Katie Holmes/Staff

On Sept. 17 The Daily Californian ran an advertisement from Dr. Chase Lay, a San Jose-based plastic surgeon who specializes in Asian facial plastics throughout the Bay Area. The ad showed two unidentified Asian women in before-and-after photos of blepharoplasty, a procedure more commonly known as “Asian double eyelid surgery.” We want to share our opinions on why this ad is problematic and what steps members of the community can take to educate themselves on the damaging effects of Western beauty standards.

The controversy over receiving blepharoplasty boils down to one question: Are those who consider blepharoplasty or receive it motivated by a dislike of their Asian features? The specification of “Asian” in Lay’s practice confirms that Asian blepharoplasty, unlike breast augmentation, targets an ethnic group. Some Asians view it as an attempt to Westernize while others see it as just another way to enhance their beauty.

The most glaring message in the Facial Plastic Surgery ad lists “Double Eyelid Surgery” and “Asian Eyelid Surgery” toward the bottom. The distinction between double and Asian eyelid surgery unnecessarily racializes the procedure: The specification of “Asian” not only targets a certain group but also limits the practice to one demographic. On Lay’s website, there are before-and-after photos of patients who have undergone eyelid surgery. Under the category, “Eyelid Surgery,” many of the patients who chose the procedure are white and appear to be more than 40 years old, electing to undergo the procedure to look younger or less tired. This demographic differs highly from those under the category “Eyelid Surgery for the Asian Eye,” who are largely younger. One of the patients wanted to make her eyes look “brighter,” affirming how eyelid surgery for Asians is more often due to concerns over beauty than age or medical reasons.

The obsession over double eyelids in Asian culture, especially in South Korea, did not happen randomly. It stems from the standard of beauty in which Western eyes are more desirable because they are larger. Lay’s ad promotes more than just the practice of eyelid surgery targeting Asian Americans; it sends the message that in order to be accepted, Asian Americans must have the “Western” look, most noticeably in their eyes and nose. If individuals do not comply, they are excluded from this model of beauty. For a community that has struggled to represent itself in media, education and politics, it is a shame that the ability to succeed is dependent on conforming to a Western standard.

The TV career of Julie Chen is one example of what is at stake when Asian Americans are pressured to undergo eyelid surgery. Chen recently confessed she underwent blepharoplasty to advance her career. This announcement has sparked several reactions. The first is an attack on Chen herself as a cultural “sellout.” Angry Asian Man blog reports Julie Chen’s move to undergo eyelid surgery is essentially denying one’s own identity to be accepted by the dominant race. The second is in support and offers empathy, from both her fans and the Asian American community. The Asian American Journalists Association “applauds Ms. Chen for sharing this personal moment with her audience. Her story chronicles some of the daily struggles Asian Americans face in the workplace across all industries.” And lastly, others question whether Chen’s only option to advance her career was eyelid surgery. Clearly, Chen felt she had no other option at that time.

Most notably, these responses lack criticism of the agencies of power that made it very clear Asian eyes would prevent Chen from achieving her career aspirations.

By focusing on the individual, we fail to recognize that this occurs in the daily lives of Asian Americans, whether you are one of the nation’s most recognized talk show hosts or a UC Berkeley student.

At the UC Berkeley student level, ASUC Senator Sevly Snguon has asked for an official apology from the Daily Cal and more extensive screening processes for advertisements. Along with these requests, the Daily Cal must better represent the diversity of the students on our campus. The Daily Cal should reflect on what it means to “serve the UC Berkeley campus and its surrounding community,” which requires being more aware of the demographics it serves.

We believe this is an opportunity for the Daily Cal to reach out to the many resources that are here on campus, especially when screening advertisements for cultural sensitivity. One of those resources is the Multicultural Student Offices at the Cesar Chavez Student Center, equipped with staff and interns ready to respond. We urge the Daily Cal staff to approach its work with cultural sensitivity and be transparent about its selection of advertisements that may be offensive to minorities.

Christina Cho, Sam Lai and Whitney Wong intern at the Asian Pacific American Student Development Office at UC Berkeley.

The post Daily Cal needs to be more culturally sensitive appeared first on The Daily Californian.

The offensive quinceanera-themed party thrown by the Delta Chi fraternity on the night of Sept. 21 is a perfect example of this confusion. The party, the impetus of a recently introduced ASUC Senate bill, was defended by Delta Chi’s president, Cody Kermanian, as never beginning with “the intention to marginalize.”

As evidenced by his remarks, Kermanian is sadly missing the point.

