Peter Hoekstra sounds like a bigot

[UPDATE: I retitled this post and reworded it somewhat to make clear that it's Hoekstra's and Kenyon's words (and actions) that are the problem, rather than the men themselves.]

Peter Hoekstra is a candidate in the Republican primary for one of Michigan's Senate seats. He ran a campaign ad during the Super Bowl on Michigan TV stations. The ad features an Asian American woman playing a mainland Chinese native.

Steven Yaccino's and Jonathan Weisman's blog entry in the New York Times describes the resulting furor:

While Mr. Hoekstra defended his commercial as revealing the “reckless spending” of Debbie Stabenow, the incumbent senator and a Democrat, critics denounced the spot as racially insensitive.

“Debbie spend so much American money,” the woman said. “You borrow more and more from us. Your economy get very weak. Ours get very good. We take your jobs.”

First, a curious anomaly: the woman's broken grammar is accompanied by a faultless American accent. An odd decision, considering that the two never go together in my experience.

But let's get to Hoekstra's response to his critics.

“There’s nothing racist in this ad,” he said in comments posted online by The Detroit Free Press.

[link in original text]

And the "political director" of the firm that made the ad, Bill Kenyon, justified the ad's content thusly:

“We only have 30 seconds, so we wanted to throw out something visually that evoked the image of China,” he said. “We were trying to portray this as China, not an American enclave of Chinese at some American university.”

Kenyon identified the actress as "an American whose parents are Chinese".

Here's a bulletin for those who believe Kenyon and Hoekstra: this ad is racist. No ifs, ands, or buts.

You can argue that the charge of racism should only be leveled at those who make statements or take actions that they know are bigoted. I, for one, try to make allowances for offensive statements that seem to arise out of ignorance rather than malice. Perhaps you think Hoekstra and Kenyon should be given the benefit of the doubt, that they're just abysmally ignorant, not prejudiced.

Kenyon and Hoekstra don't deserve that consideration.

Kenyon works in the media: he's smart enough to know what inflames what I've heard described charitably as "low-information voters". This ad touches on some of the oldest themes of anti-Asian prejudice:

• Asians never speak English properly.
• Young Asian women are pretty, alluring, and dangerous. The danger in this case is not merely sexual (this is the historical trope: Asian women seduce innocent Caucasian men and lead them to ruin), it's explicitly stated to be economic -- and the girl in the ad knows it.
• The Yellow Peril is always just around the corner, just waiting to despoil America.

These tropes are embedded so deeply in American culture as a result of media (mis)representations over the last century that a lot of Americans don't even realize they're there, much less that they're wrong. Not just morally wrong, but factually wrong. They make up part of the seemingly ineradicable set of stereotypes surrounding portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans in the media. (Don't believe me? Check out Asian Americans and the Media by Kent A. Ono and Vincent Pham, published by Polity in 2008. Ono and Pham do a good job of exposing the prejudiced assumptions underlying portrayals of Asians and Asian Americans through the years.)

But back to the ad. You could argue that the improper speech arises from the girl playing a supposed native of mainland China. Okay, then how about having her speak Mandarin, and subtitling her words in (proper) English? That would have been much truer to life and might have prevented the ad from being controversial at all.

I wonder if that's why it wasn't shot like that.

Oh hell, let's not be coy: I'm sure that's why the ad wasn't shot like that. If the idea even came up during production, Kenyon undoubtedly nixed it because the ad wouldn't have had anywhere near the emotional resonance with some viewers. Again, Kenyon knows his stereotypes.

As for Hoekstra, his airing of the ad and his subsequent denial of its racist content, without even pretending to address legitimate criticisms of that content, are disgraceful.

Of course, there's no way to address those criticisms, so there's no way to defend the ad. Hoekstra knows that. He approved the ad and plans to keep running it anyway. That's what makes him sound not merely prejudiced, but arrogant.

There's no way, and I see no need, to sugar-coat the result of his despicable behavior: Hoekstra looks and sounds like a bigot.