The model minority stereotype, comes to mind. I feel that Asian Americans that were in America for generations, are so whitewashed to the point, that they have given up their own culture in favor of white culture, that the majority of whites, see them as white. Now, i am speaking from my perspective when i say this…. I am curious to know, if in 2014, Asian Americans get this type of treatment.
“Ching chong” seems to be a bad, anglicized imitation of Cantonese, maybe affected by the English word “chink”, another anti-Asian slur. One appeared in John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row” (1945), set in California in the 1930s. There were other such “Ching Chong Chinaman” rhymes.
“Ching chong” dates back to at least 1864 in Australia, to the minstrel song, “Poor Ching Chong”, where it rhymes with Hong Kong.īy 1888 in the US children were saying stuff like this in Portland, Oregon: I certainly hope that one day they will be able to grasp her humor.Ĭover art for “Ching Chong” (1917), an American song written by Lee S. Yet Whites are quick to brush off any offence it causes Asians, telling them in so many words that they are being oversensitive or humourless.
Comedians Stephen Colbert and Dave Chappelle both used it assuming that their (mostly White) audience knew it was racist. They say it like there is nothing wrong with being – racist.Īt one level, most Americans seem to know it is racist. They say it like there is something wrong with being Asian. They say it like they look down on people who are different. They say it like it is all right to disrespect other people’s language, culture or race, making it into a laughingstock. They say it like Chinese does not have a literature that goes back thousands of years, back to when the people who spoke what would become English could not even read or write. They say it like “ching chong” is a faithful imitation of Chinese, not an ignorant stereotype. They say it like Asian Americans are perpetual foreigners. They say it not just to Asians who know little English but even to Asian Americans with degrees from top American universities, whose families have lived in America for over a hundred years. In the US it is applied to all East Asians – even though 81% of Asian Americans do not speak Chinese as their mother tongue. So do supposedly liberal newspaper editors. Not only children and Republicans laugh at it. So do grown people in the US in the 2000s and 2010s. It is not just ignorant, insensitive schoolchildren who say it. Often it comes with other racist acts, like pushing someone off a playground slide – or burying them in a mine shaft. “Ching chong” (by 1864) is a racist slur used in the English-speaking world to put down people from East Asia by mocking Chinese.
0 kommentar(er)
