Shoot Promos on Race, Class, Gender, Etc

"A lily or a rose never pretends, and its beauty is that it is what it is." - Jiddu Krishnamurti Music is such a time capsule so we will romanticize the music from our formative years as the "golden age". I will resist the urge to be old man yelling at cloud and say that the music of the 80's and 90's is far superior to the music of Gen-Z, signaling that I'm officially washed. One of the formative songs of my adolescence was 1995's "I Wish" by Skee-Lo, the very definition of a one-hit wonder. While rap music can often characterized by braggadocios hyper-masculinity, this track was a humorous, self-deprecating lament on personal shortcomings. "I wish I was a little bit taller, I wish I was a baller. I wish I had a girl who looked good, I would call her...". Even though Skee-Lo was a black man from Los Angeles via Chicago, "I Wish" was for me the quintessential Korean American male anthem, as a 5'9" Korean male...

"The union of feminine and masculine energies within the individual is the basis of all creation" - Shakti Gawain When I was an undergrad at UC Irvine, I made the subject of my Sociology Majors Seminar paper on "gaydar" and gender stereotypes. For those unfamiliar with the term, gaydar is the intuitive ability to assess a person's sexual orientation as gay, bi, or straight. The premise of my paper was that our gaydar was calibrated by our proximity to the LGBTQ community; do you have any gay friends or know any openly gay people? I surveyed a few dozen of my Bible Study high school students and college peers and many of them didn't know any gay people; their gaydars were solely based on gender cues.  How do you tell if someone is gay? If they cross their legs when they sit. How skinny their jeans are (this was in the mid 2000's so we were transitioning from the baggy jeans to skinny jeans era). If they carry their books in front of their chests instead ...

  "Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about un-becoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place." - Paul Coelho The model minority was introduced by Sociologist William Peterson in 1966 to describe the success of Japanese Americans ability to achieve success that other minority groups didn't. It was a concept adopted by Ronald Reagan and the right wing to characterize AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) as smart, wealthy, and compliant compared to the "welfare queens" of the Black & Brown communities, ignoring the fact that if it wasn't for the Civil Rights Movement and the passage of the Immigration Act of 1965, the vast majority of AAPI immigrants wouldn't be here. Because most of us arrived after 1965, Asians collectively didn't experience Jim Crow, housing discrimination, and lynching. Racism was largely a Black/White problem; the "Americ...

  "I know um... it's just that my truth is that I am damaged goods, and this has really messed things up for me. And I think I need some time with it." - David Rose, Schitt's Creek, S04EP07 I met Lee at a youth group church retreat where we both signed up as counselors. She was engaging, bubbly and far less stuffy than the churchgoers I was accustomed to. I must have stood out from the other Korean American college guys in my pink bandana print t-shirt (I can't stress enough the cultural impact of Cam'Ron and Dipset in the early 2000's) and cane that I used due to my knee tendonitis. Lee grew up at that church and hadn't really been back since she left for college; I was the newbie who had only recently started attending.  The thing about "black sheep": in many settings you're the only one there. But when two or more are gathered, be prepared for anything.  We set next to each other on the bus to UC Santa Barbara, where the retreat was to...

  "It's like a palm tree by the ocean that endures the greatest winds because it knows how to gracefully bend" - Stephen Kendrick If you're on a plane descending into Los Angeles for the first time, or driving through the streets of LA, one thing you may notice is the presence of palm trees. The palm tree is synonymous with Los Angeles: a symbol of luxury, wealth, exoticism, and paradise. They were planted intentionally as "street trees", despite lacking any functional uses of shade, reduction of heat, clean air, and fruit. But their uniqueness allowed them to grow and thrive everywhere, from beaches and boardwalks, major streets to tiny residential streets, the affluent neighborhoods to the hood, they're a unifying symbol. No matter where you reside, look outside of your window and you'll see a palm tree. Compared to more densely populated and vertical mega cities like New York and Tokyo, Los Angeles is much more horizontally spread out, with palm t...