The following is an account of an incident that occurred when I was a student at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, or as I call it, School of the Farts. Regardless of what you may believe, it is entirely true to the word.
In September 2003, I was enrolled in an advanced production class in NYU’s film school. The teacher was Kelly Reichardt. We were asked to present our scripts for possible production into films, but before we started, Reichardt gave us one warning — "Don’t use stereotypes."
The next week, a black student presented a script with (what do you know!) stereotypes of Asian people.
In her story, an Asian woman with a foreign accent gets robbed by black kids, who are treated as heroes. The Asian character is shown absolutely no dignity.
When asked to read the script aloud, a white girl gladly imitated a clichéd "Asian" accent. I, being more polite than I should have been, did not interrupt.
After the reading of the script was done, I was waiting for the teacher to denounce the stereotype.
However, neither she nor the white students even brought up the issue.
A homosexual Asian student finally asked very kindly for the black student to remove the offensive material, she said, "Yeah, but it’s pretty much true. I do live in an African American community."
As the whites changed the subject, I raised my hand to retort, but was ignored.
In fact, I had to wait until the discussion was almost over before I was given the chance to speak (even though I was nice enough not to interrupt their discussion).
I said, "I don’t think an Asian would be dumb enough to do that. I think you should use a Negro."
The class instantly went into an uproar, with one student even uttering, "I can’t believe he just said that." The teacher then scolded me for "making insults."
I replied by claiming that the black girl insulted my race, to which Reichardt said, "I cannot IMAGINE any way in which [the student] insulted you. And even if she did, you have no right to insult her back!"
I was subsequently removed from the class.
I could not dispute the matter because all of the witnesses, who were white, had refused to acknowledge any discriminatory remarks made against Asians.
NYU is arguably the most prestigious film school in America. If the white populace of this institution, which is supposedly the top 1 percentile of the nation, is not intelligent enough to see something so obvious, how can we realistically expect the majority of their people to?
