The Big [Censored] Theory

> I dare you to show that scene at a liberal college and notice how few laughs you get.

Did you see the recent video where the white guy dressed up in a poncho, big hat, and fake mustache and carried around maracas? He asked a bunch of white kids on a college campus if they thought his outfit was offensive to Mexicans, and they all said yes.

Then he went to the Mexican part of town and asked actual Mexicans, and they all said it was funny or that they liked that he was trying to honor their culture. Not one of them was offended.

So perhaps it would be good to ask a Chinese person if this joke offends them.

As a measure of whether a stereotype is actually bad or has negative effects, this sort of thing is a lot staler than a BBT joke, though.

Who posted that video, and was it unedited? If we're going on a single piece of anecdata, I think it's fair to question if the creator had any biases or was trustworthy.

And not all racism / bias is equal. Maybe you are right that Chinese and Chinese-American people would not be offended by this, but it seems completely reasonable that they would be, and the onus on you would be to get data that they wouldn't. It really doesn't matter what liberal college students think at all, unless they happen to also be of Chinese or of Chinese descent (or they are southeast Asian, and tired of lazy racism that doesn't bother to distinguish such things).

edit: it was in fact PragerU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU) which is intended for entertainment. It should not be considered reliable or unedited.

The important part of virtual signaling is that it has nothing to do with it's stated aims. Virtue signaling such as calling out the college cafeteria for serving sushi as "cultural appropriation"[0] is not because the people doing the signaling care about the art of sushi or the Japanese culture - it's narcissistic posturing by the person doing the signaling. Another term for this is "white savior complex".

In many ways the virtue signaling is doing the thing they are accusing others of - using a culture (that isn't theirs) as a weapon for social status.

[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-36804155

> and the onus on you would be to get data that they wouldn't.

FWIW I have a few data points -- this is something my Chinese wife has literally said inside a Chinese restaurant, and some of her other family members have said similar things about not trusting that the food being served is what they said it was.

No, but I constantly hear right wingers referencing it. It must be very popular in the echo chamber.

Yes, it does support a right wing point of view, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily wrong. It's just one video, but there are many other videos and essays about the same topic.

What "right wing point of view" exactly? That racism isn't a real problem? Are there mainstream right-wing organisations that actually promote that view?

The right wing uses videos like that to show that, "liberals are the only ones offended by cultural appropriation". The topic is far too complex to be encapsulated in a TikTok video, but the video is just an example of how it's possible that representing another culture could still be appreciated, and that not every instance of representing another culture is appropriation.

No. The point of view that between being maximally uptight about race is different than acknowledging and working against racism.

That's my point of view and I don't consider myself the least bit right wing!

Yeah, when you're part of a culture that suffers from cultural appropriation, you understand it. Although my culture suffers a very benign culinary example (poutine), it allows me to understand the power play, and how I wouldn't want others decrying the appropriation my people are living.

This is called Common Sense. To the extent that it's right-wing-coded in (and, I believe, only in) USA is only a reflection of how wacko their pseudo-left has gone.

It’s extraordinary that people are taken in by such videos. Those videos are selectively edited to make the creators point.

Tell me, when Jimmy Kimmels producers go out on Hollywood Boulevard and find that not even one person can point to a country other than America on map (https://youtu.be/kRh1zXFKC_o) - do you think that’s real too? Or is that selectively edited for laughs?

I know the video was edited, it's by PragerU. That's not the point though, it was just a story to point out that not all things about other cultures are offensive.

And it's funny you ask about Kimmel, because I actually know the person who did those bits (she was the offscreen voice for the first few years and is actually the interviewer in this video). She said that while it was edited, they didn't have to edit it much, because about 80% of the people really were that dumb.

And I did not know if you were Chinese or otherwise of east or south-east Asian descent, either. A group is not obligated to be a monolith in what they feel is offensive or not. And sometimes can be empowering to steal a slur / stereotype, but it feels a lot differently if the same word or joke is made in other circumstances.

I don't know the right answer, but I definitely think it would be understandable if someone didn't appreciate that joke. And worst of all, it's just in service of the cheapest, blandest kind of humor. The writers should be ashamed of such lazy work, regardless of bigger issues. "Would it work without a laugh track" clearly fails badly here, as it does pretty frequently in TBBT.

> not trusting that the food being served is what they said it was

Chinese folks being weary of restaurants with swapping ingredients for lower tier is not comparable to assuming chicken being swapped for cat, which is a tired joke. Usually reserved for pricer seafood, hence pick your victim tanks. Many restaurants do similar type of substitute shenangians, like I'm pretty sure the hipster burger joing is not serving genuine kobe beef patty for $15, but they're also not serving ground chihuahua either. Like even in PRC you're worried about things like gutter oil at a hole in a wall joint versus slightly cheaper grade of sea cucumber at a fancy restaurant. Even during the pork crisis, no one was particularly concerned that restaurants were feeding them cat/dogs instead.

E: relate back to your parent comment, there's somethigns like cultural appropriation that most (especially older gen) Chinese don't care about, i.e. they thumbs up for white girls wearing qipao.

