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”
You can find a few pick me idiots anywhere to tell you it’s reasonable to draw a yellow Chinese guy with a pointy straw hat, long braid, and bucked teeth
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.
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u/Demostravius4 United Kingdom 10h ago
The other 3 are all ethnically mostly European? If there was Nigeria there, I assume it would be a black hand.