Chaina - Part 2

There's a lot that I wanted to throw into this post back on Saturday, but now I can't say I recall too much of it, and much of what I want to say I'm going to leave to Bill Maher at the end of this video (3 consecutive blogs with a video, that's something new). Essentially, the point is that people underestimate how racist China can be.

This might be less controversial now that groups such as the Uyghurs have been in the news for a few years, but it bears accentuating. The racism isn't even anything different from what we are used to in Canada. Anti-black, pro-white (and Chinese, of course); fearful of foreign religions, particularly islam; skeptical of miscegenation. Some of this is I get from news stories (stories of anti-black bigotry in Canton are a recent story to look up), some of this I'm carrying over from my experiences in Korea.

This doesn't mean that Chinese people somehow aren't "nice people", especially not to be, a white guy, but it does mean they're people. Of note this is also not stating a fact about "everyone in China", just about a general zeitgesit of a country silhouetted sometimes in its foreign and domestic policy. One important factor to note is that it isn't remotely racist to claim this, just as an Asian student at Berkeley in the 60s would not have been racist for protesting Americas history of civil rights. There are other practices other than racism which are common around the world. And again, they can be protested as appropriate wherever they pop up. Occasionally, in times of tragedy, some of my friends seem to forget that.

Anyway, here's Bill Maher hitting the flavour of my post both better and funnier.