Last night I was watching a short part of Fox News and they were discussing a recent lawsuit that has been filed. The lawsuit is against Hannah Montana star Miley Cyrus over a photograph that was taken of the actor pulling the corners of her eyes back to appear Asian. The lawsuit has been filed by Lucie J. Kim and is for approximately four billion dollars. Kim claims that she represents one million Asian Pacific Islanders living in Los Angeles County with a claim of four thousand each (the minimum that you can claim in a civil rights case). Kim says that this image mocked Asian people and felt that the actor should have known that her actions would become public display.
I am totally against a lawsuit of this nature. Kim has taken the law to the extreme and should be denied before this could ever go to a place where it wasted tax payer's money. How can anyone say that they represent an entire ethnic group without first contacting each one and asking if the image offended them? I know that I was upset at both the Dallas Cowboys and the Atlanta Braves when they both claimed that they were "America's Team." No one asked me if they were my team and I would have said that they weren't if I had been asked. How can any one person claim to speak for an entire group especially when it makes the group look petty and small-minded?
Can the court blame any person for their actions in a picture where everyone in the picture (including several of Asian descent) was obviously not offended? The courts and the Constitution say that we have a freedom of expression except when those actions directly incite people to a violent action. The people were obviously enjoying themselves as evident from the photo, no violence happened and there was absolutely no Hate mongering in the actor's activity.
As long as we are so close-minded as to blame the actions of a sixteen year old girl for her actions in a photo and scream that it is demeaning and should have billion dollar consequences, we will never become a color-blinded society. As long as we make such a public display of political correctness taken to the extreme, we will never be able to move past the mistakes of a generation that has past. Unless we forget the past and move toward the future, we will stagnate.