The $4 billion lawsuit filed by Lucie Kim against Miley Cyrus for the infamous photo of her and various Disney stars slanting their eyes to imitate Asians has been dismissed. The lawsuit was class-action, and claimed that Miley violated a statute that doesn’t allow businesses to discriminate against minorities. Though the photo was in poor taste, it was deemed that the photo had not broken any laws.
The dismissal is fair: it’s grasping at straws to claim the photo was illegal. The Internet is rife with worse fodder and singling out …

We think of courage primarily in terms of battlefields, not a green light on a scoreboard. Yet that very light, registered by Republican Joseph Cao on the House scoreboard on Saturday, is symbolic of the courage of a man taking risks to benefit others.
Cao, a New Orleans native, is creating a political sensation not only because he is the first Vietnamese American to serve in Congress or the poorest member of the Louisiana delegates, but because he is the only Republican vote out of 177 in favor of the Democratic …

Makeup is magical in its ability to make us something we’re not, but can it go too far? Enter the recent trends of “blackface” and “colorface,” where white models or artistes are painted to impersonate other races.
This resurgence began with the Australian show “Hey Hey It’s Saturday” in which a cover group called the Jackson Jive performed in blackface, to mostly negative feedback. The trend is resurfacing in fashion as well: the Oct. 2009 French Vogue edition has Dutch model Lara Stone painted to look black (and dressed in requisite …

Few people think their high school mascot is cool, and I’ll admit that I thought mine, the “Mustang,” was the epitome of generic. Yet after seeing the mascot for East High School in Akron, OH, all those hideous horse murals don’t seem so terrible after all.
East High School’s mascot is the “Orientals,” complete with a dragon named “Chang” and a website with the faux Asian font commonly found on Chinese take-out cartons. Nor is it the only school that uses racial characters as its representations: East High School in Rochester, …

Katie Kitamura likes a good fight.
She may have attended Princeton University and earned a PhD in English. She may be a featherweight Asian American ballerina. However, her debut book “The Long Shot” isn’t about pliés or the world of cutthroat academics. Instead, “The Long Shot” centers around a topic that one would think is distinctively out of her realm of knowledge: mixed martial arts (MMA).