OMG, are you fucking serious? Way to totally miss the point.
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Living in Japan âbrieflyâ does not make one an expert. Give it a decade or two, and THEN tell us about pernicious values that slowly erode your sense of place in the culture. Racism in Japan is a huge problem. They have weird distorted views of Koreans, Chinese, brazillians, Russians⌠Hell, they are even suspicious of Japanese people that have spent too much time abroad in their youth. Have you ever seen an eleven year old haafu kid crying because she was getting bullied at school⌠By her teacher?
Itâs serious, and no one is talking about it.
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Watch Rahmanâs video once or twice more.
Thank you, that part especially bears repeating!
His bit on âWorkshops for Whiteyâ makes a similar point: white people often do inflict obnoxious and oblivious behavior onto people of color. White people should learn about how they often tend to do so because theyâre in the white majority. Instead of taking offense at having a simple fact pointed out â that they are in the societal majority, and that as a result, they often act accordingly. Much to the annoyance and occasional detriment of people not in that majority.
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Thank you! That led me to this, which I like even more:
I thought race was only a social construct? I guess Iâm going to need some clearer criteria about who itâs acceptable to label for their guilt-by-blood.
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Say what now?
âInstitutionalâ racism IS âsystematicâ racism. Or at least, âsystemic.â Er, what mean you do?
I thought race was a social construct? I guess Iâm going to need clearer definitions about who I am allowed to hate for their guilt-by-blood.
Yeah. Itâs a social construct with real effects. Like, you know, white privilege. And most white people not even seeing that they have it.
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Why not try NOT HATING people based on some aspect of their physical existence for a change?
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Well, please donât read this as supporting any sort of moral relativity which is something I abhor, but, if you live in country X, and you are oppressed there (Youâre blue and the green people treat you as less than human), making jokes at the expense of the oppressing population is probably a healthy thing. Here we would need to get into the root of humor and its use, I wonât go there, Iâll just say that usually, saying something in a humorous fashion is the only way for oppressed people to talk about some very serious issues.
But, if you live in country Y and the oppression roles are reversed, (Green people just canât catch a break), then its probably healthy for them to make fun of blue people. ITS NOT THE SOLUTION, but well, what can you do?
Now, If you live in country Z, where green people are denied opportunities, thought of as less than human, in fact they have created their own culture and modified language to rally around something as basic as an identity in a place where you are constantly denied one, and to be though of as dumb to cling to it and not embrace white⌠er⌠I mean BLUE mainstream culture, well, it just doesnât follow that you can say that black people should not make fun of white people BECAUSE whites are oppressed somewhere in Africa.
Now if you need me to still very loudly proclaim âRACISM IS WRONGâ because that wasnât apparent in what I wrote or in Aamerâs comedy, then to borrow/parapharase somedy elseâs words, â2014 is going to be really hard for youâ.
I tried hard not to make this too confrontational, Iâm not mad at your comment or anything, Itâs just that you seem to be on the right track about how wrong racism is, 
but you also seem to be unaware of the complexities involved.
I mean, Xenophobia seems to be ingrained into us as a species, we always find ways to hate what we consider outsiders, and we make so many artificial groups out of every perceived difference from what kind of music you listen to, all the way to what color skin you have. But its the institutionalization of these discrimination patterns that need to be fought. For example, if you go in for a job interview and you are white, and the other candidates for the position are a brown skinned man, a black skinned man and a woman, you are favored and reaping the benefits of discrimination.
Not because of something youâve done, and not because you let racist actions go unchallenged.
But because the deck is stacked against everybody but you.
In this sense, âfightingâ against black people laughing at white people is actually, a perpetuation of racism in a small scale. But this is the thing that the discriminators and the people that benefit from oppressing others have thrust upon themselves:
Do you believe that people who dehumanize others, also dehumanize something about themselves?
I do.
Lets posit the average white man, he has nothing against black people but maybe doesnât like black people making white guy jokes, he might suspect that this is slightly racist and he might be right, but he doesnât DARE say anything because its frowned upon, and he would NEVER EVER say anything remotely as offensive as what black people can get away with in public.
Objectively its not right, but the dehumanization has already occurred, the system is already in place and it dehumanizes everybody, to reap the benefits of a system he did not put in place but that grants him advantages and take offense at being laughed at is tantamount to having his cake, and eating it too.
But what if he doesnât want the benefits, what if he actually wants a level playing field?
It doesnât matter what he wants, he still gets bonus points for being white.
But thatâs unfair.
If he thinks thatâs unfair, he should try being black.
The world isnât fair, if it was, everybody would get their just desserts. Maybe that means it will always be unfair.
