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
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.
…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 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.
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.
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).
Is that context crucial though?
It gets brought up every time its pointed out how this is rascist, and it doesn’t make the use of this mene less rascist
It matters because this meme implies that it’s always racist. I don’t mean to say that it can’t be racist.
okay, but that distiction doesn’t really seem that important. It seems to only be relevant if you’re trying to provide cover for its rascist usage.
I’m not saying that’s what you’re intending to do. Just pointing out how it gets used by people who want to claim its not used in a rascist way at all
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.
Would you be comfortable calling Obama a tigger? You realize in a bar that would get you beat up right?
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.
Rap music also started in the black community but that hasn’t stopped white racists from using tropes and out of context snippets from rap music to attack black people.
Not exactly, because the meaning changed from “hey look Obama and Xi loojs kinda like this silly little picture of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger” to “the Chinese people yearn for freedom from this censorship-loving yellow man sure hope Xi gets angry about my crackkker posting”.
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.
“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”
Reminds me of a popular kindergarten birthday song in The Netherlands where you squint your eyes with your fingers and sing ‘Hankipanki Shanghai, Hankipanki Shanghai, Hankipanki Hankipanki, Hankipanki Shanghai’ to the tune of Happy Birthday To You.
It’s not done anymore in most schools these days AFAIK but only since recently
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.
