Saying “This isn’t racist because it is based off of a similar meme that originated in China” has big “I can’t be racist when I say the N-word because I have a black friend.” energy.
No, it’s worse than that. It’s “I can say the n-word because Black people say the n-word.”
It’s less that and more “ohh, it’s fine when they say it, but when I say it, it’s racist” which isn’t reasonable in the first place for the n-word, but doubly so in this case since we know there’s a lot of racism going around in the HK independence “movement.”
Daily reminder HKs minimum wage is 1 dollar for servants and 5 dollars per hour for workers, they have the highest rent in the entire world yet some of the worst living conditions and historically have only had 49% of there parliment able to be elected, the other 51% is 8 western buisnessmen.
HK separtists advocate for the above because they are the lucky enough ones to be above the slave class and they want this relationship to continue, and for things to remain the same rather than for things to get better via intergation with china, which would give the HK working and underclass access to cheap housing via mainland China, who have 90% house ownership rate vs HKs like 17%.
Source;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_domestic_helpers_in_Hong_Kong
Does that mean the entire Parliament in HK is just 15 people?
Nah, they basically split there highest democratic chamber into two, with one half being elected and the other half appointed unelected people to represent UK buisness interests, they have a majority over the elected half.
Also to clarify the small minority of the other half have more voting power than all of the other elected members, to effectively give them a majority.
HK has essentially been a autocratic imprealist state serving the bougie of HK and UK interests since it changed hands to the UK.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_development_in_Hong_Kong#Under_British_rule
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Council_of_Hong_Kong
As you can see here, they ‘permitted’ HK residents to elect half of the people in the chamber, with them (the UK) retaining control of the other half (while still retaining the deciding vote) and that China actually offers them full democracy, unconditionally.
The founding members of what is reffered too in HK as ‘ExCo’ (with the other chamber usually its ‘LegCo’)
It’s got “Trump’s mugshot will inspire POC to vote for him b/c they like criminals” energy.
I challenged this notion with a lib the other day.
The watermelon originated in Africa. That doesn’t mean that the vile caricaturised depictions of black people eating watermelons is somehow not inherently racist.
You can also look to the origin and continuing usage of the swastika, especially in Asian cultures, as another example here - you aren’t going to tell me that the right-angled unicode swastika being used by westerners on the internet isn’t done in service of fascism 99% of the time.
And on that matter, don’t let erm-ackshually dorks tell you that the 90 degree swastika wasn’t used by Nazis and isn’t representative of them. One of the most famous depictions of the Nazi swastika is a right angled one:
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1214749781387436032/pu/vid/450x360/o0Nxlts0lffM8lUv.mp4
“The watermelon originated in Africa. That doesn’t mean that the vile caricaturised depictions of black people eating watermelons is somehow not inherently racist.”
That’s not what is happening here tho. You can’t claim that every cartoon where a black person interacted with a watermelon is racist.
Just like here you can’t claim it just cuz the character is yellow it is racist.
Pooh is used cuz dude looks like Pooh… Not cuz he’s yellow. The fact that Pooh is yellow too doesn’t suddenly make it racist.
The libs downvoting this post en masse 🤣🤣🤣🤣
I’m on hexbear so I can’t see the downvotes lmao 🤣
I just see the overall score
It’s got 97 up and 50 down rn
This is why disabling downvotes is good. Make those cowards show themselves.
Racists who know enough not to talk openly shouldn’t be able to passively influence discussion either.
I was somewhat against removing downvotes when we initially did that, but wow was I wrong. Terrible reddit-tier feature that needs to be trashed.
Don’t worry! Downvotes are only for flagging content that doesn’t belong here. It will never be used as an “I disagree” button.
This is also why we at Reddit don’t have a report button, because the free marketplace of ideas will naturally sort out posts and comments that are appropriate. Wait, I’m receiving a new update, you DO HAVE A BUTTON TO REPO—
Honestly I’ve begun coming around to the idea specifically bc cracker liberals downvoting like punkasses instead of standing on their square and speaking what they believe with the whole chest
One of the places Lemmygrad should take a leaf from y’all’s book
-burguer liberals using a dumb, fat foodie as an insult
-they don’t see the irony
pottery
for background info, the chinese government does not ban the actual associate of winnie pooh to xin unless it is used to promote racism contrary to the claim by the red fascist tankiejerkers, liberal sloganists, and the NATO-backed hong kong rioters by young students who never know about the period before the return of hong kong to chinese rule. The liberal sloganists justify the racist act on the claim that it is directed towards an oppressive dictator, but they cannot explain why they attack a ‘tyrant’ for their chinese ethnicity and appearance instead of their morality. For more suspicions, the winnie pooh association of Xi Ping in chinese hate crime propaganda are from people who contradict their hong kong independence slogan with return to british colonial rule and who believe that british immigrants are the only true ‘hong kongers’.
