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Might it be worth moving discussion of "all Japanese people are ninjas" to the thread in the Policy devoted to such discussions?
Short version:
1) I think in terms of my own reading that the comment reads most naturally as a comment on Mark Millar's tendency to resort to cliché rather than a sincere belief about the current occupation of the population of Japan, or the propagation of said belief.
2) "He can't be making a racist comment, he's not a racist" - see under "hysterical female". There's quite a good thread on this here.
3) I think we've encountered quite an interesting issue here, which leads back to something Deva quoted, to the effect of "you treat being called racist as if you've been told you have syphilis. It's more like you have snot hanging out of your nose. Wipe it off, carry on". That is, setting up racist/not-racist, did something open to question/is a racist structures serves to make it much harder to identify racist behaviour, because the immediate response is that old favourite "Oh, that makes me a racist, does it?" Which is a _very big thing_ to accuse somebody of, and as such if it's the only option is going to legitimate lots of low-level potentially offensive behaviour through a reluctance to use the doomsday weapon. See the baby-killing Bengalis of old Whitechapel town/the cock-rotting locals of India and, indeed/the stinking gypsies of all over the place.
4) Which is quite useful. It is reasonable to argue that Marvel comics tend to represent all Japanese people as ninja (Yukio, Deathstrike etc) or Samurai (The Silver Samurai, Sunfire etc), or otherwise _Japanese for a reason_ - that is, that superhero comics are orientalising (in the Bio K9 sense). That strikes me as relevant, most obviously in comparison: gypsies, while stereotyped in superhero comics in a number of ways, usually involving either an obsession with historical persecution (Magneto, Doom) or mystic powers (also Doom, Margali Zsardos), are not generally portrayed either as illiterate or smelling of cabbage.
5) Having said which, Tricks did not originally say "that is a racist comment" - he said "hang on, isn't that similar to a comment that caused a fair bit of controversy and offence?" Surely that could very simply have been resolved by clarifying that the intended meaning was "In the Marvel/Millar worldview, all Japanese people are ninjas"? I'm not sure why there was any need to try to belittle and insult Tricks (crybaby? stupid?), except of course that if Dudley 1,2,3 ever actually managed to contribute something of relevance or value to a discussion the world would end.
I'd suggest anything further goes to the Policy. |
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