An Open Apology for a Bad JokeOriginal posting hereOne week and a day ago, I decided to write an April Fools’ Day, fake news-style post titled “Asian Community Center to be Built Adjacent to Library.” Earlier today, I removed the post because of a large amount of negative feedback.
The day or two before I wrote the post, there was a forum hosted to dicuss the plans for an Asian Community Center, which the S.A. had approved in November. The article’s central joke was that the center would be built next to the library so students could study more easily; this played up the “model minority” stereotype that Asians tend to work harder academically as a whole. While I’m not saying that the stereotype is completely unfounded, I think that it is the reason for the unrealistic academic pressure that Asian and Asian-American students face and likely the reason that they commit a disproportionate amount of Cornell’s suicides.
The rest of the post included myriad stereotypes about Asians: bubble tea, mispronounciation of Rs and Ls, you name it… In being over-the-top with layering on the stereotypes, I thought I could pull off an Onion-style article but it seems, as one commenter noted, that I went in the direction of Carlos Mencia.
In looking at articles on the Onion about Asian-Americans, I found that their angle focused on Asians who decided consciously to defy the stereotypes of being hard-working academic overachievers. This is probably the more tasteful way of addressing the situation, and ultimately the funnier one.
Some commenters seemed to think that I was some mega-racist or the epitome of what the Asian-American community needs to be afraid of. Neither is true: in the end, this was all just a bad, crass joke. So here I am, tail between my legs and offering the offended parties my sincerest apologies.
Sincerely,
D. Evan Mulvihill
Thoughts? Did he get the point of why we're angry? I'm thinking... mostly not. But, at least we have an apology.
--Clara
3 comments:
Eeew. what an asshole
I'm glad to see that others are also making sure that Evan can't just delete his words and wait for people to forget. I think his apology is worthless and frankly not sincere. He's extremely defensive and cops a hell of an attitude.
I created my own blog (http://evanmulvihill.blogspot.com/) to publicize his racist speech so that people always associate the name of Evan Mulvihill with a racist idiot.
Here's a link to another incident at Cornell a few years ago.
http://www.cornellamerican.com/article/50/
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