...I'm still peeved with Paula Zahn and her crew.

The China adoption segment was embedded in a series about racial/discrimination issues in the U.S.  It started out with a lady who has written about weight discrimination, and seemed like it was originally planned to be a discussion about the new rules and how they are discriminatory.

Well.  Hmm.  Yeah, they are.

But y'know what?  Most international adoption regulations are discriminatory in one way or another.  Hell, most domestic adoption regulations are somewhat discriminatory, too.  They must be; if you were handing out children to replacement parents, don't you think you'd be a wee tad discriminatory about whom you handed those kids to?  If I were relinquishing a child to another set of parents, you can believe that I would want to be sure those people had been vetted to within an inch of their lives.

But, dayum.  Zahn et al. missed an excellent opportunity to actually discuss something that few people outside the Asian/Pacific Islander population actually think about:  discrimination against APIs and the myth of the model minority. 

OmegaDotter is a pretty smart kiddo.  But I don't want people to insist to me that she should be an obvious candidate for violin-playing or the math club, just because she's Asian.  I want people to judge her for who she is, and what her interests and talents are.

OmegaDotter is a pretty good-looking kiddo.  But I don't want males to look at her (when she's adult) and think "exotic and submissive" because those are the pervasive myths about Asian females.  I want men to look at her and think she's attractive because her eyes sparkle and her face is so expressive and because she's intelligent and interesting.

Did you know there were states where people of Chinese descent were not allowed to own property until the end of the 1950s?  There are people still angry that Japan has "destroyed" the U.S. automobile industry; any person of API descent is "fair game" to them.

Gook.  Jap.  Chink.  "Ching chong Chinaman, sitting on a fence".  People pulling their eyelids back.  People asking APIs born and raised in the U.S. "Where do you really come from?"  People telling APIs to "go back where you came from!" Offensively stereotyping T-shirts from Ambercrombie & Fitch.  Rosie O'Donnell doing "Ching chong" gibberish on national TV in an attempt to be funny. 

Zahn & Co. could have had an intelligent discussion about some of these issues--and one of the panelists actually tried to talk about the "hard-working" Asian stereotype as the result of culture, rather than being a racial characteristic.  But, no, it was much more fun and easy to talk about how people who want to adopt from China are looking for a beautiful child who will grow up to be a doctor.  Instead of discussing actual racial issues, they went with uninformed blather.  Bah.

Technorati: Paula Zahn, Chinese adoption, "Jane, you ignorant slut!"