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In many other parts of the world, slavery would continue unabated for quite some time, often remaining legal for more than a century longer than in the West.
Oh those benighted foreigners! Maybe we should go over there and give them our culture so they too can be Enlightened!
This is good, i can only infer from your avatar that you are white, so I apologize if I make the wrong assumption, but I do believe that we are coming to the tipping point soon, where white people realize just how wrong racism is, I mean, I know YOU know its wrong, but I suspect you donât KNOW how wronged you can be.
You should realize though that the point is to offend, you should find it offensive, and hopefully funny, but thatâs beside the point Iâm trying to make. Only now are white people starting to feel discriminated, only now are white people starting to understand just how dehumanizing it is for people to form an opinion of you because of the color of your skin.
And only now are white people starting to understand how the institutionalization of racism works, because black people DO get to make fun of white people, even if the white people they make fun of are not racist. Of course its not fair, but the mistakes of the past have not been set right yet, the world still isnât fair.
A good analogy to make sense of this is global warming, we are burning fossil fuels like crazy, and weâre reaping the benefits from this, all the conveniences we need. There will come a time, we know this, when we will not continue to do this, in fact, a lot of us, know its wrong to do this today, but canât find a way to end it.
In the future, when our grandsonâs and granddaughters look back, theyâll think we were crazy. And theyâll be right, they will also be stuck with the consequences of our actions while we reaped the dubious benefits.
Theyâll think, I didnât burn any fuel! Why should I live in a contaminated world?
But the mistakes of the past need to be made right.
Also, its worth noting that this does not have anything to do with their ancestors being oppressed, but with your ancestors having created an unjust world (one where you still reap the benefits of being white even if you are not racist) by oppressing their ancestors.
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Now that I am thinking about it, the stresses of the persistent racism in Japan did lead to something that I would possibly construe as âreverse racismâ, although I suppose a better way of describing it might be âreciprocated racismâ. Me and my fellow expats would engage in regular Japan-Bashing sessions where we would basically vent at all the perceived injustices we bore witness to that week. How much of our discourse devolved into over-generalizations? Itâs tough to say, but I know that it happened. During my more cynical times, the negative attitudes that I expressed there followed me out into the social world and I would sometimes misinterpret peopleâs actions because of that. It was like I was preempting Japanese racism by forming my own defensive set of biases.
Also, some further anecdotal evidence of racism in Japan: one of the most frequent questions I got there was, Â âWhen are you leaving?â
â
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Iâm slightly confused. I donât disagree with any of this. What did I say that make you think that Iâm âunaware of the complexities involvedâ of racism?
I donât get the point of any of this. Making fun of any race is going to offend some portion of that race depending on the content and message, period. You canât just point and laugh at people and then expect them to be good natured, let alone point and laugh at someone and then expect them to know they deserve to be pointed and laughed at. Itâs just not going to work that way. I suppose using the difference in race is the most effective way to turn the argument in your favor, but it all comes back to humor getting stronger reactions the stronger the emotions involved with the subject.
In all reality, things can only get better when white people are either A) offended by all jokes involving racial stereotypes because they are sensitive individuals who can feel empathy for people being singled out or B) not offended by any funy jokes involving race. Itâs not so black and white, but the basic point is that people just have to not think about race when they do stuff - like laughing at a joke.
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What youâre getting at is kind of the root of the bit, here. If you say that racism is only about a personâs individual irrational prejudice, that ignores the context for that prejudice. Prejudice is a misanthropic trait, but racism goes beyond mere prejudice. Itâs not just that Olâ Cleetus Donât Like Brown Folk or whatever, itâs that Cleetusâs prejudice is part of a systematic world-wide dehumanization. Even if Cleetus just doesnât like the idea of one dating his daughter, heâs participating in something thatâs bigger than him, and thereâs a good chance that his prejudice is, in fact, inherited from the context heâs in (like if heâs a poor rural white dude in Appalachia). Even if Cleetus has a black best friend and just makes a âNegroes be lazy!â joke, heâs in that context.
The idea that this isnât just about one personâs individual prejudice is an important part of this.
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Redefine nothing. Thatâs what it is. If you want to stick your head in the sand and imagine that this is all about peopleâs individual feelings and plug your ears against all the evidence of history that shows that it is bigger than that, thatâs part of the racism.
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isnât reverse racism still just racism?
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Thatâs a very interesting point, and I hadnât thought about it. From what I hear, it sounds like black Americans get pretty weird treatment in Japan. Maybe a more general definition is in order - something along the lines of âabuse of an underprivileged group by a privileged group because of perceived race.â
Because while the Japanese can occasionally be beastly to Americans, we had our internment camps too. So things change with time and place.