It’s the same as those homophobic memes of Putin in makeup or kissing Trump, “bigotry is fine if it’s used against someone I don’t like”
Exactly. Sometimes people will defend it with some supposed high-minded origin, like “it’s not saying being gay is wrong, it’s using trump’s homophobia and insecurity against him and turning it into a vulnerability that we’re using to trigger him”. And maybe some of the people repeating it actually believe that, but the images don’t come with a paragraph explaining the nuance. They’re just supposed to be an easy shot at trump, you’re supposed to laugh and keep scrolling. Most people liking or sharing them aren’t thinking about it any more than “haha, he’s owned cause he’s gay”.
You can spend all day convincing yourself that your specific way of thinking about it isn’t racist/homophobic, but when you share this shit online all that stuff stays in your head, and you’re just spreading bigotry.
These colonial worshipping kids have been kneeling so long that they’ve forgotten how to stand.
Their beloved ‘prime minister’ Churchill has quotes that wouldn’t feel out of place in Hitler’s collection:
“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion”
[the Pashuns] needs to “recognise the superiority of race”
“I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them — but I suppose it does no great harm to have a look at them.”
We shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them… as civilised nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.
The last one still rings true with the “just the government not the people” libs nowadays.
The last one is utterly jaw-dropping, not necessarily because I’m surprised Churchill said it, but how this sentiment has hardly suffered a dent in the contemporary “western” zeitgeist.
Replace a few words, trade “Aryan” for “European”, “civilized” for “developed”, and “barbaric” for “authoritarian”… boom, you’ve got a chart-topping WaPo OpEd.
it’s also pure 100% undiluted projection.
nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations
the west is the one that’s done all that and keeps doing it.
All i could think of reading that section was
“Yeah guys I’m totally not racist, I just think those dirty yellow ching-chongs are ugly and inferior to our superior white race and we should nuke all those subhumans to make way for more lebensraum for the white race !1!!1111!!1!111”
Anti-Asian Racism
A liberal once made an anti-CPC song with the lyrics “They say ching chang chong and oppress Hong Kong”
The image that was part of one of the communities in the shit just works Lemmy is just a straight up racial caricature and somehow people still defended it…
…didn’t this meme start in China? Pretty crucial context here lol.
It did, as a light-hearted joke comparing Xi and Obama walking side by side with a resembling image of Tiger and Pooh. Of course, westerners then proceeded to take it and turn it into their own distortion and elaborate some story about how China is banning Winnie the Pooh and that is why painting a chinese man yellow with photoshop is a sign of resistance against a government on the other side of the globe and totally not racist.
It resembles a lot the same thing that happened with that image that floated the internet around a few years ago of Putin photoshoped as a stereotypically and comically flamboyant homosexual man, which is totally not homophobic even if the punchline is “he’s gay” because you can always make it up that the image is banned somewhere and thus is a sign of resistance and contains no reactionary sentiment behind.
I wouldn’t really called the original “light hearted” since Obama was compared to character named literally “Tigger”.
I’m not really convinced that they would be making a reference like that that only works in English (and is a bit of stretch even then imo).
Well, as JucheBot noticed le average redditor instantly connected the dots so i would say it’s purposeful by and for those kind of people. For all we know it might be made by some shit like Serpentza or some local colonized lib. Their numerous presence is confirmed even in China. Also i don’t think i like the suggestion that Chinese don’t know english.
Le average redditor is probably a native English speaker
Also i don’t think i like the suggestion that Chinese don’t know english.
“Knowing English” and “making subtle references that only work if everyone thinks of a cartoon character’s English name” are very different things. I assume that most people seeing Tigger will think of whatever his name is in their native language, regardless of how many languages they speak. You generally don’t cycle through different words in every language you know every time you see an image looking to find a pun.
It’s possible but it’s a really big stretch. It’s definitely not the main thing to be criticizing when people are painting an Asian person’s skin yellow.
I didn’t catch that (in my language he’s just called the name of the animal, translated). I am unsure if that was intentional or not, however.
Given that it was written by a British gentlemen in the past there is probably a bunch of rascism unintentionally at least.
Tigger
I remember that meme showing up on r/blursedimages, and Le Aberage Redditors were absolutely making the connection.
Yea that one is pretty easy to connect the dots, I think it’s safe to say people from China, the most populous country on Earth, can be racist, just as any individual from any other country can be.
Yeah, there’s a huge network of far-right media run by/targeting Chinese diaspora, some of which filters back into mainland China. It’s how BLM got roughly translated into “black people are expensive” in chinese media.
But whether chinese people made that connection or not is irrelevent, this isn’t about chinese people on wechat, it’s about westerners on reddit who absolutely did make that connection.
It’s strange that this concern for context only ever goes in one direction. Symbolism, like words, develop meaning through their usage.
If I were to say that I ejaculated during intercourse with your wife last night, would you take that to be an insult or would you be dying on that same context hill that the verb to ejaculate used to refer to suddenly making a statement and that intercourse used to refer to having a discussion with someone?
Probably not.
Would you say that the swastika isn’t a Nazi symbol because it originated in Indo-European religious and cultural symbology?
Maybe. I can’t speak for you.
The origin of something doesn’t determine its usage.
Are you using it in the original contex? No. So then it doesn’t
I don’t use it at all, but I don’t particularly like the implication that it’s definitely racist in all contexts. It just feels reductive.
