Eugene Cho, pastor of Quest Church in Seattle, blogs about the Spanish Basketball team’s picture in where they slant their eyes as an “affectionate gesture” toward their Chinese hosts:
I’m in no position to judge any of the individuals or players involved as racists. I like to give people the benefit of the doubt and I certainly do in this situation; Truthfully, I also really like Pau Gasol and Jose Calderon as NBA players…I intend to draft both of them for my fantasy basketball teams in the upcoming season. But having said that, I have no problems with calling the ACT racist. While the intent may have been to demonstrate an “affectionate gesture,” let’s make this very clear: slitting or slanting your eyes is NOT an affectionate gesture. You don’t mock physical appearance because you think it’s affectionate.
As if this picture were not horrific enough the Spanish Tennis team posed for a very similar picture. How can we not call this racism when it was so strongly called out the first time it happened. But not to be out done… the Argentine womens football team decided to join the racist posturing making this an Olympic trifector.
From the Guardian Article:
Re the Guardian article’s suggestion that if the Chinese don’t protest we shouldn’t — bullpucky. We know the gesture is racist. This is not a relative thing; it is an absolute. As Eugene Cho says, you don’t make fun of a trait common to a particular ethnicity out of affection. Good grief, of all the things they could’ve done to show affection, THIS is what they came up with?
Bull.
Man, I hate to be all agreeing-with-the-liberals, but yeah. My ethnicity isn’t easily “affectionately” mocked with a gesture, but my religion is, and if some group of Baptist athletes was making the sign of the cross as an “affectionate” type of teasing, I’d be pissed. OK, maybe they don’t mean any harm, but the level of thoughtless cluelessness is an indicator that they don’t care about my feelings. If they did, they’d have taken the trouble to know enough about me to know that would be offensive. Translate that back into ethnicity, and it’s not cool. They should apologize.
I see. Of all the values in the world, ours are the ones which are absolute, especially when it comes to telling other peoples how they should feel about something.
This gesture is mud with Asian-Americans, but do the Chinese in China consider it so? I’m very, very, very skeptical of any suggestion that they wouldn’t, but it’s a possibility, and the one saving grace for the Spanish team’s position. Again, I highly doubt it, but I haven’t ever lived in China (contrast “lived” with “visited”), nor have ever viewed popular Chinese shows or movies to get a sense of their cultural norms.
You are taking nojojojo much too literally, Daran. I think I could expound upon her kernel of frustration, in the long-winded way that only I can.
What if the Spanish basketball team had loudly and publicly queried Chinese Olympians on what they thought of the incident, and the Chinese, not wishing to deepen some sort of global controversy, just went with the path of least resistance? And the Spanish team then went, “See? No harm, no foul.” I don’t know if this is how it played out, but I’d be supremely unsurprised if it was.
How many times have you seen this play out in real life? Guy 1 is being a regular douchebag to Guy 2, and a third party, Girl 1 (just to add gender diversity), calls him out on it. Guy 1 straightens his aviators, pulls the shoulders back on his pink golf shirt, and says, “What? Naw, naw, we’re cool, right, Guy 2?” And the Guy 2’s of the world, regrettably but oh so often, just offer up the path of least resistance yet again.
The thing is, nine times out of ten, the Guy 1 really does know what he’s doing – whether to get cheap kicks out of it or to play some sort of petty power game or whatever – which is why Guy 2’s resigned affirmation that everything’s cool should not be taken at face value. But if you’re really a decent person, you don’t encroach upon others’ dignity (especially where racial wounds are concerned), and you do it for its own sake, and not merely only to the line of strict culpability. I think that’s what nojojojo was trying to say: we know that it’s racist. You know that it’s racist, and surprise, you got caught. So man up and fess up so we can all go home.
Also, I thought I should add: I may be unfamiliar with China, but I have spent a lot of time in my native Korea, and there, it is beyond debate that stretching out the eyes is an unquestionably offensive gesture.
