The main difference I see between the two ads is that one had a better budget. In the first one, all they had to do was find someone who looked Chinese and could fake an accent (even if it’s a bad fake).
But let me understand the rules here-- if I use an actor with a bad, fake accent, that makes an ad racist. Or, if I put the actor in a stereotypical scene, that makes it even doubly racist. A French guy with the Eifel Tower in the background, saying: Za cheese een za US is oreeblay, then that’s racist. Right?
[Camera opens on greasy lips munching down on a huge burger. Pulls back to reveal hugely obese white guy wearing a stetson, standing next to a saguaro. In the background is the Statue of Liberty.]
Thank y’all for all your’n inward investment.
Because of the policies of Hu Jintao, y’all are exportin’ y’all’s money to car factories in the good ol’ US of A and givin’ us jobs while most of y’all can’t even afford to buy a goddamn car.
Let’s look at if from another perspective. Let’s say some Chinese politician is running a negative ad in which he wants some American to play a part. The American is a guy in jeans, cowboy boots and hat, big belt buckle, and he comes on screen and says: “Howdy, pardner.” Would you Americans actually be offended by that? I’d think it was pretty damn funny.
Many conservatives understand racism to mean a conscious belief that members of a given race are inferior in some aspect.
Many liberals understand racism to include other things, like any kind of racial stereotyping (positive or negative), use of race simply as a group marker to play on us-and-them mentalities, or unconscious associations.
Thus, many liberals find the arbitrary use of race or racial stereotypes, especially in the context of “us” vs. “them,” to be racist. It just isn’t a requirement – in this view of what is racist – for there to be an implication that the “them” is inferior.
Feel free to argue that one view or the other is the correct view of racism. But for God’s sake, do we need another thread in which both sides insist on ignoring the other side’s view of what racism is?
There’s still a bit of the smug, sneering moustache twirling villain going on here.
But at least it’s not quite as stereotypical and demeaning as the one in the OP - high education setting, slick architecture, high tech gear, no silly accent… This is China Knows Its Shit, not Chinamen Vely Funny, so no, not racist.
Oh man. Fans, teapots, the Great Wall, dragons, paper lanterns, stylized lions, that asian looking Word font… but where is the fortune cookie and the wizened old guy caressing his pearly white Fu Manchu ?!
I’m docking them asshat points for missing something that obvious.
Ah, yes. This is one of those arguments in which it turns out the side arguing it’s not racism is perfectly happy with it being called bigotry, isn’t it?
Agreed. And the same information could have been conveyed by a character who doesn’t work on a rice paddy and speaks better English. That arguably would have made more sense, too. (The bike thing doesn’t mean anything to me one way or the other.) The ad you proposed seems fine to me - it’s alarmist, but the point Hoekstra is making is alarmist, so that’s a given. Using a professor speaking in Chinese doesn’t involve any stereotypes that I know of.
And yes, we’re commenting on the presentation more than the content here. That was always the case. You can discuss the U.S. debt and China in a sober way, or you can do it in a ridiculous way that includes cartoony Chinese music and a rice paddy worker who speaks broken English. You can talk about crime or single fatherhood and black people in a way that addresses the problems and suggests you want to do something about it, or you can make a commercial about basketball playing gangbangers named DeShonDre who talk like guys in '80s rap videos while bragging about white people they robbed and how they spent their welfare checks. They might be about the same topic, but they say different things and they certainly make very different statements about your perceptions and your intent.
And your strategy appears to be to just assert a proposition and shout down those who disagree with you. I’ll stick with asking people to make an argument, thanks.
Here is an argument that I hope meets your criteria for what makes up an argument:
Assumption: **Racism ** is hatred or intolerance of another race or other races.
Assumption: A stereotype is a simplified and standardized conception or image invested with special meaning and held in common by members of a group
From 1 and 2 we could conclude fairly that a racial stereotype is a simplified and standardized conception or image based on hatred or intolerance of another race or races.
According to this wikipedia article, two common stereotypes of East Asians by westerners include stealing our jobs and possessing poor English speaking skills.
On the website linked in the video, the quote “We take your jobs,” is printed verbatim. This sentiment is also implicitly suggested when the speaker says that Chinese economy is rising while America’s is falling.
In the video, the speaker uses broken English.
By 3, 4, 5 and 6, it is clear that the advertisement plays to racial stereotypes and is thus a form of racism.
There was nothing arbitrary about the racial stereotypes on display in that add. There were all right out of the classic Yellow Peril ads meant to scare people about the Treacherous Orientals. That’s why people think it’s a racist ad: because it uses symbolism from previous racist ads (coolie hats, rice paddies, “Engrish”) to frighten viewers about the idea of encroaching Asian hordes. It’s the same message from previous racist ads from years ago.
Conservative claims that somehow, this time, those specifically chosen symbols aren’t racist because, hey - it’s all true! are just as specious and laughable as those Conservative idiots who sent out the postcard of watermelons on the Whitehouse lawn, claiming that they’d never heard of the stereotype of blacks liking watermelons.
ETA: Also, I hope they paid that actress a ridiculous amount of money.