Two Things Named Slanted, One Word With a Long History

I haven't seen the film Slanted.

I want to say that upfront, because I have opinions about it anyway (and because that fact is itself part of what the film is doing). You don't need to see a movie about a Chinese-American teenager who undergoes surgery to become white to have feelings about it. A lot of people don't. The discourse around the film started well before wide release, and it followed a pattern anyone paying attention to conversations about race and culture will recognize: some said it went too far, some said it didn't go far enough, and critics, including for the LA Times (who couldn't resist the headline "something's not quite white") reached instinctively for the wordplay the title invites.

When a word has enough cultural weight, people can't help but reach for it, even when they're reviewing something that exists to challenge why the word has that weight in the first place.

What I can speak to is the word.

Slanted has been doing work in Asian American communities for a while now. Before the film, before my memoir of the same name, before The Slants were a band, the word was showing up in places that were quietly building something: The Slanted Screen (the 2006 documentary about Asian American men in Hollywood). The Slant Film Festival. The Slanted Kings of Comedy Tour. Slant Performance Group. These weren't coordinated efforts, most of this was being built in a pre-social media world. But the same word kept appearing as a flag planted in the same territory: We know how sometimes this otherwise mundane word can be used against us, and we're taking it back.

That pattern goes back further, and it isn't unique to one word. Frank Wu's book Yellow, the legendary ska band the Chinkees, a long list of artists and writers who decided that the most powerful thing they could do with a derogatory frame was step inside it and rearrange it entirely. The specific methods differ: Some are building community and solidarity, some are trying to name a structure of power plainly enough that people can finally see it. Some are using humor, irony, and satire. It’s what what civic educator Eric Liu once put simply in an NPR interview: "Wit neuters hate." And, some are doing all of this at once while not being especially worried about whether the execution is clean.

That variety is the point, not a problem. Racism isn't one thing with one solution. Like any persistent condition, it has treatments that provide immediate relief, treatments that work on a longer timeline, and treatments that try to address the root rather than the symptoms. The assumption that there is one correct method (or one acceptable level of provocation) has always been more about the comfort of observers than the needs of people actually navigating these systems. Those who end up focusing entirely on the word end up missing the point. Racist slurs wouldn't exist if not for the existence of racist systems. By protecting the status quo through fear of new, creative interpretations of language, we end up perpetuating their venomous power.

The research bears this out. Adam Galinsky and colleagues at Columbia documented something that people engaged in this work have long understood: when members of a stigmatized group self-label with a derogatory term, they feel more powerful afterward, and observers perceive both them and their group as more powerful. The labels themselves are evaluated less negatively. Reappropriation doesn't just change how a word feels; it also shifts the underlying power relationship. A Washington University study published in Political Psychology used The Slants' trademark case specifically as a testing ground for these dynamics, finding that when people understand the motive behind reappropriation, they judge the same words as less insulting. In other words, context and intent aren't just rhetorical cover: they actually change what a word does in its cultural context.

The split reception to Slanted the film is a useful illustration of this.

Critics called it a daring body horror parable with pointed racial commentary, while finding the script occasionally unfocused. Some thought it went too far; others wished it had gone further. The SXSW jury, which gave it the Narrative Feature Grand Jury Prize, described it as "specific to the fractured identity of Asian Americans and universally relatable in its theme of desperately needing to belong." Variety found it very funny but too safe. Hollywood Reporter said it stays too close to the surface.

What's striking is how predictable those fault lines are. Work that uses the tools of popular genre (horror, comedy, satire) to examine structural power tends to get this response: the people who needed it to be braver are often those for whom the status quo is bearable; the people who found it too blunt are often those who wanted the same argument made more gently, in a form that didn't make anyone uncomfortable.

Public Enemy opens their iconic anthem "Fight the Power" with a line about the best-trained, best-equipped people refusing to fight (choosing to switch rather than confront). The premise of Slanted was probably never going to pierce mainstream audiences. But maybe it wasn't for them anyway. The work that changes things for the people most affected by a problem rarely gets there by prioritizing the feelings of people least affected by it.

The arts have always done two things simultaneously: they hold up a mirror to where we are, and they open a window onto possible worlds we haven't built yet. The difficulty is that looking at the same mirror from different angles produces different images, angles are shaped by the very institutions and frameworks the work is trying to challenge. People who derive power and resources from existing systems, even people who genuinely want conditions to improve, often find themselves able to support change only up to the point where it doesn't require rethinking the systems they depend on. It's a very human thing to believe that gradual adjustment of existing levers is the realistic path, because imagining an entirely different system requires imagining yourself in a different relationship to power — and most of us are far more fluent in the world we grew up in than in the world we'd have to build.

Reappropriation lives in that tension. It's not just reclaiming a word. It's insisting on the right to define the terms of your own existence in a system that has historically reserved that right for others. Sometimes it's elegant. Often it's not. The lead character in Slanted is described as inelegant, flawed, making choices that are embarrassing and extreme — because that's what it looks like to shake yourself (and the people around you) into a genuinely different frame of reference. Discomfort is sometimes a sign that the medicine is working exactly as intended.

The story behind The Slants is as simple and as complex as all of the others who chose to undergo the process of reappropriation: something needed to change.

There's something worth noting in the fact that the same word has anchored so many different projects, in so many different registers, over the past two decades: a documentary, a band, a horror film, a memoir, etc. All are doing the work of insisting that the people a slur was designed to diminish are the ones who get to decide what it means now.

That work is never finished. But it accumulates. Each project adds something to what the word can carry, and makes it a little harder for the original harm to go unexamined.

The film isn't the culmination of that lineage. Neither was the court case, or the memoir, or anything else. It's just the latest entry — inelegant in some places, necessary in others, certain to make some people uncomfortable, and not particularly obligated to apologize for any of that.

If you want to go deeper on the research side of this, the Washington University study and the Galinsky work are good starting points. The legal dimension — what happens when the government tries to adjudicate which reappropriations are legitimate — is what Matal v. Tam was actually about.