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Originally Posted by MMM
I had a feeling someone would come up and say "lighten up".
I have no problem with poking fun at stereotypes, but this shirt crosses the line from poking fun to what I consider to be racist.
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Right, cause katana's and being super-humanly smart are horribly, racist things. How dare they
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Let's look at some examples:
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Great. Lets.
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9. Concept of the word "the" is beyond his comprehension.
So Japanese people are so stupid, they cannot even understand the concept of "the". Not only is it not funny, but it is degrading the intelligence of an entire race. There is a word for that...
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Saying the Japanese speak horrible English isn't racist. Not the funniest thing in the world, but very very far from racist.
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8. Had the innate ability to be a human calculator.
This is a dehumanizing stereotype. Yes, Japan, Korea, Singapore and students in other Asian countries tend to do better in math than those in the US and other Western countries. So instead of that being a call to educational action, we make fun of it.
Notice the use of the word "innate", implying that math skills are not due to good education, but are skills Asians are born with (not true).
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And thus, it's funny. It's saying it is like they were born super smart. I find it hard to see that as racist, or hell, I don't even see that as offensive! The only negativity found in this example was put in place by you rather than actually being implied by the example.
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5. Slices meat with a katana
That's just stupid. More Americans have held pistols than Japanese have held katanas.
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OH NOES! THEN IT MUST BE TOTALLY RACIST AND OFFENSIVE!
Japanese + Katana = racist?
As said before, the only negativity here was brought on by you.
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2. Can't say "parallel" to save his life
Like the "the" comment, this is simply degrading the Japanese language because it doesn't have an "r" or "l" sound like the one in English. Like that's Japan's fault. It is such an ethnocentric comment to make (much less put on a t-shirt).
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Same with the "the" example.
I must ask, if you were to create a list similar to this that
wasn't "offensive", what would be on your list?
