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A Slanted Perspective
Understanding the drive to fight for free speech A ‘Slanted’ Perspective
Aboy sits on the couch. The movie playing on the TV is Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill.” As the boy watches, a scene starts up. It’s the moment when O-Ren Ishii, leader of a Tokyo crime organization, enters a restaurant. She’s dressed in all white contrasting the black ensembles that her clan wears as they follow behind her. All of the actors are Asian or Asian American. It is the first time the boy has ever seen Asians portrayed as cool, sexy and confident.
28 | fall 2019 That boy was Simon Tam, founder of The Slants, an all Asian American dance-rock band, and the winning party in Matal v. Tam, a First Amendment Supreme Court case that resulted in a provision of the Lanham
Act being ruled unconstitutional. This provision prevented the registration of any trademarks that were seen as disparaging toward an individual or group. In this particular case, it had been used to prevent The Slants from registering a trademark for their name due to the racist connotation with the word “slants.”
Tam’s band chose the name The Slants as a way to reclaim the term — to take the word back from those that used it in a derogatory manner. He was not the only one with that idea though. The Asian community had already been reclaiming the word “slants” on its own for decades, Tam said. activists that came before him.
For example, Melissa Hung, the founding editor of Hyphen, an Asian American culture magazine, established the Slant Film Festival in 2001 to showcase the world of emerging Asian American artists. There are also the directors and production teams behind “The Slanted Screen,” Slant TV and Slant Magazine.
Every racial slur against Asian Americans was already a registered trademark, according to Tam. But whenever Asian Americans would apply for these trademarks themselves, they were denied.
whereas people who weren’t Asian were given the benefit of the doubt.” Tam said. “For me, it was about the principle of those kinds of things.”
The law was removing the victims from the process, Tam said.
“It allowed the government to be the arbiter of speech,” Tam said. “For me that is the ultimate problem.”
If our desire is to reduce the use of hate speech or racial slurs in our culture, trademark registrations are not the way to do it, Tam said.
The idea for The Slants blossomed from the extreme lack of Asian representation in mainstream entertainment. No movie Tam had watched ever displayed genuine representation with depth. There was even less representation in the music industry, the art he lived and breathed since he was a child.
“There’s this Chinese proverb that the nail that sticks out gets hammered in,” Tam said.
Tam was not raised in an environment where he was encouraged to speak out. He grew up with, what he called, “typical Asian parents” and was taught it was better to not cause trouble. He was told to accept things as they were.
He was taught that it was better to silently protest things that he disagreed with.
“You don’t want to get into more trouble and create more trouble for yourself,” Tam said. “To be clear, I wasn’t rebelling against my parents,” Tam said.
He wasn’t the type to sneak out of the house to hang out with friends or do drugs. He was the kid that helped his parents with computers and went to church with them on the weekends.
“I rebelled against systems, like things that I thought were unjust. That’s what I thought was worth speaking up against,” Tam said. “Witnessing unjust things occur is probably the most disturbing thing.”
He would ask himself questions like, “What can I do to change that? What can I do to address these things that are evil and don’t belong in this world? How can I lessen the suffering of other people?”
“I’m driven by this idea of compassion,” Tam said. “Activism is certainly a natural vehicle for that, and in a lot of ways, I think art and music are also right in line with that.”
Tam engaged in forms of activism prior to the Matal v. Tam case, but he never considered himself to be an activist. To him, all the things he did were simple acts of compassion.
The activist label came later as he found himself increasingly involved with the Asian American community.
“Instead of just thinking, ‘Hey, here’s someone who’s hungry’ and giving them food, it was more like asking, ‘What causes hunger? What causes racism?’” Tam said. or use hurtful language because the reality is that they will get away with it anyway,” Tam said. “A more just version of things is to think about who are the people with the least options or the least resources in our society. How can we empower them, so that they have more options? So they’re on a level playing field?”
We don’t actually need the government to protect us against people who do hateful things, we need the government to actually have equality, Tam argued. Everyone having the same starting point is much closer to the idea of justice than simply trying to remove discomfort or trying to block other people.
Tam says that people who only mute, block or unfriend people on social media do not actually change the hearts and minds of those who are being racist.
“If we want to change the systems and the root causes of issues like racism, we actually have to engage with people,” Tam said.
In order to overcome the prejudice people have and shift people’s thinking, we need an open dialogue, Tam said. Matal v. Tam was a great win for freedom of speech, but it represents only one of many of the necessary steps needed for a more equal and just society.
He wanted to get to the root of these issues and find solutions for the community. Even though Tam disagreed with the law that was preventing him from registering The Slants as a trademark, he doesn’t think of laws in black and white. He actually warns against doing so.
But Tam was a punk rock lover, and he believed in rebelling against the system. “Rather than thinking if a law is good or bad, think about it in terms of justice. Justice is more than just punishing people who abuse our laws