There is a bias in that we see such videos, find them shareable, notice their existence but really there's absolutely no reason to use either the Kimmel or PragerU vid as anything other than light entertainment.

That doesn't mean the underlying argument they propose can't be defended, just that the videos have no explanatory power whatsoever.

I’d agree that that is the case a lot of the time, especially in the online popularity contests, but a big percentage - I’d say probably a majority - of the time it is simply sheep behaviour that has become ingrained

I felt this pull at university, when I spent a brief time flirting with the art society. everyone there had these kinds of values, and it would have made fitting in significantly easier if I had vocally agreed with them. this would have been especially tempting if I was (more) lonely and desperate for company, as many people are

as it was I mostly just kept quiet or carefully found points of agreement. I suspect if I was the type of person to give in to this zeitgeist, and not particularly question my beliefs, it could easily have developed into something real without any need for narcissistic tendencies

> edit: it was in fact PragerU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PragerU) which is intended for entertainment. It should not be considered reliable or unedited.

Isn't PragerU a far right site know for promoting bizarre things? I'd would definitely call it "unreliable".

I saw that clip - there may be a valid point somewhere in there at being too easily offended but it's a stupid stunt from a non-honest broker. At the outset, the video's author's intent is to make liberal college students look dumb or like snowflakes, so that's what that video sets out to do but; there's no telling how many people they to talk to get cut on either side of the argument.

> 80% of the people really were that dumb.

Dropping in just to point out that ignorant, dumb, and uninterested are different concepts.

Everytime you hear someone tell their story you get an editorialized view (at the very least by having chosen to listen to them rather than someone else).

Those videos are clearly optimized toward the desired impression, but I don't think that they used actors to make their points.

On the other hand you have problems like https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/12/weak-men-are-superweap... where you can construct a castle of lies and deception by only speaking selective truths...

To summarize my point: stories are ways to tell one of the many facets of the human experience, when told honestly they can be helpful to our understanding of both the common and the uncommon, when told dishonestly they can warp our perception of reality.

Good grief, I wish people would stop pointing to a particular subset of an ethnic group to try to "prove" that people are "wrong" to get offended.

1. Videos are easily selectively edited

2. Within an immigrant ethnic group, different subgroups will have different feelings due to their experiences. For example, 1st generation immigrants tend to be less cognizant of this sort of stuff.

Here's a bit of a rant for you- as an Asian person, I find these Asian jokes pretty fucking unfunny. It absolutely shits me when people will ask an Asian person from Asia what they think about some hot-topic issue within the Western sphere- yeah no shit they'll find it trivial. They're so geographically and politically disconnected from the issue it makes no sense to ask them.

They experience none of the effects, understand very little of the context and have very little stake in the matter, the only reason people would ask them for their opinion on these issues is so they can point to a foreign face and tell people like me "why can't you be as well behaved as them".

Swapping ingredients is pretty common in all kinds of restaurants; a lot of whitefish are actually tilapia no matter what they say, and a lot of farm-to-table ingredients are entirely fictional.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/02/20/fish-s...

https://projects.tampabay.com/projects/2016/food/farm-to-fab...

I agree with your sentiment, but isn't it a bit ironic that you made a point of emphasizing heterogeneity among ethnic subgroups, but then sort of took that away from what was more specifically mocking Chinese and North Korean stereotypes, rather than broadly Asian? If you were Filipino and got mad about a joke that poked at Chinese materialism culture, wouldn't that be a bit of a reach? Surely within Asian cultures, different stereotypes abound in regional humor, especially is it's taboo to joke about regional cultural differences

> isn't it a bit ironic that you made a point of emphasizing heterogeneity among ethnic subgroups, but then sort of took that away from what was more specifically mocking Chinese and North Korean stereotypes, rather than broadly Asian?

Yeah a bit. I chose not to mention specific ethnicities and omit detail to keep my comment short. Regional humor has it's place, but in more nuanced contexts. A Chuck Lorre production isn't the first place I'd look to find anything thoughtful and nuanced, to be frank.

Main reason I used the broad brush for "Asian" is because in western society, 1+n generation Asian diaspora are less likely to segregate themselves by lines of national grievances back in Asia proper. In addition to that, nationality is rarely the deciding factor on whether an individual is subjected to racial jokes (from outside personal circles), it's their appearance. I've been jokingly accused of being a Chinese spy, despite not being ethnically Chinese.

This guy simply edits videos to provoke a reaction and get clicks. It is just business, and not an accurate depiction of reality at all.

It isn't even a creative or original idea. Remember Jimmy Kimmel's "The Man Show" where he got women on the street to sign an "End suffrage now!" petition because "suffrage" sounds like "suffering"?

It is an easy trick to embarrass people by shoving a camera in their face and putting them on the spot. But it doesn't actually tell you anything. It isn't a data point.

Poutine is actually a pretty classic example of the bad kind of cultural appropriation. I wouldn't call it benign. Non-Quebecker Canadians are happy to claim Poutine as a "typically Canadian" dish (erasing its connection with Quebec specifically) despite many of them holding Quebec culture in extreme contempt.