Alexandra Wallace...cultural critic, YouTube star, pariah, GONE
Alexandra Wallace, the UCLA student who created an obnoxious and offensive video stereotyping her Asian colleagues as gibberish-spouting boors, announced that she was leaving the school as a result of “being ostracized” by “an entire community.” Yes, I’d say that was the idea, and it is how cultures enforce its values. And it works.
Wallace picked the day of the Japanese tsunami to post her anti-Asian rant on YouTube, where it promptly went viral. It also made her an instant pariah on her campus, where over a third of all students are of Asian heritage, and the rest of them, unlike Alexandra, have at least a vague concept of mutual respect and decorum.
You can read a complete transcript of the three-minute diatribe here, but this shortened version gives a sense of what infuriated Asians, UCLA, and just about everyone else:
“So we know that I’m not the most politically correct person so don’t take this offensively. I don’t mean it toward any of my friends I mean it toward random people that I don’t even know in the library… The problem is these hordes of Asian people that UCLA accepts into our school every single year, which is fine. But if you’re going to come to UCLA then use American manners. …So it used to really bug me but it doesn’t bother me anymore the fact that all the Asian people that live in all the apartments around me — their moms and their brothers and their sisters and their grandmas and their grandpas and their cousins and everybody that they know that they’ve brought along from Asia with them – comes here on the weekends to do their laundry, buy their groceries and cook their food for the week. It’s seriously, without fail. You will always see old Asian people running around this apartment complex every weekend. That’s what they do. They don’t teach their kids to fend for themselves. You know what they don’t also teach them, is their manners. Which brings me to my next point… I swear every five minutes I will be — okay, not five minutes, say like fifteen minutes — I’ll be in like deep into my studying…and then all of a sudden when I’m about to like reach an epiphany… Over here from somewhere, ‘Ooooh Ching Chong Ling Long Ting Tong, Ooohhhhh.’ Are you freaking kidding me… And then it’s the same thing five minutes later. But it’s somebody else, you know — I swear they’re going through their whole families, just checking on everybody from the tsunami thing…”
Nice, eh?
Wallace seems to recognize that an apology doesn’t do much to repair the damage from something like this, though she has offered several. It is good that she is sorry she’s an insensitive bigot, and maybe she can go on from this and work on that problem, but she is still a bigot, because non-bigots literally never say such things, and bigots who have the sense to realize how wrong these sentiments are don’t put them on display for millions of people, including the objects of the bigotry, on YouTube.
Or place it on YouTube in the middle of a terrible disaster killing thousands of Japanese. To call this insensitive or mere political incorrectness is to chart new vistas in understatement. Her rant was racism, callousness, nastiness, mean-spiritedness, bigotry, stereotyping and jaw-dropping idiocy, all blended into one noxious, stinking mess. Wallace directly insulted a large segment of her community, offended most of the rest, and embarrassed the university. The community not only had a reason to want to get rid of her; it had an obligation to let her know that her conduct and attitudes were not welcome, that they were antithetical to the values of UCLA, and indeed the United States.
That it did, and kudos are due to UCLA. But let us not hear any more blather about “tolerance.” We should tolerate what is tolerable, and what isn’t tolerable we should reject. That applies to objectionable practices imported from foreign cultures, as well as racist rants against those cultures by UCLA students.
UCLA correctly decided that it should take no disciplinary action against Wallace, for her idiotic video was undoubtedly protected speech. She had a right to make it and post it, just as the people she went to school with had a right to tell her that her company was no longer wanted as a consequence of her exercising her right of stupid free speech. Some of them unfortunately picked unethical ways of doing it, as will always happen in such cases. Wallace should not have received death threats. Nobody should have harassed her. She should, however, have been delivered a very clear message that people, like her, who denigrate whole races and ethnic groups, shamelessly and to the world, will not be tolerated.
The UCLA community did the right thing by shunning Alexandra Wallace, and she did the right thing by getting the message and packing her bags. She is not, repeat not, any kind of a victim, except perhaps as another piece of internet roadkill, where YouTube, Facebook and Twitter gives the unwary opportunities to reveal their ugliest features to acquaintances and strangers alike.
Wallace has branded herself a racist and a fool, and the brand will be there for a long, long time. But UCLA’s community demonstrated what its values were, and did it the best way and the old-fashioned way, through intolerance.
Let’s hope they learned the right lesson from the episode.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m guessing it was the death threats and other forms of violent intimidation that “worked” as opposed to the “shunning” but I am willing to be persuaded if you can explain how the UCLA community shunned her — did people silently turn their backs on her as she walked by?
That’s a great question. There’s no way to know; certainly the death threats would get anyone’s attention. Death threats in the midst of widespread support by others would be a lot easier to stand up to—subtract the death threats, and would near universal hostility—but non assumptive hostility—be enough to chase her away? Depends on her resilience and personal ability to withstand it, and I have no idea.
In any event, nobody should feel sorry for her.
Oddly enough, I am somehow fairly unoffended by this (reading rhetoric dating from the days of the Chinese Exclusion Act will do that to you); I’ve had family members say some pretty harsh things about non-Taiwanese Han Chinese people themselves.
Of course, I’m not defending her; the over-generalization that takes place here is face-palm worthy (though there may be some genuine culture clash going on that got covered up by Ms. Wallace’s undiplomatic idiocy), and last I checked, it was Japan, not China or Taiwan, that got clocked by the earthquake and tsunami (also, any idiot knows nowadays that the basic syntax of Japanese and Chinese are worlds apart).
My Chinese late father-in-law, my daughter’s best buddy, never in his life said anything like, “Ching chong ting tong.” Of course, his mother tongue was Mandarin, so perhaps he was not familiar with Alexandra’s dialect.
And of course, Japanese sounds nothing like any Chinese dialect, which seems to be what the young woman was mocking though what she said sounded nothing like Chinese, unless she was trying to recall the Dynasties. She must be a fan of Mickey Rooney’s turn in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”….
Non Sequitur Irony: my daughter’s middle name is Alexandra; of course she’s a little brighter than this one (graduated summa cum laude from UC Berkeley — brag about her every chance I get).
As far as I can tell, American stereotypes of the Chinese language seems at least in part to originate from their perceptions of Cantonese immigrants and Hong Kong martial arts films (and given that much, if not most, of the pre-20th century European contact with the Chinese in the post-Enlightenment/Scientific Revolution era occurred around the fairly mercantile Cantonese speaking province of Guangdong, I suspect it’s a general Western stereotype as well). I myself only know Mandarin and a smattering of Taiwanese Minnan, so take this with plenty of salt.
Julian H.: when we were living in Honolulu, we were having a heated dispute with our Chinese-descent landlord. My wife (Mandarin descent) told him he had “the manners of a Cantonese coolie”.
I gather that, coming from a Mandarin, that was the ultimate put-down.
(We moved.)
I though coolies had generally GOOD manners. No ?
I think this guy had the best response to Alexandra. Enjoy….
Fred thats the funny as hell thnaks for posting this.