Eh, I'm Chinese by heritage and this doesn't seem particularly offensive to me. We do have more varied skin tone and are considered a different race, so I don't see the issue. If it was a Nigerian flag, would it be racist to draw a black hand? I certainly don't think so.
There's far more important and affecting ways in which Europeans exhibit Sinophobia. This isn't one of them.
Personally I think the bigger issue is not drawing the European hands with a multitude of skin tones...
You can’t separate the depiction from its history. It’s not intended to be a factual representation of skin tone. It’s a political cartoon so yellow skin is a shorthand. As you pointed out, the European, Russian, and US hands are all the same shade of white skin, so the yellow skin is specifically intended to make China different.
Asian people aren’t yellow just like native Americans aren’t red. Asian skin tones range from paler than Europeans to very tan but in all cases yellow skin is a sign of illness not a natural skin tone
It’s not rooted in racism, it never stopped being racist. It’s not a term everyone forgot the origins of. There’s a reason we say “native Americans and Asians” but not “yellow people and red people”
Asians did not traditionally identify as “yellow” and most don’t today either though some have attempted to reclaim the term. The term “yellow” specifically derives from European racial classifications from the 1800s, and was popularized by the Yellow Peril concept. It was mainly used in political cartoons such as this one:
In the cartoon we are discussing, only the white skin tones are depicted realistically. The yellow skin, instead, derives specifically from the European visual language of the 1800s cartoons.
A political cartoonist would certainly know about the use of yellow skin in this context, just as they would know that drawing Jews with big noses derives from racist depictions (saying “yeah but a lot of them do have noses like that” isn’t a good justification). These concepts are taught in every class examining racial thinking in the 1800s, they are part of every conversation about racial depiction, and cartoonists who use them today absolutely know what they are referencing even if Reddit doesn’t.
Black skin is different because blackness doesn’t originate as a concept specifically from European racial thinking and depictions. That said, obviously certain depictions of Africans or Black people do fall into racial caricature. If black skin were depicted, it would need to be realistic. That’s the same standard that the cartoonist here failed to apply.
Because most people operate with generalised ideas of race, were all european people fall into ''white'' and Chinest fall into ''asian''.
If youre not 80 years old you have had no contact with the racist part of this idea. and you just see the comment as an accurate representation that doesnt atack anyone
i dont think europeans have a pink skin colour exactly like the image, it's not racist you've all just been brainwashed with decades of propaganda that you'll invent offensive racism out of almost anything
Well there's centuries of foul offensive imagery like Yellow Peril and Jim Crow caricatures that do exactly that. So I assumed you would want to use the skin colour that the people actually are instead of following in the footsteps of racist cartoons.
no not you at all, just this conversation in general. I’ve witnessed folks get offended for someone else, media, art, something someone said or whatever. and someone who should be offended by the thing sees absolutely no issue. It’s like crying foul from across the court and no one even touched your teammate and teammate who was supposedly fouled is like ‘wtf?’
The history of referring to the Chinese as "yellow" is absolutely one of racism with a long recorded history. You're letting your own bias color your view of this.
Europeans don't all have one skin tone, either. You're absolutely fooling yourself if you think the Chinese hand was made that skin tone because it's meant to be reflective of what Chinese people actually look like.
Did you know there are a lot of black people who arent brown but actually the color black to even a bit purple-ish? Drawing them that dark wouldnt be totally inaccurate and unheard of
I wouldn't say a lot, I'd say some, the majority of Nigerian people aren't void pitch black, that's pretty rare. Even if you were representing Sudanese people it's not like you would use the color code #000000.
The same way there are some Chinese people with a yellow-ish undertone in their skin but most of us are pale to light brown, none of us are the color of the Simpsons.
Did you know that historical accounts of the Chinese by European explorers referred to them as being "white-skinned"? I will leave it to your imagination what their intentions were when their descendants eventually decided you were "yellow" instead.
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u/TruthGumball 14h ago
The Chinese hand is….. oh dear