Got Rice?
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The phrase "Got Rice?" is a term that was coined by Asian American youth in the 1990's shortly after the original "Got Milk?" advertising campaign for the California Milk Board in 1993. The phrase has since come to be used as a symbol for the cohesiveness of Asian American cultural identity and cultural pride, especially on the Internet. It's usually mentioned close to the Asian Pride slogan.
The humor is derived from the fact rice is often considered a staple food of many Asian cultures, and that milk is not a traditional food in Asian culture. The slogan can thus be viewed as an Asian American cultural response to American media and advertising.
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[edit] T-shirt campaign
While the phrase itself presumably began as Asian American slang, the first notable usage is the t-shirt campaign first started by the Asian American magazine Yolk.[1]
Soon, other Asian American organizations began promoting the phrase and selling similar t-shirt designs. The organizations and their proponents intended for the t-shirts to be a fun way of promoting Asian American cultural heritage:
"Political identi-tees don’t all have to be so in-your-face. The Japanese American National Museum (http://www.janm.org/) in L.A.’s Little Tokyo offers an array of kinder, gentler tees commemorating aspects of Japanese-American heritage both fun and serious. Among the most popular designs, a line of adult and baby tees feature the rallying cry of the lactose liberation movement, "Got Rice?" [2]
Many in the Asian American community viewed the design as evidence of significant progress for the viability of Asian American culture and identity; whereas before identity may have been enforced on Asians via stereotypes from the dominant society, the "Got Rice?" shirts were an attempt by Asian Americans to define their identity and to take back those symbols used to stereotype them.
"For early Asian Americanists it was important that a distinction between Asians and Asian Americans was made; the U.S. borders were thus highly relevant in order to define Asian American identity. The t-shirts now sold by an Asian American magazine sporting the slogan "Got rice?" would not have sold well then. This t-shirt slogan is an allusion to the "Got Milk" ad campaign in which famous people tell you why you should drink milk, but in which items that are more or less inseparable from milk, such as a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich or a chocolate-chip cookie are also included. People would have tried to avoid fulfilling stereotypes at all costs, even in jokes. Nowadays there are multiple ways to read and deal with stereotyping and even to play with it. [3]
The phrase, as well as the t-shirt, continues to enjoy wide popularity today among Asian American youths.
[edit] Rap song
A song entitled "Got Rice?" was also produced shortly after 1998 by an unknown youth of Asian descent. The song was released on the internet, and is set to the tune of hip-hop artist Tupac Shakur's song "Changes", arguably one of his most famous and influential songs, from his album Greatest Hits, released posthumously in 1998. (The original riff for the song is from Bruce Hornsby and the Range's "The Way It Is.") The song is thus an example of borrowing of media and self-representation from one American minority (African Americans) by another (Asian Americans).
The song features the refrain "Got rice bitch, got rice" and ends with "'Cause we're thugs for life baby... Asian Pride!" It proved to be highly popular, albeit controversial, and has been reproduced, remade several times and changed. It was satirized in the song "Got Ice?", which ends with "'Cause we're Eskimos for life...Inuit Pride!" Positive reaction focused on the humor (and parodic) value of the animation, as well as the bold expressions of cultural identity and pride. It praises the educational attainment, knowledge, intelligence, looks and money of Asian people while degrading other people and also mentions countries of Asia, namely Philippines, Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Mongolia, and China with respect.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ Olivia Barker. "Eastern Influences Become Icons of Popular Culture", USA Today, March 22, 2001.
- ^ S. D. Ikeda. "Identi-tees: Stereotypes, Abercrombie & the Chest as a Battlefield", IMDiversity.com.
- ^ Heike Berner. (2003) Home Is Where the Heart Is? Identity and Belonging in Asian American Literature. Ph.D. Dissertation, Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
