It looks like Arizona Republicans are hard up for some Asian friends. In a spectacularly awful attempt to illustrate its diversity and support for Asian Americans, the Arizona Republican Party's official website prominently displayed a photo of a smiling Asian American family. Here's the problem: the family is fake. In fact, it's a cast photo of the fictional Kim family from Margaret Cho's short-lived 1994 sitcom All-American Girl.
Arizona GOP uses Margaret Cho sitcom pic to represent Asian Americans
For you young ones out there, decades before Fresh Off The Boat, ABC aired the very first sitcom featuring a Korean American family, starring rising standup comedian Margaret Cho. It made some waves, but for the most part it was not well received and was promptly canceled after a season. You heard it mentioned a lot in the hoopla as a predecessor to Fresh Off The Boat when that show hit the air a couple of years ago.
But it's pretty apparent that the show didn't have any fans among the Arizona GOP. Or they would have found a nonfictional or at least less recognizable Asian family to use as their token minorities.
The photo of the Kim clan -- J.B. Quon, Amy Hill, B.D. Wong, Jodi Long, Clyde Kusatsu and Margaret Cho -- was prominently featured on the website with the caption "Asian Americans," on a page declaring that the GOP will never "demand special rights for certain races, push policies that favor members of one group over another, or single out certain ethnic or social groups with the promise of special favors or political privileges."
Before you make any promises, maybe do a better job of at least pretending you give a shit about Asians. Because it says it a lot when your only reference point for Asian Americans is a TV show from over 20 years ago. Actually, it says that you have no reference point for Asian Americans when you have no idea that you've posted a photo of a TV show from over 20 years ago.
The gaffe was first brought to everyone's attention by Vice News. The image has since been removed.
"As soon as this was brought to our attention, the page was taken down," Torunn Sinclair, spokeswoman for the Arizona Republican Party, told VICE News. "This was obviously a mistake, and we apologize."
Cho, who is clearly no friend of the GOP, addressed the mistake with a funny story from childhood.
"I find this similar to when I was a kid someone told me that [Duran Duran frontman] Simon Le Bon's name was 'Mike Hunt' and so I went around school saying, 'I love Mike Hunt,' and even wrote it on my locker," Cho said in a statement to Entertainment Weekly. "I didn't bother to research and paid the price of a dodgeball to the face. They got some bad information and ran with it. They deserve a dodgeball to the face."
"WTF? That was 24 years ago... indicating how far behind the GOP is!" tweeted Jodi Long, who played Mrs. Kim on All-American Girl. "Actually they have yet to come out of the dark ages."
Hey, they could have used a photo from Fresh Off The Boat.
More here: Margaret Cho responds to Arizona GOP photo faux pas.
