Racial Slur Database Analysis

The Racial Slur Database associates banana with the phrase, “Yellow on the Outside, white on the inside” (Racial Slur site). This internet slur is used to represents Asians who have lost their heritage by assimilating to other cultures( Racial Slur). Being Asian with Chinese descent myself, I feel my banana story is heavily influenced by the consequences of globalization. This social phenomenal refers to the “expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-time and world space” (Steger 15). Such an inevitable natural force has slowly integrated me as a banana in the global world through the diffusion of language, technology, and consumption of food. The global me is a product and catalyst of globalization.

In particular, the internet plays a pivotal role in expanding the global connectedness among billions of individuals through a World Wide Web (Steger 17). This innovation have allow me to connect myself with people through the compression of “world time and world space” (Steger 17). One example of myself quickly connecting to the world is my facebook profile, which allows me to been seen by people globally with internet access 24/7. In fact in a Forbes article from 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, stated “for the first time ever, one billion people used Facebook in a single day” (Worstall 1). This demonstrate how globally connected I can be to almost 1/7 of human population. Moreover, I am shared with my friend’s experiences through pictures or status updates on my daily news feedback. Even more conveniently, facebook allows me to send message to my friends or strangers through the internet space. The internet has given the power to facebook to integrate myself in a space with billion of

All of which seems to fit Steger’s idea of “a expansion of core self through creations of multiple individuals and collective identities nurtured by the intensifying relations between the personal and global (15) .Even though I am still able to express Chinese culture, globalization of Western culture has seem to continue peel skins of my banana to a point that I might actually turn culturally white. This is the consequence of assimilating to American culture for the last 14 years. My banana lifestyle is constantly changing with globalization of technology, culture, and ideology. The rapid spread of idea through the internet has social consequences on the way I form my cultural identity. I no longer have the authentic roots of my nation state because that culture has been deterritorialized and reterriortized in a new global imaginary space. In an undeniable sense, my identity is a product and catalyst of globalization. So if I am ask how am I global, I would simply say rooted from China and planted as a new seed in America is how my cultural identity can be simply sum up. Empirically speaking, the banana story is surely a self fulling prophecy that is becoming a common theme in many Asian’s lifes. It is important to realize globalization of language, technology, and culture have a profound impact on the individual’s construction of identities and life