the explanation given in the first screenshot by (presumably) a thai person feels, at best, offensively ignorant and, at worst, intentionally misleading to me as well. the character in question is from a thai poem, written by king rama v based on his impression of the mani people - an indigenous group living in the south of thailand.
they are not ethnically thai and, while race is a social construct and it is hard to put many ethnicities around the globe into a neat racial category, the mani people can absolutely be labelled as black. certainly, the features that the thai people who "dress up" as the character in question caricaturise are the exact same features mocked by blackface and are features which the mani people share with black people.
essentially, everyone's knee-jerk reaction here was fully accurate. this is, in fact, indistinguishable from blackface. this might as well be the thai jim crow.
while colourism is 110% a serious issue in thailand as well, this character and the fact that thai people "dress up" as him is a textbook example of the dominant enthnic and racial group in the country making a caricature out of the features of another smaller, marginalised, and in this case also indigenous ethnic group, which is - of course - undoubtedly and blatantly racist.
moreover, if you look up news on the mani people in thai, you will see that they are constantly battling racism and discrimination. just this month, they submitted a request to the thai government, asking to stop using slurs when naming their ethnicity in official documents, as the most widely used words for the mani people in thailand are indeed not "mani" but two slurs. the name of the character in question (as well as the name of the poem he is from) is one of those slurs, by the way.
unfortunately, this character does seem to be completely normalised in thailand. kids read the poem in secondary school, the character gets depicted on screen in all sorts of ways, he is a popular "costume" for costume parties, and he was even an entire character on the thai version of the mask singer (not that any degree of mockery and caricature is okay but that one is particularly offensive: you can look up "เงาะป่า the mask singer" if you want to see for yourself, but massive warning for just an insanely racist caricature). but this normalisation is exactly why we can't just stay silent about it. people need to understand that this is not fucking okay. and we need to actually talk about it not being okay for that to happen.
in general, i feel like western fans tend to stay away from criticising anything they see in thai series or from thai celebrities because they are afraid that whatever seems wrong might be "just a part of the culture" or nuanced in some way that they do not understand. and while that might also be the case and it is always a good idea to do research first (flashback to me researching this very topic armed with two dictionaries and a purpose), we need to understand that thai media and celebrities are not beyond criticism and valid criticism is absolutely crucial. especially when it comes to an issue as serious as racism. double especially when it comes to anti-black racism, which is unfortunately a plague all over the world, asia included.
baratheonpilled
ellievsbear
discoholicmusic
amandla
