Week 1 -- Sunday Comic Strip | "Hollywood's Choice" by Analí Cine, Diane Lee, and Melanie Manuel

"Hollywood's Choice" by Analí Cine, Diane Lee, and Melanie Manuel

The piece was created by first establishing a scenario involving a mixed raced individual. We then made a storyboard on paper, transferred it onto a computer, used digital media to create a rough draft and then a final draft. Some of the special tools we used were a drawing tablet and Adobe Photoshop. During our brainstorming in class, we discussed Cynthia Nakashima's "An Invisible Monster: The Creation and Denial of Mix-Race People in America," where Nakashima mentions that mixed race women are sexualized as well as how being mixed race implies attractiveness. While this is not necessarily true, there is a problem in Hollywood that values such traits of "mixedness" to set others apart from one another; in this instance, it gets someone a part despite their not being deserving of it skill-wise, but simply due to their appearance. We decided to comment on this issue within Hollywood, because even in this "progressive" era, Hollywood is still very much entrenched in eurocentric ideals and values of beauty. It is important to critique such things, because there are reasons why this is happening, and it begs the question of whether we may see change - of course, there are still pockets of change like "Crazy, Rich Asians," "To All the Boys I've Loved Before," and even "The Sun Is Also a Star." The latter of which includes two mixed race leads. We hope that this sparks more conversations about mixed race roles in Hollywood, and the potentiality of more inclusion as well as a decrease in their sexualization.
Being an artist, for us, means that we get to convey our messages through art. It means that we can express how we feel or think in a way that is different than just using words. As artists, we are community advocates, we are courageous creators who want to promote awareness and equality. Our core belief in creating art is to start conversations about issues that multiracial folks experience as well as monoracial folks, because we believe it is important to understand where ideologies like colorism, internalized racism, and others such topics we have discussed come from. And although we are educating, we also seek to learn as well.