I'm japanese, born and live in japan, this site fights to much, apparently only 2 races exist in the world, white american and black american, the rare times i open tumblr i see people draw asians very dark, in OUR CULTURE that is very hurtful as wether they like it or not dark skin is seen as not pretty, americans call us racist for this and want respect but they don't respect others, americans think their culture is right and the others not, japanese people we exist and we look a certain way
Yup, true that. Americans (all americans including poc) have a way of just assuming the entire world follows ther ideals, culture and views and ignores the fact that the rest of the world are you know… not america, have a different history and way of doing this. Race in America is heavily tied to black vs white while e.g. in Belgium as far as i know when it comes to racism it’s usually aimed at brown people because there’s just more brown (e.g. middle eastern, arab, turkish etc) people here and because of the immigrant crisis, a lot of that racism is targeted towards people who “look muslim” (so islamophobia technically speaking however, a white muslim will def not get the same reaction as a brown one)
And when it comes to other poc, asians, natives, latina/latino people, americans tend to gloss over them, they’re not the extremes, they’re the ones in the middle so they don’t care as much. And when it comes to other cultures like asian ones they’re super disrespectful. Because of their america centralized view they don’t reallise that other cultures can have values (that they might not agree with) based on their own history. I’m not an expert on japanese culture but I do know pale skin has been the ideal for a lot longer than they’ve had contact with the western world. Did the west influence it in recent years? I think it did (with hollywood films constantly showing the world that black people are dumb/poor/thugs I don’t believe there’s a country in the world the us hasn’t pushed their ideals on at least a little bit)
And yeah, scream it to everyone, esp the ones who aren’t listening: asian people have their own cultures and their own identities and their opinion matters!
Another thing that i notice a lot of americans will do is, is use the opinions of either diaspora or mainland asians whenever it suits them. When diaspora say gits is whitewashing,the first response you get is: “but real japanese people don’t care, it’s their opinion that matter the most for some reason,, yours doesn’t”. When mainland japanese people say wanting to be pale is sth that predates contact with the western ideals they turn to diaspora who have only lived with american culture and say “but the reason they want to be pale is because of racism!” You just can’t wint with them i’m afraid
