Posted by It is the Martin Luther King long weekend in the United States. When the good doctor said, “I look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character,” I choose to interpret that as meaning all people of all races and all creeds. In reality, most of Mr. King’s speeches are focused on black and white; a tribute to the dichotomous thinking that permeates debate about race in the United States and western thinking and philosophy in general. You can see that clearly when intellectual lightweights jump on the social justice (SJW) bandwagon like celebrities who probably believe they are drinking deeply from the fountain of wisdom but are actually gargling in the spring of politically correct propaganda.
Such is the case with Ashley Judd who thinks that the most pressing social issue today is: “If you’re other than white, you have to scroll to search for an emoji of color that more closely resembles your experince [sic]… A little thing, perhaps. But … what if emojis, came, standard issue, in black? So WE whites had to scroll to find a color that more accurately resembled US? Multiply that times the incalculable. … And that gives me a glimpse of what it may be like to be a person of [color] in a white-centric world. Everything set to the standard of whiteness, everything else a variation thereof.” This semi-coherent post (what the heck does “multiply that times the incalculable” mean anyway?) on Facebook was mirrored by an even more incoherent tweet on Twitter: “& why are emojis yellow (which is just code for white)? Why don’t they come in black & make me have to change them?” OMG, seriously? Where’s the heck is my face palm emoji? First of all, since emoji’s originated in Japan with NTT DoCoMo, I would guess that, if anything, yellow emojis are probably a code for us Asians (instead of being a code for white). Mind you, if I saw an Asian with skin the deep yellow colour of an emoji, I would probably tell him to go to the hospital ASAP as he probably has jaundice. Second, why should I be forced to hunt to change a black emoji into a yellow one just to placate Ashley Judd’s perverse sense of social justice? Does anybody else have the sneaking suspicion that politically correct has now morphed into George Orwell’s 1984 where “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” and now we can add “yellow is white”? At least they already modified emojis a few years ago so that you can change the colour of your emojis rather than being stuck with generic “Simpsons” yellow skin tones. But some people are never satisfied, and they see racism under every innocuous rock.
The simple fact is that we are all racists; it’s only a matter of degree. Racism is just a term for making stereotypical pre-conceived judgements about people based upon some superficial feature like skin colour. On one end of the spectrum, there is the “string him up and lynch him just because he looked at me funny and he has a different skin colour and is therefore sub-human” racist. Then there’s the “walking through the ghetto’s surrounded by scowling dark-skinned youths with guns and machetes stuffed in their pants and feeling very uncomfortable” racist. I am definitely the latter, having experienced it last summer while shooting a film in Jamaica. I didn’t know those youths personally and never got around to breaking bread with most of them and talking about their life stories (although we did for quite a few that we interviewed). Did I feel threatened when approached by weapon wielding black youths, especially when they were frowning or expressionless? Hell yes! Does that make a racist? Technically yes. On the plus side, I also picked up the cool nickname Chow-Yun-Slim after someone said I resembled the Hong Kong actor and I replied that I wasn’t Fat enough.
Nowadays, we are conditioned to yell racism at every little slight. The right wing refers to this as “playing the race card.” More intellectual wags like to point out that the concept of race is hard if not impossible to define; they are right.
Q: I’m French and so naturally I hate the Americans (and that island nation of shopkeepers the British); does that make me a racist?
A: Technically not but it’s OK for Americans to call you a bunch of cheese-eating surrender monkeys as well and not be racist.
Q: Is Hispanic a race?
A: Hispanic is not a racial category as it applies to descendants of Spanish speaking people from Latin America whether black, white, native or mixed.
Q: Does this mean that Portuguese speaking Brazilians are not hispanic?
A: Most say no but Brazilians are probably Latinos because it is a broader term referring to people from Latin America.
Q: So then people from Belize, Jamaica, Suriname and Guyana are Latinos?
A: No because although these places are in “Latin America” (defined as Central America, South America and the Caribbean), they are former Dutch and British colonies and thus are Germanic and don’t speak a Latin based romance language.
Q: That makes sense, so what about French Guiana or Guadalupe? French is a latin-based romance language isn’t it? So they’re Latinos right?
A: Shut up. You’re starting to annoy me.
You see, the whole definition thing is artificial and construed. It is, as Orwell put it in 1984, a bunch of newspeak. But it is done for a reason… because whites (i.e. anglo-saxons) don’t see latinos as really white and vice-versa so they had to think of something to differentiate themselves from the Gringos. However, tired of a bunch of white people who speak Spanish trying to pass themselves off as being oppressed minorities, the media has invented yet another newspeak term: White Hispanic. As for French Guiana, I went to school with a black girl from there; her surname was Ho-A-Chuck and she had a strong French accent. One night, she informed me that her grandfather was actually Chinese and hence the strange surname. I surmise that two generations earlier, a Chinese migrant with the surname Ho (which probably makes him Cantonese) and the given name Ah-Cheuk went to French Guiana. He probably spoke poor English and even worse French and when immigration asked his name for the forms, he ended up giving his descendants his complete name along with hyphens as the family name.
