j.k.r. needs like one close friend to sit her down and go: “okay, but, go over this with me again. you decided the evil snake your dark wizard kept as a pet and vessel of his fragmented horrific soul – the one that has to be murdered in order to defeat the evil wizard – is in fact….an asian woman who was cursed to eventually become a beast and monster in her own body. am i getting this right? the asian woman turns into a snake because her bloodline is cursed and then she becomes the pet of a white supremacist with magic. you invented a body curse specifically for turning women into monsters and your first thought was not like, subversion of fairy tale misogyny but….to add a layer of racism? just trying to understand here.”
Or mayhaps, Political correcteness is in sure need of a close friend to sit down and be able to keep perspective?
Grindelwald, as a character on paper, is not racist. He doesn`t care, as long Wizards get to sit on the top of the pyramid instead of continuing to hide in plain sight and non-wizards consent to that view. Voldermort, on the other hand was indeed all about “pure blood”.
Is there anything in the trailer that claims or tries to claim that only female asians can be cursed? No? I didn`t see it either.
Can we just cool on this social modern trend of ruining storytelling?
me: hey friend of political correctness, there’s this trope that has been used to demonize asian women for the last idk, eighty years in cinema, and I think it’s kinda bad. how do you propose we put that in perspective. i mean the racist trope of the Dragon lady came out of Yellow Peril – which was extreme racism towards asians – and is identified often by making an asian woman look exotic and associating her with dragons or snakes and being very sexual. this whole reveal is a literalization of the dragon lady because this woman is physically going to become a snake. there are entire books written on this one form of racism.
Dragon Lady Stereotype: The Dragon Lady is an ethnic stereotype of East Asian women found in America and other Western societies. The Dragon Lady stereotype is one of the major East Asian woman archetypes utilized in American fictional works in literature, media, and theater and is defined as a strong, deceitful, authoritarian, or mysterious woman of Asian descent. Dragon Ladies are also calculating, clever, and sexually alluring exotic woman determined to seduce white men. The inception of the stereotype is hard to pinpoint, but its stereotypical nature has connections to the racism toward people of Asian descent during the Yellow Peril years in the late 19th century and the sexist attitudes toward East Asian women as sexual objects.
Historically, East Asian societies have long traditions of women serving in positions of power. However, these histories challenged the larger spectrum of Western patriarchal beliefs, which were particularly widespread during the early 20th century. Therefore, the Dragon Lady image is the antithesis of the submissive, subservient, and exotic Asian sex doll stereotype. The term has been applied numerous times to Asian film actresses and politicians throughout the 20th century.
[…]
Welch, Rosanne. Women in American History: a Social, Political, and Cultural Encyclopedia and Document Collection [4 Volumes], edited by Peg A. Lamphier, and Rosanne Welch, ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2017.
It’s almost like this is a thing that is actually a big deal, with a lot of history behind it. that’s not even the full entry, it’s longer than that.
actually this is specifically something that gets taken up a lot in regards to popular culture because it’s a trope that originated FROM pop culture. just searching this for articles and books I get a lot of hits on the subject:
including ones that focus on things like Batman’s Talia al Ghul! And Wolverine!
it’s almost like this is somehow indicative of a pattern i did not personally invent
that affects women, particularly asian women
even in non-acting worlds, like idk, Law.
I just think maybe this is worth noting because it has a nearly century long history that is recognized by a range of scholars and just regular people who have been affected by it.
“Friend of Political Correctness”: yeah but like,,, without racism, how will we tell stories?
White people who openly say that “Diversity is a code word for white genocide” are explicitly stating white people are too weak to survive if they have to compete equally for resources and would literally die out- literally go extinct- without being protected and isolated for their safety.
Y’all white people need to do something about those weak links among you.
It might seem like this argument would work but it doesn’t 😦 I mean, it works against people who are on the fence, but committed white supremacists already have a practiced answer: the white race is always the best and smartest and strongest and whenever they’re not, it’s because traitors on the inside (Jewish people) stabbed them in the back. It’s the same argument Hitler used to rise to power: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stab-in-the-back_myth
This is an incredibly powerful explanatory model if you choose to believe in it. Everything good you do is because you’re naturally good and deserve it: everything bad you do is because an enemy made you do it.
It also doesn’t work for the same reason why “so you think you’re the master race but Asians and Jews are inherently smarter?” doesn’t work. They don’t so much see themselves as the best at everything ever as much as the creators of everything wonderful that has existed. They see all the pretty cathedrals in Europe and go “this is the pinnacle of human achievement and we will never get back to anything like it.” They think any intermixing between White and non-White cultures will lead to the end of civilization as we know it. They justify all of this with some really bad evolutionary psychology. It’s all rubbish of course but it’s attractive to people who are willfully ignorant of science and history.
