- I don’t care as a matter of fact of your “jewishness”: you’re the one who talked about it, so don’t if it’s just a fact dropping that does not add anything important to the discussion.
If someone says I can’t have an opinion on racial stereotypes unless I’m a member of that race (which is bullshit, by the way), then it’s absolutely relevant to the discussion to mention that I’m a member of one of the races that is being stereotyped.
Along those lines, for those of you who think you have to be a member of the race being stereotyped…what gives you the right to insist it’s not a stereotype if you aren’t a member of that race? That’s far worse!
If anyone here (who doesn’t think there are racial stereotypes in TPM) is a Black Asian Jew, I’d like to hear about it for sure.
Ah, I didn’t say you can’t have an opinion. I said you aren’t the best one to determine if something is offensive to a particular group outside your own. One of the points I was making is that a lot of these accusations of racist stereotypes are being leveled at GL by people of the same racial group he belongs to, not the racial groups might claim to be offended. Now, we have an example of one person who is offended by Watto who is of the group that the stereotype applies to. I think he is misreading a lot into it that isn’t there because I see a much closer match to the stereotypical junk dealer as exemplified by Steptoe and Sandford.
And we heard from an Asian (from Hong Kong) who says that the Neimoidians are not offensive to him in any way. And Ahmed Best is in the group that should be offended by Jar Jar and he sees no reason to be offended by the character he created. I also haven’t heard that these two groups were up in arms over the movie. It has been mostly white people who dislike the film to begin with.
One of the problems of being in the white majority is that is the precise group that has created and perpetuated the stereotypes. The stereotypes are a shorthand for us. They were widely used until they become offensive. Pretty much all of them have become offensive as has the white washing of roles in films. And there are all types of stereotypes, not just racial or cultural. But you have to be careful that calling out something as an offensive racial/cultural stereotype doesn’t reveal the stereotypes you have embedded in your head.
Probably the biggest thing that bugs me about labeling the Neimoidians as an Asian Stereotype is that Asia is a big place and a lot of cultures are Asian. More than a third of the world’s population is Asian. Do you mean Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean, Mongolian, Siberian, Russian, Kazakhstani, Turkish, Iranian, Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi, Burmese, or Thai? Each of these that old Hollywood deigned to acknowledge had their own stereotype, they weren’t lumped together. There was and is no Asian stereotype. There is yellowface for the East Asian racial group, but you can’t say that the Neimoidians meet that criteria. And the movie characters that were portrayed that way were always clearly from a specific national stereotype (usually Chinese or Japanese).
And I’m arguing this because in the scheme of things, we have a lot of serious issues without looking for minor issues where they don’t exist. We have lots of people who make movies who fail to think of diversity when casting. We have lots of writers and creative people who don’t think outside the box. And then there is the whitewashing of roles. Most of our movies are not representative of our population. Let alone representative of the world population. And that doesn’t even touch on the active racism and cultural bigotry that exists still today. We have plenty of real problems in the world to deal with without making up ones that don’t exist.