As for the original concept of races, as the Europeans were busying conquering and colonising the planet, they invented three major racial categories: Caucasoid (white), Negroid (black) and Mongoloid (east Asian). Some added Australoid (Malayan-Polynesian). We all know that “indigenous” native americans can trace their ancestry to Asia, probably via the Bering Straights land bridge a long time ago. Of course this is a major simplification but one interesting question you can use at pseudo-intellectual liberal cocktail parties is what is a Caucasian? For most people, and police descriptions of perpetrators and victims of crime, Caucasian means white Europeans. The real definition is, of course, that the term refers to the Caucasus Mountains or the Caucasus region which is the area between the Black Sea and Caspian Sea between Russia and Iran and Turkey. This region is also comprised of Georgia (the country, not the American state), Armenia and Azerbaijan. In other words, Turks and Iranians have a better claim to being Caucasians than most Europeans with the exception of the Russians. Heck, even most sub-continentals like Pakistanis and Indians along with the Middle East and North Africans can call themselves Caucasian. Don’t tell that to a white supremacist though; I’m pretty sure they won’t appreciate the intellectual repartee.
We could also deconstruct the term Asian which has basically zero use as a category other than to indicate a geographic place of origin. Even the word Asian means different things depending on where you are. If you’re American, when the media uses the word Asian, they are generally referring to East Asians (ie, Japan, Korea, China). When the British media uses the word Asian, they mean South Asians (ie, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh). Despite some common heritage and similar looks, the Chinese, Japanese and Koreans all consider themselves very different from the other; probably even more than British, French and Germans do even though they are all Europeans. And darker skinned Southeast Asians (Vietnam, Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Myanmar) are more from the Malay-Polynesia blend or a mix (especially in the case of Thailand). Calling them all Asians is like saying olive complexioned Greeks are the same as blond haired Scandinavians.
Can we eliminate racism? Well given we can’t even successfully define race properly, it is kind of hard to eliminate. Even if we could, it would be pointless because we as a species, are hard wired to be tribal. We have and always will define our social networks as “us and them” and race is merely a handy construct for us to do it with. If there were no differences in skin pigmentation, I’m sure we would create another method of differentiating each other like the flat nose versus the big ear people.
British anthropologist Robin Dunbar postulated in the 1990s that the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain a stable social relationship with is about 150 (mathematically 148 to be exact). Dunbar defines this in simple terms as “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar.” Any more than this requires more complex social control including rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a cohesive group. This number tends to correspond with neolithic farming villages, Hutterite settlements, and even basic unit sizes for armies from the Roman Legions up to modern militaries. More recent research suggests it holds up even in the modern era of social media where some people claim to have thousands of friends and millions of followers. When looked at closely, they tend to only have close and constant contact with one or two dozen of these “friends” and occasional contact with one or two hundred and virtually no real interaction with all the rest.
Why am I so blasé about racism? Other than the deep held intellectual belief that we can’t eliminate something we can’t even define and even if we could, we are hard-wired to make new distinctions in any case… well I guess that’s justification enough. But it does go deeper than that. As I alluded to earlier, racism is just another form of stereotyping and we all engage in it to some extent because we need to just to function. It would be nice to treat everyone we pass on the street as a unique individual and get to know them and their story in depth but we simply don’t have the time or the brainpower to do that seven billion times. Thus we take short-cuts and generalise and stereotype because there is no other realistic option. What I do hope though is that people do occasionally take the time to get to know other individuals more in depth, especially ones that they normally wouldn’t interact with. In other words, I have long ago resigned myself to the fact that some form of discrimination will always occur because that’s the way we are. I only hope that we minimise this and try to eliminate the most egregious manifestations of racism like job and education discrimination. Oh, and no burning crosses, lynchings, making me sit at the back of the bus, use a separate elevator or use a different water fountain either.
My first job after finishing my undergraduate degree was with Mobil Oil in a small northern Alberta town of about 8,000 people called Whitecourt. It was principally populated with rig pigs, tool pushers, lumber jacks, and truck drivers. In other words, white redneck nirvana. Never had a single problem during the one and a half years I worked up there. About the same time, I went to the wedding of a farmer friend in Saskatchewan which was held in Saskatoon. During the wedding reception, one of my friend’s aunts came over and talked to me to thank me for making the long drive to celebrate her nephew’s wedding. She then casually apologised and said something like “I’m sorry we don’t have any girls around here for you”. If I were a SJW liberal, I’m sure I would have went ballistic. However, it was clear that there was no malice in her comment and that it was a simple observation that there were no Chinese girls there (I was the only Asian… heck only minority in attendance). I didn’t have the heart to tell her that any of the drunk young blonde farm girls would be perfectly fine with me; she was such a sweet old lady.
