im continuing the thing from earlier and this post is kinda long so im putting it in here so its easier to close bc this is cookie thread and like yeah i probably shouldn't be flooding it with fairly serious talk but also i think its important to be saying these things, even if people disagree, so im choosing to anyway
i decided to do some research on what this is bc this language is fairly common but typically seen as non-racist for various reasons. they are called figleaves! lead me to this interesting article here that i’ll bring up later.
i think my point may have been missed, so I will restate it and then explain further why I think language of that type is not ok.
lets look at the original post, and lets question the language. its worth mentioning that so far the device as only been referred to (by sulit) as a “white noise machine”. we know it’s volume adjustable.
daeron then says this. i percieve this to be a comedic exaggeration talking about (in the latter part of the sentence) how the product itself is a bit absurd, like fr wtf is a white noise machine, particually one with an adjustable volume setting? daeron uses this fact for humor. they talk about how this is probably just some fake white noise programmed into some shitty speaker. a shitty chinese speaker. what does chinese add to this sentence’s humor, and how is it being used in combination with the words around it?
if we take it as how daeron is saying how they meant it, it’s simply an expression of the coutnry of origin of the machine. but why does specifying the fact the product is chinese add anything to this sentence? sulit never said anything about its country of origin, why add this detail? to me, its similar to when you hear people go like “oh this BLACK person was super rude to me in the store today!”. black is adding nothing to this sentence if you view it as just a race, but if you look at the implication with these kinds of words theres a clear stereotype put into their meaning. the same is being done with the word “chinese” in daeron’s sentence. why is it important that it’s manufactured in china for the comedic effect thats being intended, and why is it being used in conjuction with the absurdity and it being “shitty”? its important because there is a stereotype around chinese products being cheap, and poorly made. they break easily; they’re knockoffs, and this is all because they are from china. this stereotype is racist, it creates an idea that because a product is chinese it is inherently lesser quality than another product, when cheap, poorly made, fragile, knockoffs are made all across the world
to go on to marissa’s point, yes, there are shitty products from china. i never said there wasn’t. i bought a gameboy emulator thing like last year from china and it broke in a week lmao. that doesn’t mean that the language used here is not racist.
ideas like these are covered in that article i linked earlier! this is the use of a figleaf. clearly, there is actually some truth to the statement that products from china are poorly made, because there do be some shitty products from china, therefore daeron using chinese like that means that there is no racism in the statement. daeron is also not a racist perosn, therefore what they are saying cannot be racist. neither of these things are correct.
people who are not racist say or think racist shit sometimes. my race n ethnicity professor who is, yknow, a professor in race n ethnicity has many stories of how she has accidentally said insensitive and racist things because she didn’t know or didn’t percieve what she was saying as racist. i am not saying daeron is racist! i am not saying daeron has racist or even negative thoughts about chinese people! i thought i had made that clear but i must have miscommunicated. my issue is with the language that daeron is using. by using chinese like this, as a synonym for a shoddy, ineffective, cheap product, it’s reinforcing a sterotype that things from china are inherently less valuable because of their origin. and I percieve that stereotype to be racist. daeron says they weren’t using it like that and they just meant it as it simply specifiying the country of origin, i disagree because that doesn’t make sense to me and their follow up statement of “no escaping the fact that the majority of products sold for cheap are manufactured in china”. maybe you (the reader) disagree with me, idk, but i still think that language like that should be avoided and so if i see language like that being used in what i percieve to be a harmful way i am going to say something and encourage people to like, not do that
i, again, do not believe daeron meant any harm, i severely doubt that idea. but i do think that language use like that can cause harm and that it should be avoided
feel free to drop this subject, i just felt that it was worth fully explaining what my thought process was bc i felt a little misunderstood. i hope i have made myself as clear as possible
