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Why racism in media matters
Feb. 24th, 2017 01:17 pmvia http://ift.tt/2lN0egB:
This is going to be a bit long, but here goes:
As I’ve mentioned, I’m in Vietnam at the moment. It’s great, I worship at the altar of their food. However, today, while we were in a restaurant worshiping said food, it started to rain. Across the road was a shop selling, among other things, the classic Vietnamese conical bamboo hat.
Now, my view of cultural appropriation is that it doesn’t count if the object is a) being used for it’s original purpose, and b) being sold by people of that culture to tourists. Given that I wanted the hat to keep the rain off and they were obviously for sale in the touristy area of the town, I gave myself the green light and bought a hat.
The hat was awesome, but when I put it on, I suddenly had the weirdest urge do make a racist gesture pretending to be chinese. I didn’t. Because that would be fucking racist. But I stopped and thought- wait, why the hell did I even think that?
Well, that was easy to explain. Because every time I had seen a non-asian person wearing that hat in movies, they had done exactly that. The very act of putting on a hat had been connotated to something racist.
Fuck you Disney.
This is going to be a bit long, but here goes:
As I’ve mentioned, I’m in Vietnam at the moment. It’s great, I worship at the altar of their food. However, today, while we were in a restaurant worshiping said food, it started to rain. Across the road was a shop selling, among other things, the classic Vietnamese conical bamboo hat.
Now, my view of cultural appropriation is that it doesn’t count if the object is a) being used for it’s original purpose, and b) being sold by people of that culture to tourists. Given that I wanted the hat to keep the rain off and they were obviously for sale in the touristy area of the town, I gave myself the green light and bought a hat.
The hat was awesome, but when I put it on, I suddenly had the weirdest urge do make a racist gesture pretending to be chinese. I didn’t. Because that would be fucking racist. But I stopped and thought- wait, why the hell did I even think that?
Well, that was easy to explain. Because every time I had seen a non-asian person wearing that hat in movies, they had done exactly that. The very act of putting on a hat had been connotated to something racist.
Fuck you Disney.