I hope you don’t regard yourself as a “plain text”-er
In other words, of all the values in the world, ours are the ones which are absolute, and if the Chinese don’t express their agreement, then it’s because they’re wimps.
Look, I find those photos really creepy and offensive. They’re offensive to me. I don’t think I have any business being offended on behalf of other people or making assumptions about what those other people feel about it.
Daran, if the men who die defending their villages in foreign wars, or those who lose a limb from working a dangerous job to support their families, do not agree to the idea that they’re being victimized, then they’re not being victimized, period, yes? After all, they may hold very traditionalist views of family and gender, and thus may even take great pride in the sacrifices they made – and great offense at the notion that they are disempowered victims in any way. So they are not disempowered and they aren’t victims of any sort; straight from the horse’s mouth, after all. And the mere suggestion otherwise on a blog post is cultural imperialism, you assuming things for them, you deciding how they should feel, etc. etc.
Except, of course, the rules are different for issues we actually care about, aren’t they?
Replace men dying in wars with your own pet issue, you being anyone intent to continue these stupid little games.
Being from outside the continent, I can see how you mixed this up. (For those out of the loop, he is quoting back to me a statement I made in the Confederacy thread.)
“Plain text” refers to a political tradition in America that supports a minimalist – the “plain text” – interpretation of the Constitution. It is popular among self-described conservatives in general, and Confederacy defenders in particular. This definition is specific – I was not using the term to mean “textual literalist” in a general sense.
The problem, of course, is that those who say they support the “plain interpretation” are supporting their own interpretation, which they either blindly assume or bullheadedly insist is the *obvious* interpretation. An extreme example of this is the one I brought up: someone who considers “the People” to be a mere rhetorical flourish as it applies to the Tenth Amendment*, but not to the Second Amendment; this example is extreme because it actually involves self-contradiction. However, even internally consistent interpretations still fail the grade, because there is nothing to suggest that their set of rules is the same one the Founders used. But I digress.
I don’t see that your analogy is remotely comparable. If someone dies or loses a limb, that’s a tangible injury, which exists independently of the view the injured person takes of it.
Actually I care about the same issue as you do, except that I apply the rules consistently.
I suspect that whose who created the photo, i.e., those depicted, but also those who suggested and helped to create it, probably didn’t intend to cause offense, but the first rule is that intent doesn’t matter.
We don’t know whether the Chinese were offended, but apparently that doesn’t matter either. What’s left? Only our own feelings. Now I’m quite prepared to be offended on my own account over this incident. What I’m not prepared to do is appropriate the presumed offense of the Chinese. “Don’t appropriate” is one of the rules, isn’t it?
I don’t understand why this is being discussed as if “the Chinese” are the only relevant party that might be offended. After all — as I’m sure everyone in the photos knew — the Olympics are covered internationally, not just in the host country. If Asian-Americans (including Chinese-Americans) find it offensive and racist, why does that somehow not “count”?
Except, of course, that tangible injury in and of itself =/= victimization. A boy who gets scratched up climbing trees is not a victim. A retired football player who walks with a limp and has to take painkillers every morning has been neither disempowered nor oppressed. Tangible injuries can constitute victimization with the right contextual link, but this contextual link is every bit as mental as the one connecting certain images with racism.
The analogy stands. If a man in Rwanda is horribly mutilated by a machete wound, but was proud to have fought, and doesn’t see his plight as victimization, who are we to say he’s a victim of anything? Who are we?
Well, we’re people, with eyes and ears and a rational mind. We shouldn’t make ourselves a burden to that man, but neither is there some sort of mathematical formula whereby the offense we can take can only be less than or equal to the square root of the offense he took minus one. We are perfectly free to form our own opinions.
Let me ask the following three questions, clearly:
(1) What, to you, is the difference between being offended *personally* by something that happened to someone else, and being offended *on that other person’s behalf* for the same incident
(2) – and what makes you so sure you’ve done the former while we’ve done the latter? (This all seems like largely a meaningless semantic quibble to me, which makes your insistence on pressing this point all the more irksome and arrogant. )
(3) And most importantly, how do the two breathe and act differently in real life? How can you tell one from the other?
