I’ll take the steak and with a side of stereotypical remarks, thanks.

I am possibly the most frustrated I’ve ever been following an incredibly racist event in Las Vegas where my family and I were marginalized for being Asian. Upon entering the venue for “Marriage can be murder,” my mom in excitement for the event ahead stood up to take photos of the whole group, consisting of my grandmother, my aunt, her kids, my girlfriend, and my mom. She ended up momentarily standing in the way of a group of folks that were being seated and received a very audible “she’s simply reinforcing stereotypes…” by the hostess.

My girlfriend picked up on it yet and expressed her anger to me, yet I was willing to let it slide as it was the first offense of the night and probably wouldn’t continue. And yet, it did.

As the show started, I was one of the folks singled out for being accused of the murder in the plot of the show, an excuse for them to bring me up and poke some fun at me. Generally, I’m not opposed to this kind of thing — I think that I have a sense of humor about myself — but when it comes to racism I have low tolerance. The hostess immediately made some comments about how we were an entire table of asians and blatantly poked at our foreign-ness, as well as got the DJ to play gangnam style to encourage me to dance to their racism. I’m not even Korean, but I suppose the slanted eyes make it a close enough comparison.

Then, they continued to point out that we were Asian and probably could not understand the english that they were speaking too well, in addition to constantly singling out the group of us to be the butt of the joke. It was interesting to notice the juxtaposition between the racism thrown around the room — while it was directed toward blacks and whites (the group sitting in the audience was not incredibly diverse, and probably for good reason) as well as our group, the other racist slurs were of a different vain (i.e. ‘blacks should be able to dance’ when they asked an older gentlemen to show his moves or ‘white women are the most coveted women of all’ when they talked about the attraction of another lady in the audience). It was clear that, as an easily picked on minority in the room, that they were going to be relentless the rest of the show, constantly throwing a racist barrage toward me and my family (even my grandmother).

I was so frustrated that I began shaking while we were watching the show and had to exit in the middle of it to calm down. My girlfriend and I went to the receptionist at the front desk to explain how we were incredibly frustrated and asked if there was anything to be done yet simply received condescending remarks in return about how ‘we should simply laugh it off.’ After talking with her for a bit, we were told we’d get a call the next day by the ticketing agency, “tix4tonight” which never ended up coming.

What started out as a night of a lot of great energy turned into an ugly demonstration of white supremacy. I ask folks out there to think twice about the things that they say/do and avoid this kind of destructive marginalization.