The government called it a “segregation center,” but Satsuki Ina calls it a prison camp.
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941. The following February, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order authorizing the incarceration of anyone on the West coast who was deemed a threat, including everyone with Japanese ancestry. Government officials arrested Ina’s parents and took them to a horse track outside San Francisco that doubled as a temporary holding area. Ina’s family ultimately was sent to the Tule Lake Segregation Center near the California-Oregon border. Ina’s mother was pregnant at the time.
Tule Lake was a maximum-security prison camp that, at its peak, locked up over 18,000 people. Some 1,200 guards watched over the inmates from 28 watch towers. Some of the guards had machine guns. they were backed up by eight tanks.
“And that’s where I was born,” Ina told me.
Her father delivered a speech at Tule Lake at one point, declaring that it was his constitutional right to be free like other Americans. Ina says the U.S. charged him with sedition and punished him by separating the family and sending him to a prison camp in Bismarck, North Dakota.
By the time World War II ended, her family had been reunited at a prison camp in Crystal City, Texas. Ina was two and a half years old when she and her family were released. She says that time in detention has stayed with her, manifesting in longterm stress and negative physical consequences.
Today she’s a psychotherapist who has spent time visiting family detention centers, including the South Texas Family Residential Center, which sits just 44 miles away from her childhood prison in Crystal Lake.
Ina’s experience is eerily similar to what many young immigrants are experiencing today. I spoke to Ina about her life, work, and the longterm effects of detaining children in prison camps.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
You were born inside a prison camp here in the U.S. The U.S. government apologized for locking up Japanese-American families. What goes through your mind now when you hear the is U.S. detaining about 11,000 children in “shelters” across the country?
It’s alarming. It’s so resonant with what my family and my whole community had to experience. America made a horrible mistake back then.
When Pearl Harbor was attacked, there was so much collective anxiety in our country that finding a scapegoat was a natural outcome. The U.S. government just completely bypassed constitutional rights and human rights. And that’s that’s what I feel like is happening today with the inhumanity of separating children from their parents as a form of punishment.
I interviewed mothers in a family detention facility and I asked them why they would take such a huge risk and cross the continent to to get to the U.S. border. And it’s because they did not want to be separated from their children.
They worried that their daughter could be kidnapped and become part of sex trafficking or that their boy would be captured and become part of a gang. The women told me that they felt like they had to gather their children and escape so that they could keep their children from being separated from them.
What are some of the longterm effects that these children in detention may have to live with?
I am a psychotherapist, so I work with children who have been traumatized and what they are experiencing is definitely trauma. One of the worst traumas for children is to be separated from their caregivers and then placed in what they calling “temporary detention facilities.” But it’s indefinite detention—they have no idea how long they’re going to be held. They have no idea if they’ll ever see their parents again.
That level of anxiety causes tremendous emotional stress, and we know from the research in neuroscience that constant release of these stress hormones can affect a child’s ability to learn, a child’s ability to self-manage, to regulate themselves.
The longterm impact that I’ve seen in my own Japanese American community is this hyper-vigilance, this need to constantly prove themselves, and always being on edge. Japanese Americans are viewed often as the model minority but I see the behavior of needing to strive and not offend and belong and maybe give up their own personal aspirations to fit in has come at a great sacrifice and is a reaction to having been incarcerated unjustly.
You left the prison camp when you were two and half years old. How did those years affect you?
This kind of treatment has consequences for a lifetime for a child. The trauma effect is pretty severe when there’s been captivity trauma. We were unjustly incarcerated when we weren’t guilty of anything.
Today I live with anxiety about the possibility of random accusations or being blamed for something. That’s constantly present. So we are always working hard to please people and not cause trouble. There’s a constant need to be perfect. We don’t show up in the criminal justice system but we end up with a lot of psychosomatic disorders and symptoms resulting from over-achievement. We question our integrity and worthiness. I’m over-educated, for example. I have a Bachelors, Masters, PhD, I’m a licensed therapist, a certified gerontologist, the list goes on.
