Should they have walked off?

When I was a kid watching old movies with my parents, we'd see Chinese store signs written with slash-style calligraphy that was not Chinese, just bogus characters swinging on shingles in a movie set. Chinese dialogue was usually a series of frantic percussive sounds ("Wok tok dong!"), or hifalutin English without contractions ("Thank you, kind sir, my father will not be having tea").

It's not that a phrase like "Long Duck Dong" isn't funny, but that its staying power in our culture perpetuates foolish ideas. For decades Asian men were portrayed as Machiavellian evil-doers or over-eager buffoons until replaced by Millennial stereotypes like the bumbling hipster and malcontent sub-genius ("Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle," or Bruce in "Get Smart").

Hollywood has usually strived for an appearance of assumed authenticity while seldom banking on its reality. Think about WWII movies where Nazis speak in bullying, guttural German while their Jewish victims talk in a Britishy sort of accent, even though both parties are probably German nationals. (And most Southerners know that a Hollywood Southern accent just stinks). Think about historical dramas and biopics where  two people were made into a single character, or pivotal moments were erased, all for the sake of advancing the plot. It's Hollywood. It's movies and TV. It's utter fantasy.

The problem is, some of us come to accept it as reality.

Our presumptions of correctness
When those Native American extras walked off Adam Sandler's latest movie set, for every American who supported the move, there was likely also one who thought, "Oh for Pete's sake, it's a comedy, lighten up and get over it. Now we've all got to watch what we say!"

But here's why it's a disservice to our country to just "get over it": TV shows and movies have a powerful influence on us, if only because we grant them more power than the books and articles we read (or don't read), the ideas we uphold, or the probing we don't do to learn about other cultures. Our kids watch too, and we may not express skepticism ("Remember it's just a movie") so we won't ruin the fun and fantasy. Movie catchphrases linger ("Make my day!") and movie "realities" often become the culturally entrenched single narrative we glom onto as "factual evidence" about how others groups and ethnicities exist in the world, never mind that they're only partial realities or flat-out errors.

And yes, we do have to watch what we say, because if we're going to confine our cross-cultural learning to sources like TV and movies, celebrity magazines, and anecdotal evidence versus firsthand experience, then there's a higher risk of offending a customer or even causing someone devastating injury (such as when suspicious Alabama police tackled that grandfather visiting from India, and put him into the hospital).

Thanks to 9/11, some of us continue to make erroneous judgments based in fear, not information, believing that most law-abiding Muslims are active jihadists while ignoring the "boondock jihadists" within our own heartland, in the form of neo-Nazi and white supremacy paramilitias.

To believe other cultures should just "get over it" is a denial of American values.

Should those native American extras have walked off? Absolutely. Comedy notwithstanding, by doing so they said, "My heritage means a lot more than what you're paying me each day to bear witness to this crap."

In my encounters with people of other cultures, I've learned there is always an exception to the single-narrative belief we might hold of that person's group or heritage. The best way to learn? Take that other person as an individual, and ask questions with care and civility. The payoff is that you might be taken as an individual as well, in a position to dispel any mistaken notions they might have of Americans.