the reason straight male athletes will behave homoerotically with each other is because being gay is a joke to them

the reason straight girls will call each other girlfriends and kiss each other for the amusement of men is because being gay is a joke to them

I don’t care if you think “this is just how Degeneres/Kimmel does comedy”, I don’t care if they did it for laughs. The overall tone of their segment is to show their reaction; to show how ridiculous and childish they find the KonMari method. We get it, white liberals don’t have time for wishy-washy Japanese mindfulness woo-woo and their enlightened views make them too rational to take seriously any other cultures that are based in spirituality and animism

Kimmel made a long, over-winded joke that deliberately put both Marie and her translator into an embarrassing situation, deliberately highlighting and mocking Marie’s lack of English, and then mocked the Shinto cultural background that Marie’s methods come from. Ellen’s writer acted as if Marie was going to overturn his office, then shoves Kim Kardashian’s ass into Marie’s face, then admit that he’s going “put everything back anyway” after Maries leaves. Both of them act as if her “greeting ritual” was some form of Weird Hokey Japanese Gimmick. 

White “progressive liberal voices” are turning non-white cultures either into a commodity or into a joke without any self-reflection or foresight into the damage they’re potentially doing. They take no care in the hurt that they as white comedians are sowing; in turning Marie’s traditional Japanese cultural values and contexts into a punch line, they’re making the act of othering and disrespecting non-white cultures more normative and easier to do. Their activism and political commentary is nothing but performative white bullshit.

I …listen. I know everyone means well and I’m glad to see people coming out in her support. But.

1) The aggression she’s facing isn’t just “people being mean”, it’s a mix of xenophobia and racialised misogyny. Please don’t decontextualise that and turn it into some defanged playground-call of Being Mean, when a lot of the overreactions to her has been deliberate and malicious. This is something everyone - especially white people - really need to learn to recognise. This is about the way systemic racism and privilege works; Kimmel and DeGeneres using their platforms and liberal image to maliciously other another culture foreign to them. They are causing harm to other people of colour through their actions because they are normalising this kind of behaviour 

2) White people like Degeneres and Kimmel behaving appallingly and maliciously and othering non-white cultures should be unacceptable regardless of whether or not the subject of their othering is deemed “kind” or “pure” or “wholesome”. Disrespect of Marie’s methods and spiritual/cultural background should be unacceptable regardless if it’s useful for you or not. Once we go down this path of attaching more value to a culture because it contributes to you personally, we’re skirting into respectability politics, going back around to commodification from the other side.

learn to respect other cultures unconditionally, and learn to not tolerate microaggression - if there’s one thing you learn from this, guilty white people, please please learn that white Othering cannot be tolerated no matter who it’s from and to be extra vigilant if it comes from your own communities.