Facing Up to Facebook Racism

Some controversial groups on the popular website spur University of Virginia students to explore the line between college humor and racial slurs.

By Mythili Rao, University of Virginia

When a close friend of University of Virginia sophomore Patrick Giesecke began teasing him about having an “Asian fetish,” Giesecke logged onto thefacebook.com and created a new group to catch the attention of his friend, who happened to be an Asian female: “People for the Propagation of the Asian Fetish.”

According to the facebook group, “Asian women are truly the most scrumptrillescent delicacy abroad.” The group’s purpose was “to bang out Asians. Bang hard or go home. Yes, even the ugly bitches.”

“I can’t help it if my dick likes the taste of Teriyaki sauce. Or soy. Or duck for that matter. And when I’m feeling a little risky, wasabi,” it proclaimed. Gieseke said his aims were satirical. “I couldn’t see anyone reading that and being like, ‘Wow, someone really wants to do this to Asian girls.’ I thought it was pretty blatant that it was just a joke,” he said.

Freshman Maryann Li stumbled across the website while browsing facebook groups. Li, who is Chinese, was shocked. “I showed it to my boyfriend because it was just so ridiculous,” she said.

Li’s boyfriend, Grant Woolard, is white. Woolard agreed with Li that the group’s treatment of Asian women was “demeaning and degrading.” But Woolard, who plans to study the Chinese language in Taiwan this summer and hopes to continue pursuing the language at U.Va. in the fall, said he also disliked the group for its portrayal of the relationships between white males and Asian females. “I was frustrated to be relegated to that category of the ignorant honky who drools over foreign flesh,” he said.

After e-mailing Giesecke, Woolard, already an old hand at creating facebook groups such as “Americans for the Metric System,” “Students for the Deification of Billy Joel,” and “The Super-Happy Friendly Lady at Newcomb [Dining Hall],” started “Americans for the Increased Importation of Asian Women.” Woolard said he intended the group as a response to Giesecke and as a humorous celebration of Asian women. Li joined, and the couple began inviting friends and acquaintances.

One of Woolard and Li’s invitees, second-year Elizabeth Chu, Chair of the University’s Diversity Initiatives Committee, didn’t find the site particularly humorous or celebratory. When Chu received her e-mail invitation, she was appalled. It is worth noting that Chu is already a member of the invitation-only facebook group “Chino’s Paradise” (group description: “Give into the hotness”), in which forty-eight of forty-nine women who are members are Asian, but, she says, she drew a line at explicitly objectifying language. “The name alone was offensive,” she said.

Chu enlisted the help of second-year Julie Chen, and together, the two published a letter in the student paper, The Cavalier Daily, in response. “This blatant racism and sexism is an unacceptable message for a university of our caliber to be sending to our students as well as to our peer institutions,” they wrote. In an interview, Chen explained her thinking on the formation of the groups: “In my mind there was an environment here at U.Va. that made it okay to do that.”

In recent years, race has been a hot button topic at U.Va. In March 2003, the alleged attack on U.Va. student council presidential candidate Daisy Lundy, who is black and Korean, spurred an FBI investigation and a deluge of community activism. Blackface fraternity parties that spring kept issues of race in the forefront. In June 2004, the report of the President’s Commission on Diversity and Equity, which outlined a series of recommendations for transforming U.Va.’s racial climate, summed up the atmosphere with candor: “It is no secret that this Commission was appointed in the aftermath of several disheartening incidents of racial injustice and insensitivity on the Grounds of the University.”

As tension around the issue increased, Chen and Chu didn’t contact the groups’ creators but did alert Daisy Rodriguez, assistant dean for Asian/Asian Pacific American students in the Office of the Dean of Students, despite Chu saying, “I wanted the people who formed those groups to take down their groups on their own, and not because some administrator forced them to.”

With the publication of Chen and Chu’s article, Li began receiving e-mails from students expressing dismay at her membership in “Americans for the Increased Importation of Asian Women.” Although Woolard was listed as the group’s founder, it was Li who students and administrators—including Rodriguez—first sought out. “People saw me as someone who had betrayed the Asian race, which I thought was silly,” she said.