Thankfully, liberal SJW thinking does not translate well out of its western roots despite the conceit that they are “universal”. The biggest problem with the west is that it has, throughout its history, sought to change the rest of the world in its image. From the crusades and missionaries, Europeans have sought to convert the rest of the world to Christianity. Even in the darkest days of colonialism when Europeans (and to a lesser extent Americans) were conquering, raping and pillaging the planet, there was constant rationalisation of the white man’s burden of bringing civilisation to the savages. Older and in many ways more advanced civilisations like the Aztecs, Incas, Mayans, Ottoman Empire, India and China might have disagreed with this assessment but unfortunately the Europeans had bigger guns. Less obvious, communism was also a European philosophy that sought to export itself to the rest of the planet in their global revolution of the proletariat. Today, the European/American tradition of narcissistic hubris is still healthy and continues unabated although masked more benignly as western liberal democracy. If there was one bible for this train of thought, Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History” would suffice. The Arab Spring was widely lauded across Europe and America as their Fukuyamaist belief in the inevitability of liberal democracy led them to believe that the “flowers of democracy would bloom across the Arab desert”. We have seen how well that has turned out.
That’s insane. We are talking about UNIVERSAL human rights and freedoms screams the western liberal. How can you even argue against that? Put it this way, I’m sure that the missionaries were pretty convinced in their belief that they were doing God’s work. I’m also pretty confident that British gentlemen would pontificate about the good they were doing in bringing civilisation to the savages throughout their Empire where the sun never sets while sipping their after-dinner brandies and smoking cigars in their private clubs in London. Today, we placate ourselves and justify our near religious belief that liberal democracy is the pinnacle of human evolution by using false logic like “look at all the people looking to get into the west” as evidence that we are right and the rest of the world is wrong. Well, if the alternative is starvation, poverty and even worse, war; of course the relative prosperity and peace of the West looks good. But remember there are 300,000 Canadians in Hong Kong and the vast majority of them are people who decided to move back despite the pollution, crowding and high costs and the fact that they are living under a non-democratic communist regime. How can this be? Vancouver and Toronto, are always at the top of the “best cities to live in the world” list every year. Are these people stupid or insane? Maybe, but not as crazy as the 13,000 Canadians that had to be evacuated from Lebanon in 2006 after Hezbollah attacked Israel.
For the Chinese, we know we are racist because we think we are the freaking chosen people. Kind of like the jews except multiplied by 1.4 billion. The difference is, like the jews, we generally don’t give a rat’s ass if the rest of the world emulates us and we certainly don’t want to make the rest of the world more Chinese. Aha, what about Tibet? (Westerners hardly ever mention Xinjiang and the Uyghurs even though they probably get it worse than the Tibetans probably because they’re muslims not cute cuddly buddhists in orange robes). That has nothing to do with expanding Chinese culture and everything to do with expanding China’s land and resources while building a buffer with India and Russia. I’ll not go into a debate about Tibet at this point in time but suffice to say I find it interesting that westerners who talk about it don’t understand that they are essentially supporting an oppressive theocratic regime whose Lama God Kings resided in the Potala Palace while the rest of the Tibetan serfs starved. Don’t believe me? Think of all the Tibetans who died building this for the Dalai Lama and his predecessors before he was forced into exile in India in1959.
Sure the Chinese are racist. Occasionally the west and internet get wind of it and then express their moral indignation like the Qiaobi washing powder ad that went viral in 2016. The company did eventually apologise and withdrew the ad… apparently after the government told them to due to the international outrage. I’m sure they still don’t fully understand why but did it anyways.
This is not the first time or the last time this sort of thing has happened in China or Asia. One of the biggest ones surrounded the toothpaste Darkie (complete with a caricature of a smiling black man) which was and is popular in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia (Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand). Somewhere, a bunch of white liberal SJWs got wind of this and decided to do their usual outraged protesting and whining. Unfortunately, Darkie was purchased by Colgate in 1990 which is far more susceptible to the moral outrage of white liberals in the west and decided to change the name to Darlie from Darkie. They also changed the logo to a more androgynous picture that barely resemble a human being. Victory for the SJWs!!! Except I can guarantee you that you can count the total number of white western consumers of this toothpaste on one hand. This product is a legacy of the British colonialists but is principally consumed by locals in Asia. While the English name has been changed from Darkie to Darlie, the Chinese name remains 黑人牙膏 or, you guessed it, Black Person Toothpaste – Darkie. It’s not just the Chinese though, look at the Thai packaging in the picture below and you’ll notice that while the English name has changed, the Thai name also remains the same.
