The Mike Haddad Show: This is relevant to my interests.

Anyone offended by the following contents can focus their blame directly on Jon from Slapdash, because I found the source of my annoyance on a link from a site he linked to, and I can blame the person who run's the intermediate site because that's not as amusing. In fact, I personally plan on blaming him for the fact that I had to stop my CS reading because I was so bothered by this. Oh ya, and people are probably going to think I'm a huge racist by the end of this. Sweet deal, eh?

Reappropriate (reappropriate.com) (yes, I'm linking because I’m not a douche bag and I have no problem standing behind my argument until obvious flaws are pointed out), had an article about the question 'What are you?' I stumbled across it from another site, but before I read it I saw that at the very top there was a post titled "Apl Song vs. London Bridge" (link). As much as someone's apparently very clever thoughts on the question 'What are you?' interests me, I'm more interested in reading about the Apl Song vs. London Bridge, because I had just seen BEP in concert and they performed both of the songs.

Well it wasn't the flattering or informative piece that I had tricked myself into expecting. Instead it was four paragraphs on how Asian Americans should stop letting themselves be stereotyped against. The source of this argument comes from a line in Fergie's new song, London Bridge, which I'd like to say was misquoted. Ignoring that "love me long time" is not the same "let me love you long time." This apparently shows that they're insensitive, and should be chastised, etc., etc. As much as I'm sure it was inspired by "me love you long time" I hardly doubt that any hip-hop group, never mind the BEP, should be chastised as racist because of a line like that. I mean, let's take away lyrical creativity from hip-hop and leave it as a bunch of people singing about their bitches and bling. That's a great thing to do for a dying style. But I digress; my beef was with the 'What are you?' post, not this one.

The 'What are you?' (link) post is about the evils of the "innocent question" 'what are you?' in reference to people of colour. Leave it up to The White Man to want to point out everyone's differences and "Other-ize" people. You know, because it's not AT ALL possible that someone who's been raised in one of the most boring cultures in the world could be curious about someone else's culture or heritage.

I'm not going to parade around the fact that I'm not white like everyone else (despite the disgusting amount of racist remarks I get from trashy white people in my comments), and no I'm not going to play the gay card to claim that everything I say here could not be offensive. But what I am going to do is point out that it is so incredibly typical of every single minority out there to automatically assume that everyone is out to get them. Trust me, I deal with it everyday, and I admittedly feel that way more and more often. That's stupid though, and I'm working to stop using it as an excuse unless it's blatantly obvious that it is in fact someone being a douche.

I'm just particularly bothered because 'What are you?' is one of my favourite questions. I don't randomly going around dropping the WAY-bomb to everyone I meet. On the other hand, I'll more often than not bring it up with people that I have had decent conversation with. Everyone has a story, and 'What are you?' is just one piece of that story. Sure, -ism's are out there, but at the same time reverse-ism's aren't going to make the world any better off. At the very least it's not going to let me finish my CS work.