Group 1E SAPSA

Katrina Asuncion, Kimi Villaroman, Vince Olanda, Larry Wang

Group 1E

            Our SAPSA is about the ways that Asian Americans identify in terms of color. We especially focused on the ways Filipinx-Americans choose to identify, and where they fall on the spectrum of “brownness.” We often associate being “yellow” with being East Asian, and although the term has a racist history, it has been reclaimed by Asian Americans, as evinced by the Yellow Peril. We associate brownnesss with being Middle Eastern, Chicanx/Latinx, but brownness can also pertain to Asian Americans as well. Although Filipinx-Americans are members of the Asian American community, most do not identify as yellow due to their differing experiences that deviate from the monolithic Asian American experience. In our SAPSA, we hope to open up the dialogue regarding brownness to expand upon the fluidity of its defintion and validate the Filipinx-Americans that identify as brown, while emphasizing that these identifiers are still subjective and open to many interpretations. Our intended audience is anyone that may identify as brown or yellow, because we hope to open up the dialogue in the Asian American community and expand these ideas. Overall, we were able to discuss our desired topic, and we received a lot of insight from our interviewees, so we think that we accomplished what we set out to do. Although we only scratched the surface, we do believe that we began to open up this dialogue. We faced a challenge when some of our interview subjects expressed that they found identifying as yellow to be offensive, which we had not previously considered prior to filming. We also felt that we mostly got answers in which our interview subjects identified as brown, and we would have liked to get a variety of answers to show the fluidity of the terms. If we were to redo our SAPSA, we would have liked to interview more people, and not just a majority that identify as brown. In terms of the future, we hope to encourage others to challenge the ideas surrounding what “brown” means and what “yellow” means, and we hope to learn more about the impact and effects of these identities.

Link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B1ZOhZGzmez1ZWtZSEhWUDVwbVU/view?usp=sharing