Watch Skin (2018 Short Film)

[Edward]

Skinis a 2018 American short drama film, directed by Israeli-born filmmaker Guy Nattiv. Co written with Sharon Maymon, the film won the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film at the 91st Academy Awards, marking distributor Fox Searchlight Pictures' first win in the category.[3][4]

A white family enjoys a visit at a lake with friends. Their tattoos imply the group are Neo-Nazis. Jeffrey brags that his son, Troy can shoot a target with a rifle and takes bets on the challenge. Troy successfully shoots the target.

The group heads to a grocery store, where Christa shops for food. In the checkout line, Troy sees an African-American man, Jaydee, holding a toy. Troy and the man smile at each other. As Jaydee is checking out, Jeffrey notices the interaction and accuses Jaydee of messing with his boy. Jaydee denies it, and Jeffrey calls him a racial slur. Jaydee leaves, telling Jeffrey that he is the problem.

Jeffrey tells his friends about the dispute, and they follow Jaydee into the parking lot. Jeffrey and his friends beat Jaydee viciously while Jaydee's wife frantically calls the police from her car nearby. Troy watches the incident from the store as Christa frets. As the group leaves, Jaydee's wife holds him in the parking lot. Troy looks out the car window and makes eye contact with Jaydee's son, Bronny, who is nearly the same age.

The next evening, Jeffrey and Troy are driving home and find a van blocking the road. Jeffrey walks up to the van to make them move, but a group of black men abduct him as Troy runs after the van. Jeffrey is taken to the garage of a home, where several black men and Bronny drug and tattoo him over several days. Jaydee is there recovering.

Some time later, Jeffrey is thrown naked onto the same road where he was abducted. He sees his reflection in a window and finds his skin tattooed completely black. Inside their home, Christa wakes up to the sound of someone outside. She nervously loads a handgun and calls for help. Jeffrey attempts to wash his skin clean with water but fails. Christa orders Troy to hide under the bed and not come out.

Jeffrey forcefully enters his home. Christa, seeing what appears to be a naked, black man in her home, warns him to get out or she will shoot him. Jeffrey manages to communicate to Christa who he is, and she drops her weapon. A shot rings out, and Jeffrey collapses. Troy stands in the doorway behind Jeffrey, holding a rifle.[5]

Wu and I agree that there are many words we could use: Asian American, East Asian, East Asian American. People with roots from South Asia or Southeast Asia sometimes refer to themselves as brown, which seems like a useful shorthand. But for a bunch of reasons, brown doesn't work for East Asians. I'm wondering if there's a parallel word for us.

Wu sucks in a breath. Her gut reaction is No! The word, she says, is too fraught. Using it would be like painting our skin with a sickly, mustard sheen or writing a nasty word on our foreheads. "Yellow" has long been considered noxious. To some, it's on par with Chink, gook, nip or Chinaman.

One of my most vivid childhood memories is of watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers after school with my two older sisters. I'd nestle into the couch beside them as they started on their homework, watching the Rangers shapeshift into things more powerful than their human selves.

And the yellow Ranger? She was played by Thuy Trang, an actress of Vietnamese descent. And though I loved her, her costume confused me. My skin wasn't yellow. I didn't know anyone who did have yellow skin.

In recent years, former Power Rangers cast members and producers have said that race had nothing to do with their costumes. Yet, as a child, it seemed clear to me that by the calculus of race in America, yellow meant Asian.

I get this bit of history from Michael Keevak, a professor at National Taiwan University, who writes in his book Becoming Yellow: A Short History of Racial Thinking that "Luridus also appeared in several of Linnaeus's botanical publications to characterize unhealthy and toxic plants."

Keevak argues that these early European anthropologists used "yellow" to refer to Asian people because "Asia was seductive, mysterious, full of pleasures and spices and perfumes and fantastic wealth." Yellow had multiple connotations, which included both "serene" and "happy," as well as "toxic" and "impure."

A work by artist Herman Knackfuss titled "Peoples of Europe, Defend Your Holiest Possessions" depicts an archangel gesturing toward a Buddha riding a dragon, in an attempt to persuade the nations of Europe to band together against Asia. Herman Knackfuss/Pall Mall Magazine/Hathi Trust Digital Library hide caption

British actor Peter Sellers stars with actress Helen Mirren in The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu in 1980. Sellers is wearing a chef's hat in the role of Dr. Fu Manchu, while Mirren plays the role of Alice Rage. Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption

In 1956, Marvel's short-lived Yellow Claw comic featured a villain of the title's name. He was drawn with a bald head, long scraggly beard, slanted eyes and, yes, fingers that resembled claws. True to the name, his skin had a distinct yellow hue.

