I read the “Oxford study” so you don’t have to.
a plea to touch some grass by pikachu, the kid.
Man, if I had a dollar for every time I saw some misguided kid on TikTok say “Oxford Study,” I would be able to actually buy Saltburn.
I don’t know how fucked up my TikTok algorithm is, but I have always been on “Asian American TikTok” ever since I downloaded the app.
My feed has always had Gen Z-targeted Asian American content; lots of discourse about Stüssy hoodies, ABGs, bubble tea, K-pop centric content, “Kevin Nguyen,” as well as tidbits and insights into Korean American, Vietnamese American, and Filipino American culture.
Based off my algorithm, I’m sure TikTok thinks I’m a 17-year-old Asian-American kid from Southern California.
Good guess, I’m a 25-year-old sorta-kinda grown-ass adult from Jersey.
Though I feel that the For You page isn’t accurate or something like that, there is one troubling thing that I have observed.
It seems like there is a subset of Asian American youth - mostly cisgender boys, who are developing very conservative attitudes towards miscegenation.
Yup, miscegenation.
According to Merriam-Webster, miscegenation is a noun that refers to “a mixture of races, especially: marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a White person and a member of another race.”
Additionally, the dictionary mentions that the word miscegenation is associated especially with historical laws against interracial marriage and that such laws were declared unconstitutional in the United States via the landmark Loving v. Virginia U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 1967.
From what I have observed both in videos and in comments sections on TikTok, Asian American boys are becoming increasingly obsessed with mixed couples; specifically, a combination known as WMAF, or “White Male, Asian Female.”
Like many covert and hidden phrases that White supremacists and homophobic people use on the platform, there is a dog whistle around it that these kids have adopted:
“Oxford Study.”
The meaning behind it is that their views against such pairings are justified because there is a peer-reviewed study behind it from none other than the college of all colleges: Oxford.
Although the existence of an actual study has been unclear for a while, a long deep dive that led me to be very afraid of the future also led me to a 2010 article called “The New Suzie Wong: Normative Assumptions of White Male and Asian Female Relationships” by then Lincoln University faculty members Murali Balaji and Tina Worawongsby, which appeared in a 2010 edition of Communication, Culture & Critique, which is published by the Oxford University Press.
The whole thing is 17 pages long, but I had a read through all of it and found some things.
Now, before I go any further, I should note that “The New Suzie Wong” reads like a reading that a professor would give me a week to analyze - only for me to bullshit any “findings” from it when I get called on during the next class to earn that participation grade.
However, there are some things you should know.
Balaji and Worawongsby examined TV ads that aired on major networks from 2006 to 2007 (a time when there was little to no positive Asian representation in American media) and found that there is more to just mere pairing when it comes to the Asian women and White men depicted.
In their piece, they found that a sense of cultural and self-autonomy is lost in the Asian women depicted in the advertisements for brands like Nissan, Volkswagen, and Mastercard. Through both covertly subtle and overtly obvious nuances and symbols, their “exotic” culture is seen as backward, and cultural and physical submissiveness to a White ruling class is key to their acceptance, assimilation and upward mobility into a “civilized, superior” society.
“These images in advertising, which we have argued sell ideologies as well as products, contribute to Asian American women’s devaluation of their sense of worth and exacerbate a desire for acceptance through assimilation. Moreover, they uphold the Orientalist constructs by which Asian American womanhood has been represented in mainstream popular media,” Balaji and Worawongsby said in the study.
“As long as these constructs remain in the era of global advertising, with White male/Asian female relationships seen as the ideal and the norm (at the expense of Asian men), it will become more difficult for Asian American women to break from the Orientalist gaze.”
In a society where our unique cultural signifiers are the commodities we consume, our identities are reduced to what we see visually and not what is skin deep at our core.
I can see why this is a problem - ads are media. Messages are created and spread through media, and people tend to buy things based on ads. People tend to remember specific details in an ad, and we, as Americans take part in a capitalistic society where there is a net monetary incentive for all of this.
The study itself and using “the study” as a dog whistle are two completely different things, but there some things I should note.
If there is one thing I can say about Gen-Z, it is that my generation of chronically online kids tends to lean onto real or made-up anecdotal evidence before they find what they feel is empirical evidence - i.e. the “Oxford study.”
Racial fetishization exists and the hegemonic structures of colonization still have its lasting effects, but you cannot change actual, genuine love between two people, even if one of them is White.
This is not coming from a “hear no evil, see no evil” perspective. If you are actively reading this and calling me a “race traitor,” please for the love of chin chin, listen.
Just because I say to “look with your eyes, not your mouth” does not mean to not use the most important part of your head - your brain.
Seeing something with your eyes solely and not giving time to analyze whether or not everyone is truly happy means that you are willing to not take in the full picture and see things through the filter of your malice and agenda.
Businessman and author W. Clement Stone is credited with coming the phrase “You are a product of your environment,” meaning that a little bit of the people that you surround yourself with rubs off on you.
You might be thinking “What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Exactly that.
Unfortunately, Asian Americans are still upholding a very patriarchal and incredibly misogynistic point of view in the scheme of all this. When I was a schoolboy, I was often told by classmates that I was dealing with "impossible odds" because the girl in the class I had a crush on was White. When I revealed that I was dating a White classmate, my father gave me the same kind of wonderous tone someone gives to someone who made a great accomplishment or bought a Mercedes.
At the same time, Asian men, brothers, and dads put down Asian women when they decide to date a White man.
We are also living in a time where our social and interpersonal emotional development is happening in places beyond typical “real life” scenarios. I may have been called “whitewashed” by other Filipino kids at school when I was 12-13 or 14 years old, but the youngins nowadays have so many stimuli at the palm of their hand to massage their developing minds, mindsets, emotions, and personalities in both the right and wrong ways outside of the schools.
This whole thing about the “Oxford study” and what it means for Asian American youth as they go forth and grow up tells me that there is a lot we have to be teaching these damn kids.
Asian Americans have come a long way from being the “model minority,” but a long history of racism, oppression, and discrimination does not give you an excuse to be a dipshit.
I know I’m going to sound like a boomer here, but people in real life do not act the way people on the comments section of TikTok, Instagram, or Twitter think.
Touch grass.
Ingat.