And chanta76, "gender divide" racism is actually quite unusual. It doesn't happen unless there's been a violent conflict in which war brides were involved. People usually point the finger at Hollywood, but what Hollywood does is cater to popular demand, whether conscious or or subconscious (that's what people who work in the LA film industry told me). In the mid-1900's and afterwards, Hollywood would have been catering to veterans of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War.
Before World War II, there was none of this "gender divide" racism. Asian women were actually negatively stereotyped as "Dragon Ladies" who were deceitful, aggressive, predatory, and domineering (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Lady ). Plus, Asian immigrants to the New World before the mid-1900's were by far male, so people would have had no idea what Asian women were like. Racial miscegenation between whites and non-whites in the U.S. was also illegal before World War II, so white people would have gotten into serious trouble if they had wanted to be in a relationship with an Asian.
All that would have changed when the U.S. and its Anglo allies fought a series of wars in Asia.
Now that the U.S. is involved in conflicts in the Middle East, Middle Easterners are being very negatively stereotyped as well - in my opinion, worse than East Asians. There's no gender divide racism, since there have been very few war brides due to the prevailing Islamic culture in the Middle East.