Rodriguez soon contacted Giesecke and Woolard, too. For Giesecke, it was the first time he had received feedback regarding his group since his e-mail exchange with Woolard. Giesecke, who has since taken down the group’s statement, says he would have done so sooner had an offended peer contacted him. “It wasn’t even funny anymore—it was only funny for the shock factor. But no one came out and said anything.”

At a mandatory meeting called by Rodriguez, she asked Giesecke and Woolard if they would be comfortable reading their group’s descriptions aloud in a room full of Asian women. “Although I’m a firm believer of everything I wrote in that group, I don’t think I would feel comfortable reading that in front of a group of people,” Woolard admitted.

By now, news of the incident had spread throughout U.Va., and an open forum was held at the Kaleidoscope Center for Cultural Fluency. The timing of the facebook controversy, which coincided with U.Va.’s Asian-American Pacific Heritage Month, only amplified the tension. “They already had these prepackaged rants,” Woolard said of the forum’s most vocal participants. He also expressed disappointment that in discussion, blame fell on Li. “My behavior was expected because I’m white and ‘foreignness is hot,’” he said. Giesecke, who said he did not find out about the forum until a few days after it had taken place, did not attend.

Defenders of the two facebook groups, including the editors of U.Va.’s daily paper, skirted the issue of race, instead focusing on whether or not it was the administration’s place to intervene in the first place. Since the facebook isn’t exclusive to U.Va. but instead is just a website used by its students, why should U.Va. officials be able to step in and monitor the content and the content’s creators?

“Nothing vindicates Rodriguez or anyone else taking substantive action against students expressing themselves,” the student newspaper’s editors wrote. “There are any number of facebook groups which are potentially offensive to any number of people, not to mention daily words and actions; should students be hauled before a dean every time a peer is insulted?”

In his defense, Woolard also noted the triviality of the facebook website. “A lot of things we support in facebook we don’t support in real life,” Woolard noted. “On the facebook, a lot of times, joining a group is a way of humoring your friends.”

Sure, the facebook is silly, but with over 832 registered schools and over 2.7 million registered users, the facebook has grown from a technological diversion to a complex component of college life. Now it is a media outlet where the usual contentious subjects — race and sexuality, and their intersection in this case—can take center stage, raising questions about how seriously we should take our online interactions. If the text from the facebook groups was written on a blackboard in a U.Va. classroom or scrawled on the side of a campus building, how would the response have been different? Should it have been different?

Woolard has since redefined his facebook group and renamed it. Now titled “Americans Who Value Females of Asian Descent,” the group purpose runs as follows: “We believe Asian females are one of our country’s most valuable assets. However, it is all too common that some Western perspectives ignorantly reduce them to mere objects of gratification and overlook their many qualities.” The group’s photo, which previously featured an image of an Asian woman lying down above a caption reading, “Made in China. Size small. Wrinkle resistant,” now displays an Asian model gazing at the camera. “Join the CelebrAsian!” the site proclaims.

A few weeks later, the momentum for race-related discourse and awareness at U.Va. only seems to be increasing. Recently, the University Judiciary Committee officially created the Ad Hoc Subcommittee for Sanctioning of Hate Crimes. Along with other student leaders, Chen and Chu have begun planning a “Speak Out” which will invite students who have faced discrimination to share their stories with the community at U.Va’.s amphitheater in the fall. Yet when it comes to race, Chu still believes that “the majority of white people at U.Va. don’t care.”

“There needs to be more of an effort to break out of the black-white binary that exists in racial discourse at U.Va.,” Chen agreed. “I think that certainly that’s an important discourse to have, given the history of the South and Virginia, but I think it’s also important to take into account that there’s a range of discrimination involving Asians, Latinos, bi-racial and multi-racial people, too.”

Clearly, the conversation is in no way over. “Part of me is glad that this discussion was generated,” Woolard said. “Sometimes it takes something outrageous to get people to start talking.”

Mythili Rao, 21, is a recent graduate of the University of Virginia with a BA in English and Political and Social Thought.