It’s reassuring to hear that Kermanian and the fraternity did not intend to alienate or insult Hispanic students on campus, but the problem with the party was not that it was conducted with malicious intent; the trouble is with the careless reappropriation of an important Hispanic cultural ritual for the purposes of throwing a party.

The bill, sponsored by CalSERVE Senator Wendy Pacheco, places the party squarely in the context of other offensive events that have occurred in Greek communities on American college campuses. While Delta Chi’s quinceanera party did not reach the levels of UC San Diego’s infamous Compton Cookout or a gang-themed party at Dartmouth College (where partygoers dressed up like Bloods and Crips), it is symptomatic of a troublesome trend in Greek party culture across the country.

There are productive measures outlined in the bill to address this trend. It calls for “intent versus impact” training, and it also asks Delta Chi to issue a public apology for throwing the party. However, the bill also has its flaws.

The bill rightfully recalls the incident last semester in which the Theta Delta Chi fraternity hung a figure that looked similar to a black male out of its window for Halloween — directly across from the African American theme floor in Unit 1.

However, the bill mentions that in spite of an ASUC bill that required “mandatory racial sensitivity” training after the incident, “there have been no updates on the efforts for mandatory racial sensitivity curriculum.”

In order for the Greek system to adequately implement these protocols, the ASUC needs to actively enforce the reforms they demand the Greek system take on. Otherwise, the changes necessary to effect a culture shift will have no incentive to be taken seriously.

Furthermore, cultural reappropriation and racial insensitivity are not exclusively qualities of the Greek system. Co-op parties and student group events are often guilty of the same kind of ignorance.

But Delta Chi’s failure to consider the consequences of its actions or the reasons behind those consequences reflect an unaware attitude that seems particularly prevalent within the Greek community.

Hopefully, after this instance, the necessary changes will be adopted, and the Greek community made more culturally aware.

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This column is in response to the article on CNN called India: The Story You Never Wanted to Hear about an American student’s experience with sexual abuse in India.

I recently returned from a two-month language-learning scholarship in the state of Punjab in northern India. There, patriarchy acts upon your body: lewd glares, shifty winks, body grabs and strange lips pressed against yours. Those are patriarchy’s hands, lips and eyes, and they threaten you, and all other women, at every turn.

Because you have a hole between your legs, you can be grabbed, prodded, pinched, pulled, pounded and your pain would not even merit a police report. And when you begin to understand fully the consequences of having this body, you no longer want it.

When a professional of the urban, middle class talks more to my male friend than me, when he asks him for his opinions, for his advice, for his time and not mine, it becomes clear that I am not a human, but a woman. I am India. My friend is America. I am a puppet. And the male, the puppeteer.

But I speak from the velvet seat of privilege. I am American-born, university-educated and wealthy. I can use this platform to rant and complain and levy my grievances, while the women of India — who fear their fathers and lock their doors at night, who are raped by drunken men in slums and sold by their parents — cannot. They do not have the social and cultural capital that I do, and this is precisely why their stories are the ones that need to be heard.

I can’t read an article about sexual violence in India that focuses entirely on a bourgeois white woman, containing not a single word about any Indian woman, without rolling my eyes. Because the true story you never wanted to hear is not the story told in the popular news, like a recent CNN article, and it is not the story about the white woman being abused — it is the story about the Indian woman being abused.

According to a 2010 UN report, domestic abuse affects two out of three married Indian women. But the Indian woman cannot describe in detail her story because her community may blame her, shun her, restrict her, abuse her and even kill her for it. The same hand that snakes its hand over her mouth to stifle a woman’s cries of resistance also stifles her testimonies of abuse. And her silence is the knife with which she, herself, is finally slaughtered. Because she cannot speak about sexual violence, it fails to be adequately addressed. The patriarchal structure is built in such a way that her story cannot be told, and so the white woman rants away while the brown one averts her eyes, lowers her head and shuffles quickly by.

These mannerisms — avoiding eye contact, covering your face and head, walking quickly, not stopping to talk to people — are often associated with the stereotype of “the passive Asian woman.” Yet these are not defects, but defense strategies. I remember asking a teacher while in India, “What are some good things to say, if a man harasses you in public?” She told me that usually a woman would ignore a man who did that and not say anything back. I scoffed and, with typical American cockiness, said, “Well, doesn’t that encourage the harassment? If you don’t say anything to the man, he will think it’s OK to continue.”

Her reply to this comment still reverberates in my mind today. She said that if a woman were to yell at a man and make him angry, the next day he might come back with his friends, find her, throw her in his Jeep, take her to a remote place and rape her. There, rape culture is like God, a supreme being — omnipotent, omnipresent, not wholly understood.

