#jun talks

Task: Pick a song for every letter in your tumblr-URL

J- Just Pretend by Bad Omens

U- Unsainted by Slipknot

N- Night Market - MapleStory OST

T- That Unwanted Animal - The Amazing Devil

A- Aspirations by Gentle Giants

L- Let You Break My Heart Again (Live at The Symphony) by Laufey & the Iceland Symphony Orchestra

K- Kaerou by Fuji Kaze

S-Stone Wall Stone Fence by Gregory and The Hawk

This is a comment I found on @alien-outpost’s post about racism in the danmei fandom. And whew, at first I was gonna just take the road of “now we don’t have to unpack all of that”. But after marinating on this for a hot sec, I think no, actually I’m going to try and unpack my feelings on this sad stale take. Becuase it managed to irritate me.

Now first off alien-outpost themselves responded to this with “a lot of the bad takes i see aren’t just americans, but westerners as a whole”. I of course wholly agree with this. I am also not going to be talking about that. That is an easy observation that I don’t have to expand on and it’s not even my biggest problem with the comment.

I want to talk about how making racism (that we Chinese Americans personally see/experience) a “stupid Americans” problem is dimissive to an alarming degree. See the issue with that logic is that the “moral panic” coming from “stupid Americans” is literally casually racist rhetoric. It’s all steeped in ethnocentrism - the looking at works and evaluating them through your own (Western) point of view under the assumption that your own cultural metric is somehow inherently superior. And then the complete disregard towards Chinese fans explaining the cultural background that the White part of the fandom didn’t even research. That’s all racist. It’s subtle, sure, but hey look that doesn’t make it not racist. And the fact that it’s “trendy”? Yeah gotta say, that really just highlights the issue because you just pointed out that literal racism is acceptable/promoted behavior.

And then there’s the “would be better if they just stuck to Disney” part of that comment. As if Disney isn’t also demonstratably racist. Let’s just talk about one of their most recent works huh? Let’s talk about their live action Mulan 2020 remake. Mulan 2020 is a mess of a production with a whole slew of problems. Problems that include a complete misrepresentation of Chinese concepts and culture. Disney. A multibillion dollar company. A multibillion dollar company that couldn’t even be bothered with basic research on Chinese concepts and folklore apparently which is clear based on their whitewashed idea of what “chi” is and their wierd nonsensical insertion of a witch character (a completely Western concept because witches do not exist in Chinese lore). And that just the most glaring issues. These are misrepresentation problems found in the remake that Disney claimed they were aiming to make “more realistic”. More realistic based on who’s standards? Eurocentric ones clearly if they decided that the most rudimentary research on Chinese culture/stories weren’t required for an adaptation of a Chinese story. Which brings me to the point that our Western based media routinely erases and disregards Asian culture to the point that an Asian story would be made into a completely Westernized bastardiztion. You know what that sort of erasure perpetuates? Racism. The lack of care itself is telling of exactly how much our (White dominated) society cares about us and our cultures.

All of which is to say that White Americans are in fact taught casual racism even simply through casual media consumption and their internet behavior reflects that 100%. As a Chinese person who grew up in America, our society erases our experiences so much that I didn’t even know some things were racist until I went and educated myself on topics and then had moments of ‘hey wait a minute’. It’s truly such a widely normalized problem that we sometimes don’t even realize that we should be speaking up. The casual racism is just allowed to run rampant. (And of course, you can bet that this isn’t just an American problem because seriously White people from across the globe exhibit the same problematic behavior within fandoms.)

So. To conclude: If you read alien-outpost’s original post and your immediate reaction was to dismiss the issue of racism in danmei fandoms as “just Americans being stupid” then you need to check yourself. Because you absolutely missed the damn point.