this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2023
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…didn’t this meme start in China? Pretty crucial context here lol.
Are you using it in the original contex? No. So then it doesn't
I don’t use it at all, but I don’t particularly like the implication that it’s definitely racist in all contexts. It just feels reductive.
No, it is simply rascist in the context we are going to be using it. If we were posting on doyen in mandarin it woudl be diffrent. This is some reddit runoff we are filtering.
Tbf, most times I’ve seen it posted it’s by people who think they’re totally owning him and who would have done the exact same if it had been any other character. Is it racist in their understanding of China? Probably. Is it racist because Pooh is yellow? I honestly don’t think so, and it doesn’t seem to be vaguely relevant for those posters.
Then again, I wouldn’t be surprised to see 4chan and related sites use it like that, so I’m not saying it definitely doesn’t happen.
The image in the OP is about a banner picture on sh.itjust.works where Xi was literally colored yellow. It's not about the meme in general.
Ooooooh, that makes a lot of sense. Thanks, fam!
Mfs when they're not allowed to be racist any more
I'm pretty sure the original context was like "Hey this picture of two presidents walking kinda reminds me of this children's book. That's cool."
And the current context is "Xi Jinping is a dirty [slur slur slur] and he's yellow"
Rap music also started in the black community but that hasn't stopped white racists from using tropes and out of context snippets from rap music to attack black people.
Not exactly, because the meaning changed from "hey look Obama and Xi loojs kinda like this silly little picture of Winnie the Pooh and Tigger" to "the Chinese people yearn for freedom from this censorship-loving yellow man sure hope Xi gets angry about my crackkker posting".
Is that context crucial though?
It gets brought up every time its pointed out how this is rascist, and it doesn't make the use of this mene less rascist
It matters because this meme implies that it’s always racist. I don’t mean to say that it can’t be racist.
I'm not saying that's what you're intending to do. Just pointing out how it gets used by people who want to claim its not used in a rascist way at all
Yeah but they're not the ones who colored a Chinese man's skin yellow.
Yeah and that meme had Obama as "tigger". Wonder why...
The meme starting in China doesn't mean much. Pretty sure Chinese people can make racist memes too.
Would you be comfortable calling Obama a tigger? You realize in a bar that would get you beat up right?
The original context for Xi being Pooh probably wasn't racist either, unless there's a similar connotation to yellow skin in Chinese culture. Therefore you could also dismiss the yellowface concerns because the original meme wasn't meant to be racist.
Of course we shouldn't do this, and instead accept that the meme is now racist because it's mainly used by Westerners who are well aware of the racist implications.
No, but there a good chance there is one drunk one that would.
Who's in Paris? It isn't for us to say
When you are talking about the hundred acre wood in a bar what do you call him? Tiao Tiao Hu?
I am not taking to the person who invented the meme. I am talking to you.
I don't wanna get all streamer about it but I think you could say numur in a gamer way
Yeah racists hate deniability, we all know they definitely don't love to play their little "teehee you're overreacting" games. OK sign anyone?
It did, as a light-hearted joke comparing Xi and Obama walking side by side with a resembling image of Tiger and Pooh. Of course, westerners then proceeded to take it and turn it into their own distortion and elaborate some story about how China is banning Winnie the Pooh and that is why painting a chinese man yellow with photoshop is a sign of resistance against a government on the other side of the globe and totally not racist.
It resembles a lot the same thing that happened with that image that floated the internet around a few years ago of Putin photoshoped as a stereotypically and comically flamboyant homosexual man, which is totally not homophobic even if the punchline is "he's gay" because you can always make it up that the image is banned somewhere and thus is a sign of resistance and contains no reactionary sentiment behind.
I wouldn't really called the original "light hearted" since Obama was compared to character named literally "Tigger".
I remember that meme showing up on r/blursedimages, and Le Aberage Redditors were absolutely making the connection.
I'm not really convinced that they would be making a reference like that that only works in English (and is a bit of stretch even then imo).
Well, as JucheBot noticed le average redditor instantly connected the dots so i would say it's purposeful by and for those kind of people. For all we know it might be made by some shit like Serpentza or some local colonized lib. Their numerous presence is confirmed even in China. Also i don't think i like the suggestion that Chinese don't know english.
Le average redditor is probably a native English speaker
"Knowing English" and "making subtle references that only work if everyone thinks of a cartoon character's English name" are very different things. I assume that most people seeing Tigger will think of whatever his name is in their native language, regardless of how many languages they speak. You generally don't cycle through different words in every language you know every time you see an image looking to find a pun.
It's possible but it's a really big stretch. It's definitely not the main thing to be criticizing when people are painting an Asian person's skin yellow.
Yea that one is pretty easy to connect the dots, I think it’s safe to say people from China, the most populous country on Earth, can be racist, just as any individual from any other country can be.
Yeah, there's a huge network of far-right media run by/targeting Chinese diaspora, some of which filters back into mainland China. It's how BLM got roughly translated into "black people are expensive" in chinese media.
But whether chinese people made that connection or not is irrelevent, this isn't about chinese people on wechat, it's about westerners on reddit who absolutely did make that connection.
I didn't catch that (in my language he's just called the name of the animal, translated). I am unsure if that was intentional or not, however.
Given that it was written by a British gentlemen in the past there is probably a bunch of rascism unintentionally at least.
It's strange that this concern for context only ever goes in one direction. Symbolism, like words, develop meaning through their usage.
If I were to say that I ejaculated during intercourse with your wife last night, would you take that to be an insult or would you be dying on that same context hill that the verb to ejaculate used to refer to suddenly making a statement and that intercourse used to refer to having a discussion with someone?
Probably not.
Would you say that the swastika isn't a Nazi symbol because it originated in Indo-European religious and cultural symbology?
Maybe. I can't speak for you.
The origin of something doesn't determine its usage.