Let’s Talk About Asian People’s Non-Imaginary World
Because Asians deserve representation too, and your hypocrisy disgusts me.
Back in 2017, when a certain Chinese — me — whined about a certain fictional character that isn’t real — Motoko Kusanagi — being whitewashed in the Ghost in the Shell remake, a large number of people punched me down and claimed that I was being ridiculous and how Motoko’s race didn’t matter because it was never stated in the original film what race she was. There was no media outrage, and most of the negative criticisms did a fair job of criticizing the film for its writing instead of bringing gender politics into it (save a small number of non-mainstream media outlets). I feel like one part of why Scarlett Johansson was left off easy by social media was because she’s a woman, which is considered a minority among our media circles. It really doesn’t help that most people still treated anime as some disgusting and niched hobby that no one cared about in 2017 (even in 2022). No one’s gonna care about Japanese-Americans’ representation when the source material wasn’t even American. Get the heck out of here, you weeaboos.
But today, in just five years, all kinds of people have certainly come out of the woodwork, didn’t they? People crying about their representation being prejudiced against, as if racial representation is finally a trending topic again. Or maybe, just maybe, black representation has always been treated more favorably than Asian ones, probably because white people didn’t enslave the Japs and Chinese.
The truth is, I used to be a liberal leftist who cared about all that stuff, about racial representation, about diversity, and I was even a vocal supporter of Black Lives Matter without bothering to do research about what’s really going on with that dubious movement. But nowadays, having heard the pretty sensible viewpoints of certain individuals who have found hypocrisy in the mainstream media’s utilization of “diversity” as a profiting tool, I can’t help but see the holes in the left’s logic, the double standards in defending one race, but ignoring or even patronizing another. Because it’s not just about my representation as a Chinese — something I could barely give a crap about anymore when Shang-Chi tried to pander to the Chinese in me — but also the representation white people feel towards existing IPs.
It’s one thing to gender/race-swap a fictional story from hundreds or even thousands of years ago because no one alive today feels attached or represented by that story, but it’s a whole other thing together to dismiss the representation of white ginger girls who grew up with the ’89 cartoon. And the keyword here is “dismiss.” It’s not just that they’re ignoring the feelings of white people, but they’re actively dismissing it, treating white people as lesser people as some form of bizarre revenge for crimes committed by their ancestors. You know how white people get mocked for using the phrase “I have black friends” when having their racism questioned? Well, I’m a Chinese who has white friends, and they treat me as equally as any other individual. So your media outrage against an entire race confuses me, and your problematic, hypocritical method of replacing a character’s race to have a conversation about racial diversity disgusts me. Two wrongs never make one right, and if white people have race-swapped black characters, making you feel justified in taking revenge, then you’re just repeating what they did, making you as bad as them. Prejudice is NEVER the solution for prejudice. It’s the classic juvenile schoolyard defense of saying, “They started it” when you were in elementary school.
So anyway, until someone restore my Japanese Motoko using AI technology, I’m not going to stop harping about this double-standards hypocrisy, especially if more people are going to harp on Medium about “bad white people bullying me about the race of a cartoon character.”