That high level of anxiety has given me high blood pressure. A lot of us who were incarcerated as children have high blood pressure. A study by Dr. Gwendolyn Jensen found that Japanese men who were detained had a 2.1 greater risk of cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular mortality, and premature death than Japanese men in Hawaii who were not imprisoned. [The study found the youngest detainees reported more post-traumatic stress symptoms and unexpected and disturbing flashback experiences.]
god okay at the gym today i was watching CNN and this stupid fucking white male anchor had a south asian guy as one of the guests or whatever, and they were talking about harvard’s discriminatory policy toward asian american applicants. basically harvard’s approach iterates that without the subjective personality metric, harvard’s campus population would be 43% asian, and thus the quotas, which cap the asian population at 19%, are necessary to preserve diversity. so naturally the south asian guy was talking about how racist this is. and the motherfucking white male anchor waxes lyrical about how he wants his white kids to be around black and latinx people so that they get a “diverse education with multiple perspectives”. as if asian americans don’t contribute to diversity! frankly this whole thing reeks of “asians are overpopulated so we need to rid the world of them” tbh. and naturally the south asian guy was like “wtf are you talking about, that’s quite literally racist against asian americans and it tokenizes black and latinx people as well” and of course the fucking cracker was like “you misunderstood me, you’re reading into this too much, blah blah blah”. when will white men die?
full offense but this really is the model minority myth in action and it’s why i’ve always fucking said that the myth doesn’t just serve to impose positive stereotypes on asian americans. its primary function is to make invisible the racialized struggles of asian people so that white supremacist capitalism can usurp asian labor.
not only do white people routinely erase the diversity of asian people, but they also continually try and erase white supremacist, colonialist, and imperialist brutality against asians. european countries colonized so much of south asia and southeast asia. europe + the US occupied china through spheres of influence. USA dropped two nuclear bombs on japan and interned japanese americans. the US killed numerous vietnamese civilians for the sake of imperialism. the US continues to exert an imperialist influence in the korean peninsula, in guam, in okinawa, in the philippines. britain fucking drained every last resource from india and enacted two genocidal famines in the region of bengal. winston churchill said that indians were worse than germans. britain then left the south asian subcontinent with a bloody partition of punjab and of bengal, effectively contributing to the bengali genocide of 1971. the US invaded iraq and afghanistan and destroyed both countries, it installed a dictator in iran. britain colonized yemen. france colonized lebanon and syria. USA, britain, france, canada, and its allies hurl bombs and drone strikes in pakistan, in yemen, in iraq, in syria, directly leading to the rise of reactionary groups within those countries, such as ISIS. the US has enacted brutal sanctions against north korea and has prevented korean reunification for its own purposes.
and this doesn’t even begin to cover american discrimination against asian immigrants, beginning with the chinese exclusion act and vile xenophobia and racism against east asian immigrants. or how today, south and southeast asian immigrants face immense violence. or the resurgence in anti-sino bias.
it’s so fucking easy to forget that asian americans actually do face racism to because white people are so good at pretending that every asian leads an easy life and isn’t racialized and that all asians look and act and think the same.
There were similar quotas in place, and the same justifications for
them, against Jews at Harvard in the 1920s-1930s. The whole “we don’t
evaluate for merit but for ~~personality~~” is a dogwhistle for
discriminating against whoever is getting the model minority myth
applied to them at a given time. It’s not a positive myth at all and it encourages discrimination, stereotyping, and violence.
The Rumbelle fandom is amazing and talented and has the most creative ideas but it seems like a lot of us are sitting here like “what if they find out what a dork I really am and don’t like it??”
Friends, let me clue you in on something.
WE ARE ALL THAT DORKY AND IT’S WONDERFUL.
I’m telling you right now that I am dorkier than any of you could possibly imagine or likely be in real life. For real. I’ll give you some examples:
I have a cat and I give her a voice. And I argue with myself in her voice.
In fact, every animal I come across gets a voice and all of them have sassy attitudes.
I often go to bed at 8pm on weekdays and 10pm on weekends because I like my sleep.
I know a vast amount of information about the Geiko (Geisha)/Maiko history and culture of Japan and have even gone so far as to make a formal study of it. I can answer all of your very niche questions. When a form of media incorporates Geiko and gets even the tiniest thing wrong I have a fucking fit. (Looking at you, Westworld😤)
I love early American history and had a blog called Your History Teacher Sucked for awhile because I am of the firm opinion that the way we teach history in the United States is bullshit and boring and can be way more fun.
I was a hardcore Vampire: The Gathering player in college and I miss it all the damn time. D&D as well.
I am a vastly hyperbolic person and unironically refer to some of the people I love as “blazing glorious unicorns descended from holy heavenly rainbows.”
There’s more where that came from. And if you’re saying, “But, Maple, none of this is that dorky,” to that I say, yes it fucking is and that’s ok.
Let your dork flags fly the same way you let your LGBTQIA+ flags fly, friends.
I hope this makes some of you feel better.
