Nov 15, 2020
When racial politics intersect with Eurocentrism
Antiracism campaigns can sometimes be Eurocentric.
A few weeks ago, The Guardian posted a video criticizing the misrepresentation of black characters in Japanese anime on YouTube and accused Japanese anime of “racism”. The video begins with a strong accusation: “enough with racism,” and then proceeds to explain how Japanese anime presents black characters in a stereotypical, racist way (such as having huge lips and bulging eyes) that resembles how early U.S. cartoons degrade black characters. The video ends with a forgiving, or rather merciful, tone, stressing how the African American community loves Japanese anime and the redemption of the racist Japanese people is possible as long as they correct themselves in the future.
Yet, I would like to raise a question here:
Can the misrepresentation of black characters in Japanese anime really be equated to racism, which is predominantly a Western concept?
Although it is often argued that racism and anti-racism are universal phenomena, and the whole world bears the responsibility to undermine them, I find it dangerous to efface the contextual distinctions between racism in the West and the misunderstanding of black people in Japanese anime, in which way we are neglecting the fact that 1) Japan does not have the history of enslaving and disenfranchising people base on their skin color in a way comparable to that in the U.S. and Europe; also 2) the misrepresentation in Japanese anime stems from its lack of understanding of black people, whereas the racism in the U.S. and Europe is an entrenched, systematic, almost theoretical, way of thinking that black people are inferior to white people. Certainly, most people in Japan, although they might think people having black skin are strange because the chances of encountering a black person are rare, do not, like “racist” people in the U.S. and Europe, consider black people as inferior (I do acknowledge the fact that some Japanese people consider black skin as unclean like the racists in the West does, but that is not a majority after all). You can say that Japanese people are xenophobic, but certainly not racist. Indeed they need to adjust their xenophobia and lack of understanding of those of black skin, but it is also worth reminding that this misunderstanding is an inevitable phenomenon when different cultures or ethnicities encounter one another and cannot be compared to the Western concept of racism.
It is also interesting to observe that although some of the black characters that The Guardian video cited as evidence of racial stereotypes are indeed related to real-life people of African origins or black skin, some other characters that the video cited are entirely dissociated from reality, and it appears that the video is applying its system of values of racism/antiracism to an entirely different plane of existence. For example, it is never mentioned that Mr. Popo (from Dragon Ball Z) is a black human that is equivalent to black people in the reality, and judging from the setting of Dragon Ball Z, it is much more possible that Mr. Popo is not a human at all, let alone an African American. For another example, Blackluster (from One Punch Man), which the video also cited as evidence of racial stereotypes, isn’t even born black. It is his own effort to transform skin color to black, a color he considers more aesthetic, when he aspires to become a bodybuilder later on in his life. Granted, politics exist everywhere, and I am not hypocritically calling people not to politicize anime, but it seems just unfeasible to cite characters that exist in an entirely different plane of existence as evidence of racial stereotypes. It is also unreasonable to say that African Americans are being misrepresented in these cases because they simply aren’t represented by these anime characters at all.
It is perhaps unsurprising that what came to my mind first when watching this video was not racism or stereotypes, but neocolonialism and Eurocentrism. The way the video is carried out, including the tone of the narrator and the title “Anime gets blackness wrong, here’s how fans are fixing it” (italics mine), all conjure the memories of the West’s past habits of enlightening and educating the East Asian people. Behind this is the idea that the West’s (here referring to the U.S. and Western Europe) system of values is universal and progressive, and that, 1) in terms of spacial relationship, ideas diffuse from the center, the West, to the periphery, the rest of the world, and 2) in terms of temporal relationship, the West leads and the rest of the world has to catch up with it. Here, the video treats the West’s problems as the whole world’s problems, perceives everything with a racism/antiracism framework, and attempts to impose this racism/antiracism worldview to the Japanese anime industry. The message is, we the West are already progressively fighting against racism, while you Japanese people are still ignorant and have little knowledge of racism, so you need to fix yourselves and catch up with us. The West, in essence, imposes a single linear timeline of progress to the Japanese people, that is, slavery→emancipation→racism→antiracism. In the Western liberals’ worldview, the Japanese people are still at the stage of racism; therefore they need to be educated and enlightened to move on along this timeline of development. Here, I believe one does not have to be a scholar of neocolonialism to see that this sounds like complete bullshit in the view of the Japanese people. If one really wants to propose a timeline of development for the Japanese people (which I highly discourage), I would say ignorance→encounters→misunderstanding/xenophobia→mutual respect would be a far better one.
Here I would like to shift the topic of discussion to another even more obvious example of how neocolonialism and Eurocentrism exist in antiracist campaigns. In June, as an act to support the ongoing Black Lives Matter movement, Johnson & Johnson stopped selling skin-whitening lotions in Asia and the Middle East because they want to “bring a new offering to the market for diverse skin tones.” However, when this news reached the Taiwanese online community, people complained that the whiteness they want has nothing to do with the whiteness of white Westerners; rather, the whiteness of these Westerns are deemed as unhealthy, pale, and lifeless. Here, we can see that the West arrogantly presupposes that Asia (and perhaps the Middle East) is still in the colonial thinking of the superior West and mistakenly believes that Asians will do their best to imitate Westerners, whereas the reality is that the Asians have already discarded this kind of colonial thinking and have constructed their own standards of beauty. In the colonial era, the colonized does not have a voice; instead the West, the colonizers, speak for them. Now, likewise, the Middle East and Asia’s voices are being usurped by the West — what the West thinks is best is best for Asia and the Middle East. Johnson & Johnson, and the West, did not really care what the other parts of the world think. If the West says that antiracism and no whiteness are best, then the rest of the world is expected to follow.
Since the age of colonization, the West has been exporting its value to the rest of the world, regarding values which, in fact, originate from the specific context of Western culture and history itself, as universal, and implicitly telling the rest of the world to follow and to fix themselves, otherwise they are ignorant and regressive in the timeline of development imagined by the West. However, as a person from East Asia, am I obligated to assume the burden of racism? Am I obligated to champion for Black Lives Matter rather than All Lives Matter? Am I obligated to treat a white person as a white person and a black person as a black person who needs to be rescued from racism, rather than treating both of them as fellow human beings? Am I obligated to accept Western liberals’ framework of racism/antiracism?
I don’t think so.