About 7,000 female fetuses are aborted in India every day, according to a 2006 UN report. Everywhere you go — on buses, in markets, at home through television and by your parents — you are being told that you shouldn’t even have made this far. In a place where you are slated to die before you are born, of what real consequence is the grabbing of a breast?

Documentary filmmaker and journalist, Daljit Ami, whom I met on my trip, was in the process of filming a documentary about female foeticide at a hospital with a female doctor who was to perform a sex-selective abortion. After rejecting his repeated attempts to speak with her, she accosted him in the hallway one day and asked, “Tell me, why shouldn’t I kill this girl?”

The obvious answer would be: because you would be snuffing out a life before giving it a chance — it’s femicide. But more importantly, why was that question even asked? If an educated female doctor is asking such a question to a male, then perhaps, to her, the possibility of living as a woman is worse than not living at all.

The post Off the beat: Encountering patriarchy abroad appeared first on The Daily Californian.

Charlotte Passot/Staff

I come from a family of refugees. My mother was younger than I am now when she was forced to flee for her life from the Islamic Revolution of Iran. My mother recalls being forced to sit in the back of her classroom along with a group of young Jewish children during her school years.

When my mother went to buy groceries in the market, she was not allowed to touch the produce because she was considered a “dirty Jew.” These are only a few indicators of the systematic oppression of the Iranian Jews, some of the oldest inhabitants of Persia. At the age of 20, she was forced to abandon her life in Iran as her family was scattered across the world. My grandmother, Mamanjani, was never allowed to return home because of her active involvement in Jewish organizations. Though she had no ties to any other government, she was warned not to go home for fear of execution without trial. Despite calling Persia home for 2,500 years, in 1979, my family and many Jewish families like my own were forced to forced to flee their homes. My family’s home, business and property was confiscated. We were torn from our homes, forced to flee to whichever country would take us in.

Though these experiences define me, some students on our campus seem to think my history does not count. During the “divestment” meeting two weeks ago, Students for Justice in Palestine tweeted about those opposed to divestment: “the Zizis are literally white people crying about their privilege, lol.” Apparently, Zizi is SJP shorthand for Zionist. And later, Daily Cal Blogger Noah Kulwin discussed a clear division he seems to see between “students of color” and “Jewish students,” implying that Jewish students like me cannot be considered students of color. I am here to address ignorance about what truly defines the Jewish people. Amid claims — or rather accusations — of “privilege” or the inability of Jews to understand the plight of “colored people,” I realized many people on this campus are unaware of who the Jewish people actually are.

My story is not unique among those who stood against divestment. Many of my peers who spoke against divestment come from families that experienced similar persecution before making it to America. For some, it was the Iraqi Farhud, where hundreds of Jews were killed and injured as Baghdad’s Jewish community was destroyed. For others, it was the oppression Jews faced under Soviet rule in Russia. And for others still, it was the Holocaust of Eastern Europe. But although they come from different corners of the globe, these Jewish students are here for a single reason: because making it to America was the difference between a new life and death in the countries they used to call home.

In the second half of the 20th century, millennia-old Jewish communities throughout the Middle East and North Africa were completely destroyed. The number of Middle Eastern Jewish refugees like my parents is on par with the number of Palestinian refugees following the Arab-Israeli War of 1948.

Not every Iranian Jew achieved asylum in America. For those who were not fortunate enough to make it here, Israel was the only country to which refugees could go. That’s what it means to have a Jewish State. It is a place — the only place — Jews like my family are guaranteed security. For our senate to refuse to recognize Israel as the Jewish State means that they are refusing to acknowledge my right to a place where my family, and others like me, are safe.

The pro-divestment movement wants you to believe that its cause is a struggle between the ethnic minority Palestinians and the “white” and “privileged” Jews and Israelis. By pretending that Jews are white Europeans, they argue that Israelis are foreign occupiers. But Jews are not a homogenous group of white people; we are an ethnically Middle Eastern people, comprising many unique communities from across the globe. After centuries of persecution, we have found security in this country and in our nation’s first home, Israel. And although we have achieved the privilege of statehood, our personal histories are defined by our recent struggles.

If there is one thing we can accomplish at a university, it is to educate ourselves. It shames me to see students at one of the most prestigious universities in the world denying the oppression of my people. True justice comes from recognizing the struggles and stories of every student. It is both offensive and counterproductive to define the ethnicity and history of another student group for political gain. Each student, regardless of race, ethnicity, color or creed, faces unique circumstances. To alter a commonly used sentiment on this campus, we all must check our prejudices.

Aryella Moreh is a student at UC Berkeley.

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