When my boyfriend’s brother got married I went looking for a card. He’s Asian and she’s white. I really like the cards with the couple on the cover holding hands. I didn’t expect to find an Asian-white match, but she’s really into Asian stuff so I figured she’d get a kick out of two Asians. You know, showing she’s really welcome into a very Asian family (even I’m Asian!)
Do you know there are no cards that have non-white or non-black people on them? No Asian couples at all. Is this too much to ask?
I eventually went with a nice lace one with flowers, but it did annoy me a little.
It’s everywhere – despite the rising Asian and Hispanic populations, despite the steadily rising numbers of interracial marriages across all lines, when you look at couples in advertising (especially dating service advertising) and on cards and just about all media that isn’t specifically geared toward minority or intermarried communities, it’s homogenous white or black couples, period.
Our black Supreme Court justice is married to a white woman. Our Asian cabinet member is married to a white man. But can we find representations of their relationships in mass media? Nope, not gonna happen.
Is it that way because it’s easier or because companies are still afraid of offending jackass antimiscegenationists? I’d love to hear a rationale.
Well, the cards are out there, but it’s a still a tiny percentage of the greeting card market. Mass retailers are so cautious about bringing in anything “new or different”, that patrons really have to holler to make their desires known before the retailer reacts.
To some degree I think it’s easier; think of all the permutations you’d have to have with Hispanic male/black female, white male/Asian female, etc. Is there enough demand to be producing all of these? Do the retailers have enough room to display all of these? Probably not. Doesn’t explain why there aren’t cards with Asian or Hispanic couples, though.
Norm Mineta is Asian? Well, so he is. Can you tell I’ve never actually seen Norm Mineta? Or rather, I haven’t paid any attention when I did?
Mineta. Japanese. Learn something new everyday.
Where’s that “dig me a hole to hide in” smiley?
They can be, I’m not a big fan of wedding cards in general, because they’re all so simpering and cutesy and hearts, roses and butterflies. If you’re not a fluffy romantic buying a card for a fluffy romantic couple, you’re kinda SOL. I tend to make my own cards. It’s not hard with some nice art paper, some vellum and a good printer, and then the message is what I want it to be.
What kills me is TV. TV shows tend to be all-white, sometimes with a token black person, regardless of where the show is set. When I see this sort of thing in shows set in San Francisco (my hometown), I just wonder if the casting director knows fuck all about what they’re doing. I mean, it’s not like there aren’t any black people in San Francisco, but there are way, way, way more Asians and Latinos. Also, a quarter of the characters should be gay. Then it would be realistic.
Looking at it from a number theory perspective, I have to comment on how many combinations each store would need to carry to satisfy the OP’s requests.
Let’s reduce the problem to four `races’ (black, white, asian, and hispanic) and two sexes (if you don’t know, ask mommy and daddy how you came to be here). Since the choices made for the first person doesn’t affect any of the choices for the other person (which takes us into another goddamned interminable debate/flame war), you would need (4 (races) * 2 (sexes)) * (4 (races) * 2 (sexes)) = 64 different kinds of cards to cover everyone.
We could, if we were a bit more open-minded, make four sexes, as well (male, female, female-to-male, male-to-female), bumping our number of flavors up to 4[sup]4[/sup]. That’s 256 different combinations, for those of you playing along at home, and that’s way too many to be truly feasible in any non-Internet market.
So, I think it’s simply a matter of cold, hard economics on this one.
I don’t understand this at all. Are you saying you can’t tell the difference between a picture of a Asian and one of a Caucasian? Or that such a picture would have to rely soley on skin tone? If one were to draw a picture of, say, a Chinese lady, would there be a problem with drawing her with Asiatic facial features?
My wife does fashion drawing as a hobby. I can tell very easily which ladies she draws are Asian.
I think it would be a simple enough for Hallmark to do if they thought there was a big enough market for it.
Well, you can just run down to Chinatown and…what? Every single town doesn’t have a Chinatown? But they’re so much fun!
Anyway, I have seen here in NY, in the larger card stores, a Spanish section (the language and/or Latino people depicted on the cards, although if you’re not the medium-brown straight-haired type of Latino you’re outta luck). Hallmark has a Mahogany line. But you’re right, outside of Chinatown I haven’t seen Asian (let alone mixed-race couples) faces in these cards. I’m sure there’s niche companies making them somewhere for Americans.
If you don’t want frilly, sometimes a simple or classic design can be found. Like two rings, or champagne glasses, printed on really really thick paper and embossed and all with fancy calligraphy.
Exactly; unless it’s a custom card with the photo of the couple themselves, what is the card saying, why cannot you be as charming and good looking as the people on the card?
As a geek, I just get peeved sometimes when I can’t get electronic goodies in languages other than English and Spanish. For instance, I don’t need a cell phone with Chinese menus, but my parents would kill for such a beast, so they can do something other than the bare minimum functions. It’s not like it’d cost the companies extra money to put additional languages in, especially since the phones originally made in Asia already have 'em… mutter mutter…
Well, actually, it would. First off, they would need to hire translators, and they would need to hire people who understand both languages at least passing well or they’ll end up with word salad.
Second, storage space on those phones isn’t free. I understand that densities are increasing, the cost per kilobyte of storage (RAM, ROM, etc.) is coming down, and so on, but you still need to budget your use of the machine’s resources. And cutting out features (hell, cutting out games) simply to include languages most people don’t speak is not going to play well.
Third, and this is my weakest argument, you need a pretty good minimum resolution to display Asian languages. You can get by with absolutely shitty pixellation to render English and other European languages, but Japanese and Chinese use some pretty intricate characters that need to be readable even in less-than-optimal conditions. I don’t know how good of a display you can reliably expect these days, but my cell phone’s LCD is pretty blocky.
This strikes me as a lame complaint (yeah I know, this from £1.10 + 99p man).
People is people. Do you need to find a card that illustrates the couple in question precisely? What if I wanted to buy a card for my red-headed friend and her boyfriend with blond dreadlocks? Oh no, the card doesn’t match!!
Seriously, why can’t you just accept that the card illustrates “a couple”? Two humans. Complaining that they are the wrong sort of humans strikes me as attaching undue importance to race.
I’ve never been impressed with cards anyway, except for ones that people have made themselves. Store-bought cards are like horoscopes — you can almost pick something at random and figure out a way that it “fits”. Maybe somebody really did go to two or three shops and spend a couple of hours in a heartfelt search for the perfect card, but frankly that is not necessarily discernable from a card grabbed on the way back from lunch. “Yeah, I got you a card with two black folks 'cause I knew you had such a great sense of humor.” But a card that is nothing more than loving words penned by you is irreplaceable, unduplicateable, and very very special.