There was a lovely little four year old girl with her mom on the bus, sitting across from me today. Her mom was reading the Entertainment section of the paper. She pointed at an ad and asked, "Who is this ( Read more... )

Racebending.com protest. Lots of people. Very cool. We were on the Channel 7 news as a top story!

We are tenth most top-story, right behind "James Franco Returns to General Hospital," "Maggots force plane back to gate," "14 Pandas Debut at Zoo," and "Man gets stuck in wall trying to escape fire."


( Read more... )

Yesterday and today, Paramount screened The Last Airbender to Racebending.com for free as kind of an olive branch, and also to show us just how diverse the movie is--to prove us wrong. I'm a big bundle of emotions right now, I guess. Here's the conversation I had with Ken about the movie, since he is better at 'splainin feelings and stuff ( Read more... )

Got another interesting email from somehow who visited Racebending.com. I have replicated this email, with name redacted, with added illustrations (it was kind of boring without the illustrations.)

( Strong Language goes under a cut )

Me: Ooh ooh!
Ken: What??
Me: I just thought of a slogan for Racebending..com!
Ken: Cool. What is it!
Me: Paramount: Other Ethnicities sit at the back of the Appa!
Ken: ...no.
Me: It's a metaphor.
Ken: but...no.
Me: But it's like...actors of color. And they had to sit at the back of the Appa.
Ken: But it's not catchy.
Me: =(

(He's totally just ( Read more... )

Racebending.com Supporter: Regarding the upcoming M. Night Shyamalan vehicle The Last Airbender, what do you think about the "whitewashing" of the production so that all of the original Asian cultural landmarks, architecture, philosophy, and costume design are being retained while they cast white kids to play the main characters?

Roger Ebert: ( Read more... )

This last month I've been trying to interview various experts on the casting of white actors to play Asian characters on the film "The Last Airbender" for the protest website I'm involved with, racebending.com. If you're at all interested, you can read them via the following links, and please let me know what you think.

Professor Russell K. ( Read more... )

On his Twitter this morning, Producer Frank Marshall finally responded to one of my posts.

Me:Mr. Marshall- Why did you respond to the rantings of a bigot, yet ignore the public's concerns re: discriminatory casting in TLA?

Him:I have responded. The casting is complete and we did not discriminate against anyone. I am done talking about it.
This ( Read more... )

Last month, I presented on Avatar: The Last Airbender--yes, a kid's animated TV series--to the Media Action Network for Asian Americans in downtown Chinatown. Before you start laughing at the absurdity of a 22 year old woman presenting to the ADL of APAs on a kid's cartoon, I guess I want to note that people have started to take any hint of racism ( Read more... )

Whoa, so this threw me a curveball.

All weekend, I've been struggling through writing a press release for the aang_aint_white, in contact with some pretty helpful groups and people--and then wham: Three hours ago, M. Night Shyamalan announces that he's thrown out Jesse McCartney and hired Dev Patel of "$lumdog Millionaire" fame to play 'Prince Zuko' instead.Now ( Read more... )