Got Rice? - T-shirt Campaign

T-shirt Campaign

While the phrase itself presumably began as Asian American slang, the first notable usage is the t-shirt campaign first started by the Asian American magazine Yolk.

Soon, other Asian American organizations began promoting the phrase and selling similar t-shirt designs. The organizations and their proponents intended for the t-shirts to be a fun way of promoting Asian American cultural heritage:

"Political identi-tees don’t all have to be so in-your-face. The Japanese American National Museum (http://www.janm.org/) in L.A.’s Little Tokyo offers an array of kinder, gentler tees commemorating aspects of Japanese-American heritage both fun and serious. Among the most popular designs, a line of adult and baby tees feature the rallying cry of the lactose liberation movement, "Got Rice?"

Many in the Asian American community viewed the design as evidence of significant progress for the viability of Asian American culture and identity; whereas before identity may have been enforced on Asians via stereotypes from the dominant society, the "Got Rice?" shirts were an attempt by Asian Americans to define their identity and to take back those symbols used to stereotype them.

"For early Asian Americanists it was important that a distinction between Asians and Asian Americans was made; the U.S. borders were thus highly relevant in order to define Asian American identity. The t-shirts now sold by an Asian American magazine sporting the slogan "Got rice?" would not have sold well then. This t-shirt slogan is an allusion to the "Got Milk" ad campaign in which famous people tell you why you should drink milk, but in which items that are more or less inseparable from milk, such as a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich or a chocolate-chip cookie are also included. People would have tried to avoid fulfilling stereotypes at all costs, even in jokes. Nowadays there are multiple ways to read and deal with stereotyping and even to play with it.