We’re talking about the behaviour of the Spanish and several other non-American national teams toward their non-American host. Is the entire World’s behaviour to be determined by what offends Americans?
Maybe I missed something in reading through some of the links in this thread, but where did anyone say that people’s offense was taken on behalf of the Chinese people? What I have read is that people are calling the photo and the gesture, whatever the intent behind it, racist, and racism is not limited to or by the national origin of the people against whom any particular racist behavior is directed.
If I call a person from Nigeria a nigger, does that mean that African-Americans should not call my speech racist, even if the person from Nigeria has never heard the word before and has no idea how offensive it is–or, to be more precise, has no idea the depth of the hatred it signifies in me and/or my culture (since the word emerges from my culture, not the culture of the Nigerian) for Black people? (And wouldn’t the issue and the questions be very similar if someone from Sweden called the person from Nigeria a nigger?)
And wouldn’t it be worth educating the person from Nigeria to understand the history of that word, how it has been used against people of her or his race, not so much because he or she should understand the word in the same way, with the same emotional response, as an African-American, but because he or she should understand that the racial hatred out of which the word nigger emerges, and which that word expresses, exists in and will be applied by people like me to all Black people, whether they are African-American or not? In other words, isn’t it worth educating that Nigerian to understand that he or she should take offense, even if they don’t have the social, political, cultural, historical context that an African-American does?
And suppose I use the word naively, without really meaning to cause offense, as I have sometimes heard brand new immigrants to the United States do. Should I not be made to understand the hatred that inheres in the word? Does my intent and my ignorance somehow erase the historical, political, cultural and social context out of which the word emerges. I don’t think so.
I believe that the Spanish team meant no offense; I believe that they truly believed the gesture was and should be read as affectionate. I find it hard to understand, however, how the intent and belief of the Spanish team is not as naive as the new immigrant here who uses the word nigger without really understanding what he or she is saying. I do not mean that I think the Spanish team was being willfully naive, but naivete does not change the fact that words and actions have meaning independently of the intent of the people who say and do them, nor does it absolve people of the responsibility for understanding the meaning of what they say and do.
Basically Darran is asking, “If a Klansman burns a cross in the woods and no black people see it, is it still racist?”
A: Uh…yes.
That said, when I was little, I did this same gesture because I wished I could make my eyes slanted. I thought slanted eyes looked so cool! So I agree with the post title; your slanted eyes ARE beautiful!
This is such irrational nonsense that it’s hard to know how to respond.
Are you under the illusion that members of the Spanish (basketball?) team are under some sort of duress, so that the preferences of some Americans will determine what they may or may not do? If so, you’re mistaken. If not, then your post made no sense.
What offends (some) Americans is determining only what some Americans criticize. Whether or not the Spanish team members, or other people, wish to take the criticism seriously is determined by them, not by Americans.
Permit me to add my standard 2 cents regarding semantics. Regular readers can just skip ahead.
I think of communication following various steps. A speaker has an intention. The speaker speaks to fulfill that intention. The hearer hears something of what the speaker says. The hearer understands something of what she hears.
I do not understand messages to have meaning outside of the context of a speaker or a hearer. Thus, I don’t understand the word “nigger” to BE offensive. I sense many people share this intuition at some level. Thus we see the familiar parade of hypothetical situations where the word “nigger” might appear:
1. Child/new immigrant that is unfamiliar with the word. (No intent.)
2. Saying “nigger” where no one can hear you (No hearer.) or where no one speaks English well enough to understand the term. (No understanding.)
3. A scratched record saying “Mick Jagger” which comes out sounding like “nigger.” Or a sqeeky hinge or a creeky rocking chair that produces the same result. (No speaker.)
I strive not to attach magical properties to words. If I want to discuss a person’s intentions, I try to do so explicitly. If I want to discuss a hearer’s feelings (including my own), I try to do so explicitly. I try not to deny the agency either of the speaker or of the hearer.
