 Darrell Y. Hamamoto, a professor of Asian American studies at UC Irvine argues that a pervasive racialized discourse exists throughout American society, especially as it is reproduced by network television and cinema.Critics argue that portrayals of East Asians in American media fixating on the epicanthic fold of the eyelid have the negative effect of caricature, whether describing the Asiatic eye positively as "almond-shaped" or negatively as "slanted" or "slanty".Even worse, these critics contend, is the common portrayal of the East Asian population as having yellow skin tones (which the critics reference as colorism).