After seeing a beautiful photograph of ASA's Lunar New Year show on the cover of Monday's Chronicle, the Asian Students Association was surprised to find a racial attack on Asians in the "Monday, Monday" column. JACK BAUER'S BIDET wrote a particularly painful-to-read tirade, and for the purpose of humor, he included numerous careless and offensive stereotypes of Asian males when writing of engineers and dating by stating, "most of these men turn out to be either emotionally unavailable, boring, overworked, taken or Asian." Since when is it acceptable to present any ethnicity as a negative trait? Does the columnist believe that Asians will remain silent and that this sort of "humor" is tolerable at Duke?-because we highly doubt he would hazard to report that a dating pool was bleak because it was "black," "Jewish" or "Latino."
Although this statement might be perceived as a harmless joke, JACK BAUER'S BIDET goes even further as he concludes by portraying an invented Asian male with poor English and offensively punning on his Chinese last name. With these remarks, the author of JACK BAUER'S BIDET makes a direct attack on Asians by furthering negative stereotypes and remarking that engineers are unattractive because they are Asian. He has announced that the student body is "us" and Asians are "them" and has offended at least one-tenth of the student body.
An anonymous humor column certainly does not give its author carte blanche to write racist remarks for the sake of being funny. In blatantly doing so, it is clear that the author of JACK BAUER'S BIDET represents the very ignorance that undermines respect for diversity at Duke.
This type of humor is most certainly not acceptable, and the Asian community will not tolerate even the most casual forms of racism. The Asian Students Association demands that the author of JACK BAUER'S BIDET give a formal public apology to the Asian and greater Duke Community for his offensive comments.
Douglas Kim, Trinity '06
Caroline Shou, Trinity'06
Asian Students
Association
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