No, it is simply rascist in the context we are going to be using it. If we were posting on doyen in mandarin it woudl be diffrent. This is some reddit runoff we are filtering.
Mfs when they’re not allowed to be racist any more
Yeah and that meme had Obama as “tigger”. Wonder why…
The meme starting in China doesn’t mean much. Pretty sure Chinese people can make racist memes too.
I’m pretty sure the original context was like “Hey this picture of two presidents walking kinda reminds me of this children’s book. That’s cool.”
And the current context is “Xi Jinping is a dirty [slur slur slur] and he’s yellow”
Huh, never even thought about him being yellow, I always thought the joke was he was fat and stubby (and I guess oh-so-cuddly)?
Plus it’s not a good meme so much as he Streisand Effect’d the shit out of it. Like, the shiiiiit out of it…
It’s not deliberate
Your point is mentioned by the meme.
(But I disagree with the meme. Saying you are not allowed to satirically compare asians with characters that happen to be yellow is a problematic statement in itself.)
Except that centuries ago the Europeans decided to start the Yellow Peril campaign to strip Asians of their humanity by calling them the ‘yellow danger’, which still has its effects today. Other than being a yellow bear there is nothing noteworthy comparing Xi to Winnie. Do better. Would it be okay for you to satirically compare black people with characters that ‘happen to be black’?
The comparison stems from the general physique and perceived mannerisms that supposedly match between the two. I’m not sure the colour was an original part of the meme anyway. The origin was that image of Xi and Obama walking alongside each other, with the drawing of Pooh and Tigger to show how similar of an image it was. Xi was not coloured yellow in those earlier images, that started after the CCP cracked down on those memes.
I always thought it was because xi Jinping is a fat fucking moron who actually looks like whinny the Pooh’s genocidal twin. It never occurred to me that it might be a race thing.
least racist liberal
Death to America
lol he’s FAT and STUPID too!!! XD 🤣 😂
Peak liberal critique and humor.
The cowards who’ve upvoted this but have not posted come out and answer for your
Xi Jinping is stupid
the chinese state is supposedly a ruthless machiavellian cunning genocidal dictatorial power structure but the guy who climbed to the top of it is dumb?
Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.
umberto eco
Thus, by a continuous Umberting of the Eco,
okay, lemmy user Colour_me_triggered
Just scrolled past this on All.
Americans should be contained be the SCP.
Sure, 90% of you guys over there are racists and have a huge racism problem but don’t go apply your racist shit to everyone internationally.
I’ll continue having Xi an Pooh synonymous because I’m not racist and can actually do things in life without trying to make it about ““race””.
P.S. God, where did Americans even get the idea that Asians look yellow?? Most of my family is Asian and is black. I know Asians who are paler than me (German).
It’s like I’d color my face blue and someone calls me a racist, discriminating penguins.
Who’s “we”? Only 40% of our users come from Anglo North America.
You think everything you disagree with comes from the US which allows you to dismiss it out of hand and never have to struggle with your preconceptions and privilege.
PS: Uh-huh. French “satire” from 1898:
honestly bold words for someone whose family were probably nazis to claim Germany is the Mr. Magoo of racism lol
Most of my family is Asian and is black.
Okay, so you’re comfortable tap-dancing. That doesn’t mean all of us are.
It’s like I’d color my face blue and someone calls me a racist, discriminating penguins.
Tankies desperately trying to distract from the fact that Xi Jinping is literally the depiction of a beloved stuffed teddy bear come to life as described by the poet A. A. Milne and animated by Disney
What about not coloring a white man’s face leaving it white? Also racist?
Have white people, the dominant race in The West for centuries now, ever been enslaved / racially abused / seen as lesser people because of their skin? Is walking around in any way dangerous for a white person just because of their skin color? We in The West have experienced a dominant white culture through decades of racism and colonialism. White thinking is, to this day, the dominant power structure in Western countries. To say racism against white people can’t happen, is indeed stupid. Individual white people can be hurt by statements made against their race. But it will never hurt the social-economic and priviliged status of the white person in current western society.
Read up on the Yellow Peril to learn why it is highly problematic to call Asians ‘yellow’ and why no similar campaign has ever been started to dehumanize white people.
Have white people, the dominant race in The West for centuries now, ever been enslaved / racially abused / seen as lesser people because of their skin? Is walking around in any way dangerous for a white person just because of their skin color?
Yes absolutely, enslavement obviously not on the scale of black people, but if you say that stuff never happened to white people you’re ignoring a large part of the world. Racism against whites is very much a thing in Africa, Asia and probably all other non western countries
Point taken on the enslavement on white people in history. I knew someone would probably pop up to say this. It doesn’t change my point about current day white supremacy in Western thinking.
I do heavily doubt that institutional and societal racism against white people happens on the same scale as the Western institutional racism against non-whites, though. As I said above, racism from individual to individual may very well happen. It is the power dynamic involved in racism that changes the impact of it.
Oh no the local edgelord has arrived guys
Please excuse my not caring about alleged racism directed at a totalitarian shit stain.
The whole circus has arrived with them
