Ride Along 2 hollywood racism

Overview:

Ride Along 2 is comedy about two cops who bring down a drug dealer, but here at Kulture we’re more interested in how the film works to bring down Asian identity to unproductive decades-old racist stereotypes.

Characters:

Character Name	Actor	Image
AJ	Ken Jeong
Pope	Benjamin Bratt
Maya	Olivia Munn

Scene #1:

The dialog goes like this…

AJ: “Lookin good”

Pope: “We call those ladies. Of course, you wouldn’t know that because you’ve never been with one before.”

AJ: mutters some street slang

Pope: “Stop talking . Just get me a secure line. Stop speaking to me as if I care.”

Analysis:

There is no stronger scene of emasculation than this in the film. Pope, who was just seen charming women left and right, enters a room and immediately insinuates that AJ is a virgin, who actually does pay for webcam girls to fulfill his weird cat costume fetish, and tells him AJ to shut his mouth and do his computer job because he doesn’t care what he has to say.

Note, he does get a kiss on the lips from the hostess and socializes well with club girls for some unknown reason, but it doesn’t detract from the reality that he’s a joke character to be ridiculed.

Scene #2:

Analysis:

Here’s another Asian character and he’s again, a computer geek. We’re two for two for hollywood styled “diversity”.

Scene #3:

Analysis:

This is the obligatory Afwm romance scene with the villain no less.

Scene #4:

This is more of a compare and contrast of the Asian male (Ken Jeong) versus Af (Olivia Munn, a hapa Asian female).

Analysis:

The pictures illustrate the highly gendered portrayals: a castrated Asian male contrasted against an attractive, competent, and assertive Asian female.

The attractive and competent Asian female is so assertive that the department head supplicates to her. In contrast, the unattractive man-child squealing coward gets manhandled by almost everyone. In real life, Asian male are discriminated against in the work place due to these negative stereotypes. Unaware Asians learn to internalize these ugly portrayals into self-hate

Conclusion:

Gendered portrayals divide the Asian community along gender lines through sexual “privilege” for the Asian female (which comes with lots of dangers) and emasculation for the Asian male.