on race and gender

I came across an Asian/Asian-American woman’s blog recently where she describes some racist/ignorant stuff that she’s had to endure. I’ll admit that before I read this, I thought that Asian women tend to not have these types of experiences, at least when compared to their male counterparts, since in anthropological terms, women historically tend to be fetishized as commodities and usually are not perceived as “threats” to society like minority men tend to be viewed as. This is evident in the racist practice of seemingly ‘welcoming’ the females while casting off (or replace ‘cast’ with ‘kill’) the males, which was rampant during Christopher Columbus’ day.

The other way to read her blog entry is that this must be a real rarity for her (to have to deal with ignorance or racism) that it’s a big deal for her whereas most Asian/Asian-American males probably have gone through that a million times before, that it’s simply not worth writing about. But I still believe that on the whole, Asian/Asian-American women in the U.S. have it a lot easier and experience far less racism than Asian/Asian-American males.