From NYT, Las Vegas Caters to Asia’s High Rollers.
Are the Venetian, and other Las Vegas hotels that cater to Asians, victimizing them out of racist stereotypes about Asians, and their love of gambling?
Should they be required to serve fried chicken, as well as dim sum?
Wealthy Asians want to gamble and the hotel finds out what cuisine they like and serves it to them. This is racist how?
If African-Americans, as a group, were rich enough for casinos to cater to in this way, we would be living in an America where anti-black racism was almost entirely a thing of the past.
One of the problems with this argument is that the Asian high-rollers fly in to Las Vegas mainly from overseas. That’s besides the point. The casinos are patronizing a segment of visitors. Patronizing…not in the perjorative sense.
nitpick: It’s the customers that patronize the casinos.
Aye. You’d probably want to say the casino is catering to a segment of visitors.
When I spent a weekend in Shanghai I stayed at the Hua Ting Towers hotel. The staff spoke excellent English, when I picked up the telephone the front desk answered in English, saving them the trouble of pretending to understand my atrocious Mandarin, and the toilet facilities were western style.
Is this racism, or just marketing? Know what your customers want, and provide it. That’s good business. As long as the hotel is not refusing to rent to people to make other guests comfortable I have no problem with it. Had they denied service to Asians I would call that racist.
Yes. Instead of the casinos patronizing the Asian high rollers, the Asian high rollers are patronizing the casinos.
You agree if they sent buses to South-Central it’d be racist, though, right?
Why would it be racist? What possible racist message would it be sending?
Not racist, but probably unethical (and I wouldn’t be suprised to find illegal), since sending buses to low-income areas is basically encouraging people to gamble money they can’t afford to loose.
Not a race thing though, the same would apply to sending buses to low-income areas inhabited by any racial group.
If it’s illegal, then it should be illegal for the lottery to advertise so heavily in places where they have got to know that the people can’t afford to lose their money. And your odds are way better at a casino than buying a lottery ticket.
Well, there’s a difference between advertising the state lotto and offering free transportation to casinos for the poor.
And in anycase, it is illegal to target the poor for lotto advertising, at least in some states. From NC’s state lotto laws (pdf!):
If this is racist, then “racist” is a uselessly watered-down adjective.
When I was in Vegas last, the TV sets featured two Chinese stations and one Arabic one. The casinos are simply responding to their expected clientele – There are apparently a lot of Asian-speaking and Arabic-speaking High Rollers, and they want to encourage them.* Is the presence of Arabic TV “racist”? I don’t think so, and I don’t think the presence of Chinese-language TV (and other amenities) is, either.
*But they don’t want to encourage them to stay in their rooms watching TV TOO much – they’re supposed to be down on the floors, gambling. I think there were fewer cable channels for diversion in that Vegas hotel room than in the hotel I stasyed in in Washington D.C. Are Vegas casinos anti-cable? No, they’re pro-casino. Don’t attribute to Prejudice what can be explained by Greed.
They aren’t sending buses to pick up poor Laotian immigrants, they are picking up wealthy Asian businessmen who want to gamble- big difference.
So they cater to Asians and that’s racism against blacks? How? And why does everything have to be about blacks in this country? I didnt’ quite gather if the tone of the article was we should be catering to blacks like this or we shouldn’t.
Casinos are a business, Asians gamble a LOT, and the casinos profit off it and the Asians have fun. Who’s losing out?
And I say this as an Asian!
:dubious:
I didn’t take the article as being about blacks at all. It seemed to be saying that this kind of ethnic targeting is a bad thing, and if it were directed at another ethnic group - say, blacks - people would be making a lot more noise about it.
I’m not seeing the racism either. However, I will say that the biggest gamblers I have ever seen were indeed Asian. And this wasn’t even in Vegas, but in the little casinos here in New Mexico. There was this one guy who would routinely sit down at a pai-gow table and start betting like crazy. $100 on his own hand. He’d play along on other people’s hands. Max bets on the fortune bonus on all six player hands (if a full table), so that was another $125 a hand. Sometimes he’d play multiple spots if there was an empty spot.
And while that might not seem huge for Vegas (and I agree that it isn’t), that’s pretty high rolling for the venue.
I think that’s the point.