An ad showing Uncle Sam, holding a proclamation and can of Magic Washer, kicking the Chinese out of the United States. "We have no use for them since we have this wonderful washer," the ad reads. Library of Congress hide caption

That was all make-believe. The real-life consequence of vilifying a race included things like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which banned Chinese immigration to the United States until 1943; the violence against hundreds of Filipino farmworkers in Exeter and Watsonville, Calif., who were mobbed and driven out of their homes by white Americans in 1929 and 1930; and the incarceration of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans during World War II.

That's when the term "Asian American" was born. At the time, it was linked to political advocacy. Yuji Ichioka, then a graduate student and activist at the University of California, Berkeley, who would later become a leading historian and scholar, is widely credited with coining the term.

In this photo from the 1969 issue of Gidra, a radical magazine created by Asian American activists at the University of California, Los Angeles, Asian Americans take part in a Vietnam moratorium peace march in San Francisco. Ray Okamura/Gidra/Densho Digital Repository hide caption

There was power in numbers, which Ichioka knew as founder of the Asian American Political Alliance. In a letter and questionnaire to new members, AAPA made clear that its organization was not just advocating for the creation of Asian American studies courses, but for broader social causes. That included adopting socialist policies and supporting the Black Liberation Movement, the Women's Liberation Movement, and anti-Vietnam and anti-imperialist efforts.

Spurred in part by the activism of the times, the term "Asian American" rose to popularity. It also helped that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was passed, allowing an influx of Asian immigrants to the U.S.

For one thing, most people who technically fit into the "Asian American" category refer to themselves based on their ethnic group or country of origin, according to the National Asian American Survey (NAAS).

Karen Ishizuka, who wrote Serve the People: Making Asian America in the Long Sixties, says that "Asian American" is still an important identifier because of the political power it has carried for decades. But it's crucial for people to be educated about what it once meant, she says, because the term has become "more like an adjective now, rather than a political identity."

Ramakrishnan and Ishizuka seem to reinforce why I've been searching for a term like yellow. In all my conversations about this issue, I've found myself remarking how the question of "What about yellow?" feels so hair-pullingly existential. Maybe it's because Asian American seems like it has been watered down from activism to adjective. I find myself wanting a label that cuts a little deeper.

In 1969, a Japanese American activist named Larry Kubota wrote a manifesto called "Yellow Power!" that was published in Gidra, a radical magazine created by Asian American activists at the University of California, Los Angeles.

His words were a rallying cry. "Yellow power is a call for all Asian Americans to end the silence that has condemned us to suffer in this racist society and to unite with our black, brown and red brothers of the Third World for survival, self-determination and the creation of a more humanistic society," he wrote.

Ishizuka tells me about a bunch of different groups in the 1960s and 1970s: Yellow Seeds was a radical organization in Philadelphia that published a bilingual English-Chinese newspaper of the same name. The Yellow Identity Symposium was a conference at Berkeley that helped ignite the Third World Liberation strikes. The Yellow Brotherhood was an Asian group made up mostly of former gang members in Los Angeles that tried to disband gangs and curb drug addiction. Yellow Pearl, a play on "yellow peril," was a music project started by an activist group in New York's Chinatown.

"That's an interesting question," Leong says. "If I'm with a group of yellow people like my close friends, I'll call myself a Chink, a Chinaman, a yellow. But in public, I'm not gonna call anyone else that .... it depends what I'm comfortable with. It's the same with my English or Chinese name. Sometimes I'll use my American name. Sometimes I'll use my Chinese name."

She's not so convinced that yellow would resolve the issues that plague Asian American. It might be a useful identifier if yellow was used very intentionally and people knew its history, she says. But it could also fall into the same traps as Asian American. With ubiquity, it could eventually lose its power.

The Yellow Jackets Collective is an activist group, the name an echo of the 1960s. They're four people in New York City who identify themselves with a wide swath of terms, in addition to yellow: she/her, womxn, brown, Asian American, femme, child of Chinese immigrants, Korean American, 1st gen., first gen. diasporic and "collaborating towards futures that center marginalized bodies."

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