Maple, Maaaaappppplllleeee!!! You are adorable, and I love you, ok? 🙂
OMG that’s adorable! Mr Sprite often yells at the TV when they get Japanese culture/history etc wrong so I feel you. I’m thinking he shouldn’t watch Westworld…
Mr. Sprite would be irritated as fuck I think with the season 2 Shogun/Edo (roughly) arc. It feels so token to me. The way non-white culture is treated on that show angers me in general and the Japanese arc boiled my blood, especially when they introduced Geiko/Maiko characters. Like, do your fucking research.
Mr Sprite yelling at other things we’ve watched:
No! OMG that’s completely wrong!
Fuck, that’s COMPLETELY disrespectful, you would DIE for that!
Okay, but the seating plan is all wrong, that would NEVER happen!
Well, that’s not even the right era for that porcelain…
He can’t reach his sword in that outfit, wtf?
Excuse me, you show that level of disrespect and you walk out of there? I don’t think so.
No no no, they’re not prostitutes! Look at the obi! FFS…
I think you’re supposed to be uncomfortable by the racism because it was all written by a gross White dude who was probably a major weeb. That being said, I wish the show made that point more explicitly.
I’ll add that it’s very noticeable that a significant swath of people ostensibly defending her feel the need to qualify it with how much they dislike Rose. Saying ‘don’t throw racist misogynistic abuse at the actress of a character you hate’ is … clearing the lowest possible bar. Apparently, it’s so difficult to simply denounce widespread racist misogyny without tacking on their seething hatred of a character her actress did not write.
In 2001, Sarah Silverman told a joke on Late Night With Conan O’Brien that incurred the wrath of Asian American activists and, in a perverse way, also became her breakout moment. The bit involved trying to get out of jury duty, with Silverman recounting a friend’s suggestion that she write something “really inappropriate” on the form — something like “I hate chinks.” But, Silverman said, she didn’t want to cast herself in such an ugly light, so she opted to instead write “I love chinks. Who doesn’t?”
The network that aired the show, NBC, apologized for the slur a few days later. But Silverman refused to, opting instead to fight it out with Guy Aoki, the cofounder of Media Action Network for Asian Americans, on Politically Incorrect. The comedian, who in more recent years has shifted her perspective on — and moved away from — the sort of meta-bigot comedy that marked her rise, insisted at the time that Aoki was a humorless scold who’d missed the point: “It’s not a racist joke,” she said on Politically Incorrect, “it’s a joke about racism.”
She never seemed to hear Aoki’s own point that a slur is still a slur, and that the reason Silverman settled on the one she did was because it was seen as permissible and more acceptable as the stuff of humor. Looking back at this particular sorry-not-sorry moment, and how little the conversation has progressed since, what really rankles is not just the implication that racism against Asians is less serious and less real. It’s the familiar proprietary ease of it all, the sense that it could be gotten away with because Asianness is colonizable enough as an identity that anyone can gain in-group joke privileges. Silverman didn’t intend her chipper punchline (“Who doesn’t?”) to also work as an orientalist slogan, but it did, and still does — a handy summation of the fact that a lot of anti-Asian racism gets presented through a lens of warped, acquisitive affection, and then denied or defended on the basis of it.
Great piece. I respect the Asian-Americans who’ve done nuanced and thoughtful criticism after seeing the movie. But I’m not one of them. The trailer looked like total weeb trash and I don’t care enough about “respecting Wes Anderson’s quirky vision” to subject myself to a second more of it.
Weeb trash is omnipresent in our cultural landscape, so it’s not like I’m mad about it. I’ve gotten good at ignoring weeb trash and tuning it out. What makes me mad is that the Asians who, unlike me, do care enough to engage aesthetically with the movie… are the ones that get the most abuse.
There’s no overt malicious intent to Isle of Dogs’ cultural
tourism, but it’s marked by a hodgepodge of references that an American
like Anderson might cough up if pressed to free associate about Japan —
taiko drummers, anime, Hokusai, sumo, kabuki, haiku, cherry blossoms,
and a mushroom cloud (!).
I feel like if he actually wanted to pay respect for Japanese culture instead of just throw around Japanese-inspired aesthetics, he’d not have included that last one.
I went over there and played in the arcades, ate some good food, hung out with people who liked the same things i do at a concert, and took some great photos with them.
He went over and put on a kimono and conical hat, ran through the streets shouting ching chong, called it a playground, went to a forest and took video of dead bodies, and caused a minor international incident.
So yeah, i’m better than logan paul.
Reblog if you’re better than logan paul!
You have to try REALLY hard to do worse than Logan Paul at this point.
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