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). This colorist portrayal negatively contrasts "colored" Asian Americans with the European population of North America in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. East Asians are also stereotyped (or orientalized) as having straight dark (or shiny "blue") hair usually styled in a "bowl cut" (boys) or with straight overgrown bangs (girls). They are often homogenized as one indiscriminate monolithic conglomeration of cultures, languages, histories, and physiological and behavioral characteristics. Almost invariably it is assumed that a person of Asian descent has genetic origins in East Asian countries such as China, Japan, Korea or Taiwan.