If we ever had any doubts that the powers-that-be handling travel and immigration discriminate against people of colour, check out this post that’s gone totally viral.
An Asian-American gentlemen named Mr. Li recently applied for a U.S. passport so that he could travel. After submitting all of the appropriate paperwork, he got back the following letter from the U.S. State Department:
click to enlarge
That’s right. The reason given to Mr. Li as to why his application is being denied is because his image is “too yellow”.
Apparently, Asian-Americans just don’t have the right skin colour to travel.
I wonder whether Mr. Li’s also the wrong shade to visit Arizona? After all, Jan Brewer recently told CNN that a drivers’ license would be insufficient to demonstrate citizenship, so it sounds like (despite the text of SB 1070) Arizona residents and tourists are going to need to have a birth certificate or U.S. passport to avoid police harassment. If poor Mr. Li visited Arizona, the cops here might try to deport him to Hawaii or something.
It isn’t racism. That photograph is indeed too yellow, it’s a common thing with these passport photographs. I myself am half chinese, and my photograph came out with the exact same (incorrect) skin tone. I redid the photo, sent in the new one and everything worked just fine. So don’t go so readily saying that people are prejudiced, because their not.
This is an aesthetic issue, purely based on it’s graphical texturing not meeting specs., and this could be dis-affecting on a number of levels as opposed to an intentional, blatant exclusionary tactic. Please get with the program, and try to offer more objectivity to your activism, as to not skew things — leaning too much one way – for it’d be a shame to douse the flame on your already prolific, built-up bannerism concerning all things Asian-American.
@Drew: I disagree that this is purely a graphics issue. Asians have more yellow-tinted skin, yet we are expected to take photographs that meet standards set for White European skintones. African-Americans often are faced with similar issues, wherein distortions that specifically affect their skintones (e.g. “too dark”) are cited as problems. As an example, look at HP’s webcam controversy, wherein the camera was calibrated for Whites, and could not detect a dark-skinned Black man in poor lighting.
Posting this story is, in part, tongue-in-cheek. But it is also pointing out the fact that the standards used to validate these photographs are Euro-centric, with little tolerance for distortions that more often affect people of colour.