Racist thread

[Kung Fu Wang]

If someone puts up a clip like this, will you call that person "racist"?

Your thought?

 

[skribs]

I don't see anything wrong with it.

Then again, I don't know the history, and I am neither Chinese nor Japanese enough to be offended by whatever is supposed to be offensive here.

 

[Dirty Dog]

War may or may not be based on racism. Not understanding a word of what is said, I wouldn't have any idea of the motivations.
If I understood what their motivation was, then maybe, maybe not.
If their motivation was "You invaded our country, so we're kicking your butt out" then probably not.
If their motivation was "We want to kill you and every single person in your country because your hair is 2 shades lighter than ours" then probably so.

 

[paitingman]

No.
Every society has their side of the story.
Some twist the story more than others maybe, but then that's something other than racism.
Asian societies tend to try not to forget so quickly and have many different versions of many different stories for millennia of off and on conflict with their neighbors.

As a Korean person, I can do my best to understand the hostilities felt between groups, say like Japan and Korea, due to past conflict.
But what was once your mother's story, became grandmother's, then your great grandmother's life story, then it was family history, and now it's almost ancient family history (and it's practically the other group's ancient history as well). And the personal feelings and hostilities fade. Until next time.

 

[JowGaWolf]

If someone puts up a clip like this, will you call that person "racist"?

Your thought?

I wouldn't call someone a racist if they put that video up. For starters it seems to be a movie loosely based on history. There are lots of movies about slavery in the US some are accurate and some are loosely based on historical events. So if there was ever a real occurrence of Japanese Pirates fighting the Chinese then that's what happened. We can't do anything about the past except learn from it to become better people on both sides.

This is a definition of racism. "prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is superior."

The people who wrong your country in 1557 are long gone. And to be honest that's not even your grudge to hold. Now if someone screws you over today then you can identify those individuals and hate them until your soul rots. But to hate someone who has nothing to do with what was done to you makes no sense.

There will always be caution based on old history. There's nothing wrong with that, because it's mostly based on triggers that don't have a race. For example, certain actions remind you have one group treated people of your race so now you become cautious of another race that has nothing to do with the past. You start to see patterns and you watch to make sure that history doesn't repeat itself. At this point in life it's less about race and more about familiar actions of humans that led to something horrible.


See 11:43.. Everyone is going to have that little voice.

It's only natural to have long term mistrust of things that resulted in extremely negative outcomes. The first thing I thought of when I heard about what the US. immigration systems started putting people into camps was the Japanese interment camps. The first thing I thought about when I hear that the immigration system was separating children was slavery. It wasn't a "white or black" thing for me. It was more of an "things didn't turn out so good the last time this happened" moment.

I would be more offended if someone posts that video to justify why they hate an entire race or nationality. My family on my wife's side don't care much for Japanese anything because of what their grand parents and parents had to live through when Japan invaded the Philippines. My wife and her siblings don't hate the Japanese as much as they used to. They are at the "little voice stage." Their kids have a "smaller voice" that tells them to be careful. But it's more about the actions than about someone being Japanese. Eventually it becomes a just a reminder of human behavior and people will will either embrace that behavior or rise above it.

The world can be a crappy place with horrible things, but you can't let hate eat your soul. With so many interracial marriages in the U.S. it's just really going to be difficult to hate groups of people. My family consists of Thai, Filipino, Black, White, Hispanic, Chinese, Greek, Italian, Muslim, Egyptian, and Australian. So I'm just really running out of racial groups and nationalities to hate lol. That's the one thing I like about living in a diverse country, eventually it gets really hard to hate anyone based on race.

Eventually we all will have to decide if we keep the bad ways or rise above them.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

If someone puts up a clip like this, will you call that person "racist"?

Your thought?

Just including some ethnicity/culture/race in a video and/or its title doesn't automatically make it racist. I didn't see anything racist in the first few minutes of that video.

 

[WaterGal]

If someone puts up a clip like this, will you call that person "racist"?

Your thought?

You mean because of the way this movie (TV show?) depicts one of the sides in this conflict? I suspect that most Westerners, myself included, don't know enough about the cultural/historical context to know if this is an accurate or biased depiction. Sometimes these things can be subtle and difficult for outsiders. Like if someone played a movie about the American Civil War in China, I doubt many Chinese people could tell if it was an accurate or biased depiction (even if it would be obvious to an American), because that's not their history.

