5h1njuu:

reclaimingasia:

You are correct in saying that Mod W did say, “

Asian Americans have been jailed, beat, expelled, fired, isolated and even killed (Vincent Chin is the famous example, also CA lynchings are quite notable), for a variety of reasons but none of them, to my knowledge, involve watching anime or listening to kpop.”

But the context in which Mod W was speaking was in response to this comment:

When you believe in the existence of antiblackness as what it should mean (another axis of oppression between blacks and nonblacks), then by definition there can’t really be ‘appropriation’ by blacks. People don’t like hearing that, so I’m personally willing to call out certain forms of appropriation eg. Fetishization or accessorizing. I am also willing to acknowledge that it often comes from the dislike of blackness as done by black people, so black people try to “opt out” and turn to other cultures. Afaik there’s something similar that goes on with asian people where they see blackness as a cool rejection of social norms/a sort of counter culture. Difference being black people are jailed, beat, expelled, fired, isolated and even killed for these same expressions. Does this happen in modern over watching anime or listening to kpop (honest question, if anyone wants to talk to me about their experiences I’m totally open)? Not to mention in the countries where these items originate from, black people are disparaged, assaulted, and mocked consistently. Idk where this falls with Nicki Minaj (I think this is where the convo started) bc as someone who played all the Street Fighter games, I saw the MV as more an homage to the character and the concept. Perhaps that wasn’t her “homage” to make. And like another mod mentioned, the franchise has been EXTREMELY antiblack. And is it different from what SZA did with the Doves in the Wind video? I just hate when people always go on and on about how “black people don’t get called out enough!!!” when black people are still getting mocked, profited off of, exploited, and killed by asian people and these same people will be mum. Social justice isn’t a zero sum game but seeing this has made me lose interest in solidarity as a concept. I have more to say but my food is getting cold but honestly speaking when you stop believing in solidarity a lot of this becomes (shrugging emoji).

I’ll leave the link to the post here in case others would like to look through it.

Let’s look at what I said that you’re likely responding to:

Now, we have talked about how people appropriate culture because they happen to be into K-Pop/Anime. Such examples are accessorizing the languages (some K-Pop fans don’t even bother to learn Hangul and instead choose to randomly use romanized Korean words in their sentences, heaven knows why they do that) and randomly substituting the 4 Korean/Japanese words they know over English words for some reason (that’s not how being bilingual works, LOL).

What I listed are very, very minor examples. It’s poor engagement with pop culture, sure, but how is using another’s language as some kind of fun accessory not appropriation? Not every instance needs to be particularly violent or have malicious intent.

– Michaela

I always think its important to contextualize appropriation, particularly against more extreme forms of persecution and exploitation. Personally, when dealing with appropriation of Japanese pop culture, I’m loathe to make a big deal out of it because, in my opinion, most Japanese pop culture simply isn’t deserving of that level of emotional investment. However, I think it’s also an equally false equivalence to say that because A > B (Where A > 0 ), therefore B = 0.

I used to work with little kids and I can tell you that most 4 year olds don’t care that a pinch hurts less than a punch. They may be able to identify that these are differing levels of pain, but they will very clearly assert that both still hurt. Unsurprisingly, a lot of our feelings don’t really change as we get older. We may be able to more clearly gauge context, decide which battles are worth fighting and determine the most appropriate response, but just because different things hurt in different ways doesn’t change the fact that they all still hurt.

I agree with a lot of this, sorta on both sides. Antiblackness is a huge issue in most, if not all, Asian communities, and the consequences are more extreme (death, injury, systematic economic oppression, etc). I don’t think saying this, however, negates the existence of cultural appropriation from Asian cultures. It still happens. But at the same time we need to examine our own behavior and hold ourselves accountable. I think before we start talking about calling out black people for this, we need to be better about calling each other in the community out for anti-black behavior and ideology. Our first reaction to pain tends to be to clench our muscles to protect the wounded area. Like this, we clench together and become defensive when we feel attacked or hurt. But sometimes it’s better to relax the muscles so we can understand the pain more deeply and respond in a way to prevent more pain on both sides.

Fetishization and appropriation of Asian culture still hurts and does damage. But I think we can bring this topic up in non-combative ways, with understanding and compassion. We shouldn’t tell others to take splinters out of their eyes when we have a log in our own, and I don’t think this will work until we’re all more vocal about opposing anti-blackness within our community. But ideally, we can come to a place where we confront anti-blackness and Asian fetishization in ourselves and each other with open ears and hearts. Im not sure if it’s possible, but I hope so. Wouldn’t it be great if instead of saying “why should we call each other out, why not them” or “why only us”, we could say “I know you are hurt, I have felt similar pain. How can we do better to not further contribute to each other’s pain?”