In other words, in Asia, we don’t care if white liberal SJWs are offended. Sure, we’ll change a few things to placate clients who are under pressure from their customers who are complaining about sweat shops and inhumane conditions. But otherwise, we’re more inclined to tell you to take a hike (in a polite way though) or ignore you. Because despite what liberal white Europeans and Americans think, the rest of the world doesn’t share your “universal” values. Not about LGBTQ, not about racism, and certainly not about sexism. Taiwan and Korean have been democracies for only about 20 years and both have elected female presidents. Hong Kong has just elected a female Chief Executive for the first time ever. However, the torch bearer for western liberal democracy, the United States still hasn’t elected a female president after 240 years. Nothing to see here folks, move along, move along.
Asians view much of this as a conspiracy by a bunch of hypocritical westerns trying to impose their views and values on the rest of the world and we are right to do so. I didn’t see a whole bunch of NGOs, SJWs and the western media protest against anti-Chinese race riots and massacres in Indonesia in 1965 and again in 1998. I don’t see them complaining and protesting about discriminatory anti-Chinese laws in Malaysia that gives preferential treatment to the majority Bumiputras in areas like housing, finance and education. Even worse, liberals in America are big on putting restrictive quotas on Asians getting into universities like Harvard and Berkeley and justify it under the aegis of encourage diversity. The 1992 L.A. riots were ostensibly about white policemen killing innocent black men but somehow it resulted in the Koreans getting their shops burned and looted but the rich white limousine liberals in Beverly Hills and Bel Air emerged unscathed.
I don’t see the liberals saying a peep about the crop of Asian sitcoms like Fresh Off the Boat and Kim’s Convenience that have come out recently that pander to the worst racial stereotypes possible. These are shows where the actors that play many of the main characters actually have no accent and are forced to make a faux Asian accents, in essence mocking their own parents. Welcome to the new liberal America folks, where Asians are the only minority group that you can caricature and stereotype and discriminate against and its still OK. To be honest, I really don’t care about these shows and they actually don’t bother me. What bothers me is the double-standard that is applied by liberals to Asians as opposed to other minorities. FOB is probably more accurately interpreted as Fresh Off the Boeing for today’s Asian immigrants who are a far different than the Vietnamese refugees of the 1970s from where the term originates. Put in another way, I’ll accept FOB the show as being fair when ABC runs Fresh Off the Boat 2 about Syrian refugees.
Most Asians are puzzled about why westerners are always lecturing them about this and that. Why can’t they just mind their own business? Why can’t they just leave us alone? What Asians don’t understand is that westerners can’t help themselves; its ingrained in the cultural DNA of the west to meddle and force everyone else to adopt their beliefs. Despite all the liberals’ talk about multiculturalism and diversity, they don’t mean all your archaic and anachronistic beliefs… they want you to leave all that shit behind… unless they think the angry white males are against it in which case they’ll say you’re persecuted and stand up for you even if it goes against another of their beliefs.
For example, as I wrote in an earlier piece, far-right Marine Le Pen of the Front National has a surprisingly large share of the gay vote in France. That’s because when faced between “fighting islamophobia” and “fighting for gay rights”, these two goals are often incompatible. Again, Orwell elucidates on this perfectly when he coined the phrase doublethink in 1984 or the “power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Liberals are masters in the art of doublethink. Their mental gymnastics used to justify contradictory beliefs would win an Olympic gold medal. “Most muslims aren’t like that…” or “they don’t represent true Islam…” The truth is most muslims are like that and they do represent true Islam because the religion is clearly homophobic as it is practiced in most muslim countries (although this varies from slight to extreme depending on the country).
What liberals want is “Islam light” and like to quote moderates (mostly progressive and often living in the west) muslims to prove that muslims and homosexuals can live together. To be fair, it is possible because we have “Christianity light” in most western countries today as the extreme views of the past (which basically prescribe stoning for homosexuality) have been generally reinterpreted. But “Islam light” is something that would have to evolve on its own within muslim countries themselves and even if it were to happen, would take a long long time to do so. An exaggeration? Here is a map of the world showing countries which have supported the UN declaration supporting LGBT rights (blue) and those that have signed the statement opposing LGBT rights (red) with grey having signed neither. No points for figuring out what religion dominates most of the red countries.
In other words, liberals support diversity and freedom of expression and religion as long as it conforms with their beliefs. They are the modern incarnation of the colonial white man’s burden: the need to “civilise” the rest of the world in their image because, as the Pogue Colonel said in Full Metal Jacket, “We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there is an American trying to get out.”
