naive, I knew these messages, what was appropriate for boys to play with, what was appropriate for girls to play with, were out there, bombarding her on TV and even in the choices and behaviors of her friends. But I always thought that the messages coming from home were enough to counteract these–that she could play with anything she wanted (well, not guns or Bratz, but you know what I mean), that she could do anything, that these things weren’t limited because she was a girl.

Not long after, in the holiday gift section at Costco, I was checking out a Fisher Price kids’ digital camera. There were two models, a big stack of blue toddler cameras and a big stack of pink ones. Apropos of nothing, The Pumpkin pointed at the two stacks: “That one’s for boys and that one’s for girls.” “No baby, anybody can have any color camera they want, right, Mommy? A boy can have a pink one and a girl can have a blue one if they want.” But she wasn’t having it–she knew who was supposed to have what, by color.

It was a digital camera, of all things. Of all the toys that did not need to be gender-coded, I thought, this would be it. It was the exact same toy, the only difference was the color. Did there really need to be a “boy” camera and a “girl” camera? I mean, c’mon! Needless to say, when it came time to buy presents, both the boy and the girls on our list got a different brand of camera–one that came in orange.

It doesn’t end there. Where I always thought that I knew where the issues would be coming from–deflecting and deprogramming hegemonic lessons that toy kitchens were for girls and only boys could play with Tonka trucks from commercials that smacked of biological determinism–now even gender-neutral toys aren’t so neutral. Does LeapFrog, for example, really need to make blue and pink versions of their kiddie learning computers? Is it that important to brand something as “for boys” or “for girls“? Will boys only use a computer if the learning game is branded with Disney’s Cars? Will girls only use it if the game is branded with Disney’s Princesses? And what if a girl likes Cars? Or a boy likes Princesses? What then? Or will they not even think to ask, having imbibed the blue=boy/pink=girl lesson for too long already?

I think about all the societal forces bombarding my daughter and her friends, and I don’t want to feel powerless to do anything. The other night, one of The Pumpkin’s best friends, a little boy she’s known since birth, was frantic because he couldn’t find another chair in which to sit at the kids’ table for dinner. He refused, absolutely refused, to sit in a Dora-emblazoned chair because it was Dora, and Dora is for girls. No matter how much I or his parents tried to convince him that that wasn’t the case, and that he could sit in the chair, he wouldn’t change his mind. He wouldn’t play dress-up with the girls, either, since the Disney Princess gear was obviously not for boys. Another boy in our group of friends, however, wouldn’t hesitate to put on one of those tiaras. He unabashedly loves Dora and the Princesses, and his parents support that love. But what messages does he get at preschool, I wonder, from both teachers and other kids, when he shares that love with others?

I’m tired of seeing pink. I’m tired of seeing blue. And I’m both pissed off and saddened deeply that at age three, my daughter and her friends, both girls and boys, have already learned to see those colors, and what they are supposed to mean, so well. And I know that this isn’t the last time I’m going to start a sentence with, “No, baby, both boys and girls can….”

Monday, February 18, 2008

The Ties That Bind Us

I often think about how far blogging's taken me since I first decided to add my voice to the din. A lot of other mombloggers and dadbloggers I've met, especially Asian American ones, started blogging for one of the same reasons I did: to combat isolation, whether along lines of race, gender, geography, or some combination of those factors and more. But a funny thing happened along the way. What started as venting into the void became something more. Venting turned to reaching out, and we found ourselves meeting people we never would've met otherwise, making connections, building communities, becoming friends. And these friendships, support networks and communities are no less real for many of us never having physically met each other offline. That's something I didn't necessarily bargain for when I started blogging, and that's pretty amazing.

All of which is to say that, today, I want to give a shout-out to one tough mama out there in the blogosphere, someone I would've never had the pleasure of meeting had neither of us started blogging, someone who, like many of you, started out as just another URL or another handle in a comment thread but has ended as a friend. She's going through more than her fair share of crap right now, and her friends in the blogosphere just want to remind her of one thing: Keep on keepin' on, MN, cuz you are not alone.

Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Challenge Update: 2 for 1 MATCHING!

I'm feeling really generous today, so before I change my mind, I just wanted to get this post out ASAP...

All donations to the RiceDaddies Empowerment in Diversity Challenge made from January 1st through March 9th will be matched $2 for every $1!!!

That's right... for every $1 you donate, Mrs. SoulSnax and I will donate $2. Sorry, US Dollars only (Canadian dollars are too expensive these days)! ;)

Launched in June 2007, the RiceDaddies Empowerment in Diversity Challenge aims to mitigate the marginalizing effects of diversity-negligent pop culture and media by funding innovative educational programs that do the following:
  • Promote positive images of ourselves for our children
  • Promote positive images of ourselves for other people and their children
  • Develop skills in our children that empower them to be leaders in the world in which we live
  • Promote pride in one's culture instead of shame
  • Promote self-respect and appreciation for others like ourselves
  • Develop our children's ability to use their imaginations in an empowering way
  • Encourage our children to be who they truly are

Friday, February 08, 2008

Ni Hao, Round Eye!


"Daddy, why does Kai-Lan have such round eyes?"
"That's what you call an idealized representation of Chinese features."
"What does that mean... idealized?"
"It's when art tries to improve upon reality."
"Oh... so, round eyes are better than narrow eyes?"
"Well, DUH! Don't you watch television?"
"I want round eyes too."
"Well, if you're lucky, you can marry a man with round eyes, and maybe your children will have round eyes too."
"I wish mommy married someone with round eyes, so that I could have round eyes also."
"I'm sorry honey, but that's what happens when you marry a man for the content of his character, regardless of his epicanthic fold."

Wednesday, February 06, 2008

Rice Daddies is a Toddler Now


Happy birthday to us, happy birthday to us... Yes, today is our 2nd blogaversary. In the coming year, we promise to be as alternately pissy and adorable as our own spawn were at this age. (For those of our bretheren who haven't had the pleasure of experiencing this yet--Hah! I mean...no, really, I mean, Hah!)

We've had a great time over the last two years, blogging at the intersection of our Asian Americanness and our dadditude. Thank you for reading and commenting, and stay tuned.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Help a daddy out...


Many of you that in my work life, I do online community stuff for a local newspaper's digital products. One thing we're working on now is a site for local parents, with profiles, blogs, forums, and a comprehensive event calendar, something we really don't have around here right now. We've been looking a lot at both national sites, like Maya's Mom, and hyperlocal mom sites run by newspaper.coms, like IndyMoms and SacMomsClub, to see what might work in this market.

Right now, we're still in development, figuring out things like direction/focus, features, name and tagline. I'd love it if you all could click on the link below and take a quick, 5-question survey that will help us hone in on this stuff. And feel free to pass the link on to other parent types you know. If you wanna get in touch with me about this, you can email me at work.

Click below for the survey
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=d_2bKv_2fC7w0KwFF_2biIXXzoNw_3d_3d

(Oh, and if you really want one of those onesies, AsAm momblogger extraordinaire Superha's selling 'em on CafePress. Heh.)

Monday, February 04, 2008

Can you tell the Difference?




Each pic is from a Superbowl XLII commercial. The first one uses a racist caricature of Asians. The second one makes use of sexually suggestive language. Can you tell me what the difference between these commercials is?
The difference is Fox was fine with airing the racist commercial but decided the Danica Patrick commercial was inappropriate for viewers.
Anyone see something wrong with this? Apparently the company (who I shall not even bother naming) intended to make the worst Superbowl commercial for the publicity. Great. Well, I'm going to hold Fox responsible for this one.