Holy cow, offensive Fukudome shirts still for sale

Harry Mok
May 18, 2008

The Cubs tried stopping sales of the shirts after Fukudome came out and said they were offensive. The people selling them, they're making a buck so they don't care much what Fukudome or anyone else says. And apparently some fans are wearing those straw rice paddy hats to games as some sort of homage to the Cubs' first Japanese player.


I can sort of see why some people might not "get" that the shirts or the hats are offensive. If they've never been ridiculed for their skin color or the way they talk, or if they've never been the target of racism, then everyone else is just too sensitive or being PC. These are the most ignorant people and probably nothing will change that.

You can make the case that it's the Midwest and there aren't as many Asian Americans as in California. But that's generalizing and offensive to Midwesterners. There are Cubs fans out there that do get it. Let's hope they are the vast majority.

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Harry Mok

Editor in chief

Editor in Chief Harry Mok wrote about growing up on a Chinese vegetable farm for the second issue of Hyphen and has been a volunteer editor since 2004. As a board member of the San Francisco and New York chapters of the Asian American Journalists Association, Harry has recruited and organized events for student members. He holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where he was also a graduate student instructor in the Asian American Studies Department.

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Comments

Comments

Slanty wrote on Mon, 05/19/2008 - 1:04pm
"You can make the case that it's the Midwest and there aren't as many Asian Americans as in California. But that's generalizing and offensive to Midwesterners."Considering there are 1 million plus Asian Americans in the Midwest - and that's a lot of sushi, pho, and bulgogi - anyone who would draw that conclusion has to be double dipping and shouting "Have I peaked yet?" on a regular basis.