 

[JowGaWolf]

You mean because of the way this movie (TV show?) depicts one of the sides in this conflict? I suspect that most Westerners, myself included, don't know enough about the cultural/historical context to know if this is an accurate or biased depiction. Sometimes these things can be subtle and difficult for outsiders. Like if someone played a movie about the American Civil War in China, I doubt many Chinese people could tell if it was an accurate or biased depiction (even if it would be obvious to an American), because that's not their history.

I don't think it would matter if it was a lose portrayal of a real event. We watch historically based movies all the time, RAMBO is one. While it's not accurate at all, it is based on an historical even. War is a nasty business. Video games do the same thing. Call of Duty multiplayer gives the players an option to play as a German, Russian, or American Soldier. I've been on the German team but it didn't make me a racist. It's just a game that used the groups of people who were part of that war.

The strangest game that I've seen was one where the U.S. were the bad guys. It made me feel uneasy for about 30 seconds and then reality hit. It's a game and there are different perspectives in which people see historical events. The Civial War in the US is a perfect example. People from the north do not tell the same story that people from the south tell it. Even to this day, you'll get 2 different stories on what the ware was about. While I may not agree with the southern perspective, I've had good relationships with people who believe the southern perspective.

Now if a person is posting racist propaganda then that's totally different than the video that the OP posted.

EDIT: Now if Kung Fu wang isn't showing the context in which that video was created then it could be part of a racist message. He likes to leave stuff out, so people usually end up commenting on part of the whole.

 

[WaterGal]

I don't think it would matter if it was a lose portrayal of a real event. We watch historically based movies all the time, RAMBO is one. While it's not accurate at all, it is based on an historical even. War is a nasty business. Video games do the same thing. Call of Duty multiplayer gives the players an option to play as a German, Russian, or American Soldier. I've been on the German team but it didn't make me a racist. It's just a game that used the groups of people who were part of that war.

The strangest game that I've seen was one where the U.S. were the bad guys. It made me feel uneasy for about 30 seconds and then reality hit. It's a game and there are different perspectives in which people see historical events. The Civial War in the US is a perfect example. People from the north do not tell the same story that people from the south tell it. Even to this day, you'll get 2 different stories on what the ware was about. While I may not agree with the southern perspective, I've had good relationships with people who believe the southern perspective.

Now if a person is posting racist propaganda then that's totally different than the video that the OP posted.

EDIT: Now if Kung Fu wang isn't showing the context in which that video was created then it could be part of a racist message. He likes to leave stuff out, so people usually end up commenting on part of the whole.

Well, there's loose interpretation, and then there's playing into a bigoted narrative. Like, for example, if someone made a movie about the Civil War where the black Southerners were happy with being enslaved, or a movie about the Indian Wars where the Native Americans were depicted as a bunch of murderous barbarians and the settlers as all helpless innocents, that would be more than just "loose interpretation". But if I posted a clip from a movie like that to a message board mostly visited by people from China or India, I wouldn't necessarily expect them to necessarily see the clip and immediately be aware of the whole context of the story and the historical context. I suspect that there may be something like that at play here, or maybe someone KungFuWang was talking to was claiming there was? I think he'll have to fill us in.

 

[Dirty Dog]

movie about the Indian Wars where the Native Americans were depicted as a bunch of murderous barbarians and the settlers as all helpless innocents, that would be more than just "loose interpretation".

There are literally dozens of movies with exactly that plot.

 

[Gweilo]

Every country will see their history different from others, and us English are probably the best at having rose tinted glasses view of our own history.
For me it was a movie clip, I don't believe it was racist, if it was supposed to be fact based, then like others I know very little of this period in Chinese history, but I don't think the Japanese would have retreated so quickly.

 

[dvcochran]

Nearly every country has this story from one side or the other. I worry the definition or at least the perception of racism is getting so stretched and overused no one really knows what it is.

 

[Prostar]

Racist? No. I would more likely say partisan.

 

[WaterGal]

There are literally dozens of movies with exactly that plot.

Sure. And they've aged very, very poorly, and would widely be seen as appallingly racist today (because they were).