Queer Eye’s Tan France demands ‘better’ for Asian lives: ‘We are more than a stereotype’
Tan France attends the Netflix and Net-A-Porter x Next In Fashion launch event on 5 February 2020 in New York City. (Photo by Bryan Bedder/Getty Images)
Queer Eye star Tan France has joined with other celebrities to demand better for Asian and Asian American individuals in a new Netflix campaign video.
The video, titled “Welcome to Our World”, features a variety of celebrities discussing various stereotypes perpetuated by the media.
Netflix said it was highlighting the issue because Asians “deserve better than the erasure, caricatures and stereotypes perpetuated by the entertainment industry”.
The video stars Queer Eye‘s Tan France, To All The Boys star Lana Condor, Hawaii Five-0‘s Daniel Dae Kim and others who talk about the treatment of Asian people and in Western society at large.
They describe how Asian people are made out to be “cliches”, “caricatures” or “foreigners” despite the “generations of Asian hands” that “helped build this country”.
Tan France described in the video the pervasive belief that the Asian community consists of “just one thing”. He stated: “We’re not just one thing, obviously. Being Asian is so much more than that.”
In a post on Instagram, Tan France shared a picture of himself emblazoned with the words: “Showing just one of us isn’t diversity.”
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The video is part of a campaign to spotlight Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) talent for Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. Other AAPI heavyweights featured in the video include Ashley Park, Ramona Young, Margaret Cho, Naomi Osaka and Jimmy O Yang.
The video follows a new report from the non-profit organisation Stop AAPI Hate which found anti-Asian hate incident reports nearly doubled in the past year. It revealed that the number of incidents reported surged from 3,795 in March 2020 to 6,603 in March of this year. Almost two-thirds (65 per cent) of incidents involved verbal harassment while nearly one in five (18 per cent) included shunning.
The third-largest category (13 per cent) of total reported anti-Asian incidents included physical assaults. Civil rights violations – including workplace discrimination, refusal of services or being barred from public transportation – constituted one in 10 (10 per cent) of the total incidents reported.