In some contexts, I take offense at the use of the term “nigger.” In other contexts (including in the contexts of the posts on this discussion), I do not. And I would not take offense if the hinges on my front door started emitted sounds akin to “nigger.” At the same time, I would probably fix that hinge before inviting company over – not because the word IS bad, but rather because the word may provoke discomfort on the part of my guests (or myself).
In sum: resist magical thinking; examine context; acknowledge agency.
nobody.really –
I disagree with the second example of the three you posted above. If there is no one else around, or no one who understands English, the likely “hearer” is the speaker herself. Self-communication is real and important, and a person who often uses offensive terms when no one else can hear is likely using it in an offesive manner that will reinforce their offensive views.
Yes. In other words, Daran is creating a binary distinction that is not at all clear. See the second half of my post #12. The only point I see to this is posturing and persona-building. And the issue deemed expendable is race.
Comments and critiques on a blog thousands of miles away from either China or Spain are not *determining* anything – nor are they silencing, chilling, censoring, or whatever other word you care to use. Not even close. Forcing a Sistah Souljah-esque non-debate over semantics, on the other hand, is considerably closer.
I’m bowing out of this thread now, since I’m once again dominating discussion here. I will respond to this point, since it misstates my position, and I can rectify that very briefly:
Actually what I’m asking is more like “if someone who isn’t a Klansman, and isn’t even American burns a cross in the woods, and an American sees it, is it really appropriate for the American to assume that the non-American means the same by the act as a Klansman?”
Good point. Indeed, I am my own primary audience.
Thus I acknowledge that using the term “nigger” with myself may have bad consequences – for me and for the people I subsequently interact with. But the term may also not have bad consequences. I don’t know that Samuel Clemens inflicted harm on himself by repeatedly writing the words “Nigger Joe” while drafting The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
In any event, the word “nigger” has harmful consequences, or not, depending on context, including the speaker and the hearer. Abstracted from context, I don’t know what meaning to attach to the word.
To return to the topic at hand, what meaning should I attach to the photo of the Spanish basketball team? Neither Eugene Cho nor I have enough context to evaluate the intention of the players. Nor do we have enough context to evaluate the likely consequences for a Chinese audience. Mostly we have the context to evaluate the consequences for ourselves: we each feel offended.
Yet we express our feelings differently. Cho does not acknowledge his own agency. Rather, he says that the image IS offensive (and IS racist.) In contrast, I try to acknowledge and affirm my own agency in this. I feel offended; the image provokes a reaction in me.
25 yrs ago Catherine MacKinnon noted the challenge of addressing a viewpoint that is presented as “the standard for point-of-viewlessness, its particularity the meaning of universality.” I try to remember that I have grown up in a specific context, and saw the image of the Spanish basketball team in a specific context, and these contexts influence my reaction. I don’t know that the whole world shares my contexts; I try to resist imputing my understandings to the universe at large.
Belated — forgot to check back on comments here — to Daran,
The reason I call it an absolute is because it doesn’t matter if the Chinese were offended or not. The gesture takes a racial characteristic and overemphasizes/caricaturizes it. This is the very definition of stereotyping, and like most racial stereotypes, it has negative effects far beyond its intent or the feelings of the targeted group. I wonder how many non-Asians think, as my own father does, that “Asians can’t drive well because they have no peripheral vision”, and similar total bullshit concocted around the eye-shape caricature? I scold my father for this, but I’m not surprised he thinks this way; his father grew up in WWII and the Korean-War era, when the US government used slanty-eye caricatures to dehumanize the Japanese. This kind of “shorthand thinking” encourages lazy-minded — or racially biased — people to reduce those who are different from themselves to a handful of inaccurate, wildly exaggerated, bad jokes. Or animals, different enough from “normal people” to be shot at, rounded up, interred in camps, or A-bombed until they glow.
This kind of caricature — and the thinking that it reveals and encourages — is absolute because the harm that it causes is absolute. The Chinese may not be offended by it, and the Spanish may not have intended offense (though I still think that’s bull), but we’ll all still have to deal with the consequences of this kind of “joke”.