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Identi-tees: Stereotypes, Abercrombie & the Chest as a BattlefieldGot something to get off your chest? Don't. That may be just where your political and personal passions belong!
After the spring's brouhaha surrounding Abercrombie & Fitch’s really, really ill-advised attempt to release a line of Asian stereotype T-shirts purportedly targeting an APA niche market, at least a few enterprising entrepreneurs have an answer: Don’t scream it; wear it! When it comes to communicating one's beliefs, there's nothing quite like a T-shirt to spread your message, no-fuss, no-muss. Insofar as a T-sized slogan can be an effective vehicle for meaningful political expression (Think of the dozens, even hundreds of people each day who can immediately be put on notice about your particular passion or outrage without a word being spoken. How many of us can recite all the Constitutional amendments? Now, how many know where the phrase "I’m with Stupid" came from?), it seems APAs have an ever-increasing number of opportunities to project our views and heritage on our chests. Suffering from this summer's heatwaves, and intrigued by the Blacklava.com anti-A&F tee picture above, we went scouting for other interesting, hot-weather political wearables. Following are just a handful of fun options and a variety of approaches -- from the subtly ironic to the scathingly satirical, from the pridefully ethnic to the historically edu-taining -- for expressing one's identi-tee. (We'll be giving some of them away at the end, so be sure to hang in there through part 2!)
Other online items of interest include a tee demanding that one "Do The Math," with accompanying copy reading, "It's the propositions, man! Oh, and the Executive Order that put Japanese Americans in concentration camps during Word War II..." The "Stereotype" tee features a single-word design that begs the question, "ever wonder why this Chinese-takeout typeface is used to represent Asians?" Issues of PC and self-identification are tackled in "Asian is [slash]...Oriental"; copy beside the tee refers specifically to the history of Orientalism in the U.S., but it could also very well summarize the company's raison d'etre: "...a group of people stood up and exercised their right to redefine their themselves in hopes for a better future." Approximately 75% of the company's sales are to APAs, in part due to Suda's apparently intense involvement with and outreach at community events, and an APA-centric web site whose interest extends well beyond e-commerce to discussion forums, info about local pop culture events, and more.
IRONY. Full disclosure up front: S.A.M.’s our guy – hero of the Secret Asian Man comic strip by Tak Toyoshima here at Asian-American Village. Nonetheless, S.A.M. graces a fun, fabulous, and well-made line of tees that’s now gone into its fifth production run. With a design reminiscent of those generic "Oriental Flavor" ramen packages, the shirts feature the broadly smiling cartoon mug of "Secret Asian Man". Subtly ironic, the design comments on Orientalist, exoticizing attitudes toward Asians that is a recurring theme in the comic strip.
The tees are available here at the Village, through the Dig, at clothing shops and comic stores throughout New England, and at national conventions. With proceeds supporting Toyoshima’s work as an independent artist, the line is also highly customizable; fan/customers are able to request tees personalized with autographs or even original, custom sketches. (For details on the shirts and the 2002 Summer of S.A.M. Stuff Give-Away, see link at end of article.)
SATIRE. In response to the ubiquitous use of Native American stereotypes by school sports teams, the "Fightin’ Whites" tee makes mockery (and a team mascot) of a stereotyped, 50’s vintage, middle-aged square a la Ward Cleaver. Images recalling the idealized, all-American, pipe-smoking uber-Dad have been applied to countless other retro-fashion and humorous ends, of course (think refrigerator magnets and the logo of the "Church of the Sub Genius"). However, the double-entendre slogan, the "square Whitey" graphic, and its conception by a group of Native American college students for a U.N.C. intramural basketball team gives this shirt lots of extra punch. Designed very purposefully to "deliver a simple, sincere message about ethnic stereotyping [of] American Indians in sports symbolism," the tees and site (http://www.fightingwhites.org/) got a boost from national press attention early this year. The site reports that proceeds from online tee sales will go to a new non-profit corporation, the Fighting Whites Scholarship Fund, Inc., supporting the education of Native American students.
HERITAGE. Political identi-tees don’t all have to be so in-your-face. The Japanese American National Museum (http://www.janm.org/) in L.A.’s Little Tokyo offers an array of kinder, gentler tees commemorating aspects of Japanese-American heritage both fun and serious. Among the most popular designs, a line of adult and baby tees feature the rallying cry of the lactose liberation movement, "Got Rice?" Similarly, the "Botan Rice Candy" tee and the "Have a Rice Day" shirt illustrated with a smiling rice cooker proudly invite JAs to "claim your...culinary heritage..." From the land of the Unz Initiative comes a series of family tees that revel in bilingualism (albeit in Romaji): Japanese familial terms of endearment include "Ojiichan" (grandpa), "Obachan" (grandma), "Otosan" (father) and "Okasan" (mothers). More serious shirts recognize the enormous, if unhappy significance of the WWII internment to JAs’ personal and collective identities. The "Camp Mon" shirt consists of a Japanese-style mon or crest representing 11 internment camps, along with the names of each lettered on the back. Another design lists camp names on back, but one specific camp on the front in a rather odd expression of something like "home-team pride" seen in intramural sportswear. The JANM site offers a 10% discount to museum members, but all the shirts are well-priced, ranging from $2.99 to $18 on the higher end.
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"Say
it loud! I’m Asian, and I’m…" Well, okay, so some of
us were seriously raised to keep our voices down,
sunk into a respectably low, don’t-make-a-scene register.
So, what’s a proud, angry, politically conscious Asian
American to do, anyway?
PARODIES. Purveyors of "clothing for the new
state of mind,"
SCORN.
Although Kristina Wong built
Frankly,
the irony occasionally proves too subtle for some APAs, for
whom derogatory associations with the term may hit too close
to home to wear in public. But unlike A&F’s uninformed,
unsuccessful attempt to infiltrate the APA youth market via
"ironic Orientalism," S.A.M. is a homegrown and
multidimensional Asian-American cartoon character, not a
racism-imbued caricature. Thus, the double-irony is the
shirts’ equal popularity among non-APAs in the Boston market
(where S.A.M. appears in the general audience newspaper The Weekly Dig) and at comics collector events (which
Toyoshima frequents as both author of The Couch and
an illustrator for New England Comics' The Tick).
