In the book Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship, Lori Kido Lopez offers a fresh perspective and understanding of what media activism portrays ad entails. Lori places her research in modern perspective looking at different forms of media, including the underexplored fields of policy, advertising, and highly popularized social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter. Lopez argues although media activism has apparent goals "to recast a role, to demand an apology from producers, to hire an Asian American consultant or director, to produce more images of Asian Americans”, the critical part that is not brought forth is the connection between these achievements and the ultimate goal of cultural citizenship for Asian Americans. She defines cultural citizenship as
Lori Lopez begins her book by referring to two specific shows The Mindy Project and Fresh Off the Boat, and she introduces one of the biggest dilemmas throughout her book. The idea in
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She brings forth the acknowledgement that although there has been critiques to the way Asian Americans have been portrayed and excluded from media outlets, there is a lack of recognition in their efforts to actively seek change. Throughout history there has been a wave of activism in order to protest offensive imagery, and lack of Asian American actors and industry workers. In collectively looking at these issues she defines a clear connection between media representations and the historical social issues of citizenship, and what she defines as cultural citizenship. She believes this can only be achieved through collective efforts.
She notes the history of Asian American organizations, from the early 1970’s, such as the Oriental Actors of America, Brotherhood of Artists, and the Asian/Pacific American Artists amongst a few which have came forth to express the discontent and inequalities in