Good background reading from a good blog:
http://www.angryasianman.com/2008/08/chink-eye-photos-week-in-review.html
http://www.angryasianman.com/2008/08/more-on-spanish-basketball-teams-chink.html
You’ve all probably heard about the issue regarding some Spanish Olympic teams and the “asianized” photos that raised up such a storm on the web. At first I was 100% confident that all this hype was just overreaction, because within Spain, nobody really cared. It’s not the not caring as if you don’t give a shit, it’s the not caring as in: “What? This is racist? You’ve got to be kidding me.” So that’s how it all went down, the international press gave Spain a lot of heat because of several racist issues in sport, and Spain, as a whole, pretty much ignored all of it. Which was fine, until Spain began to gain a reputation of being a racist country. I won’t argue that a large portion of Spanish society is racist, but you begin to see that most of it is rural and aged >40. But that wasn’t being criticized. What was being criticized was the idea of talking about race and using it in conversations as normal things, not being scared of them because of political correctness. That’s the issue. Nobody makes a big deal about it in Spain, is that good? Bad?
Most of the world seems to think it’s bad, which lead me to begin to think, “hey, maybe I was wrong about this, maybe we really are stepping over the line.”
Here’s what I eventually came to as a conclusion:
I’ve lived in the US, I’ve lived in Spain. And as much as I try to see how offensive the photos were, I can’t find a reasonable argument for why they were. If there’s one thing I have to criticize about the US in the racism issue, its that being overly PC sometimes hurts your case. The photos were seen by Li Ning (Spanish basketball sponsor) which made no comments on the issue. The Spanish Asian communities made no comments on the issue. As far as those concrete photos go, I can’t but say that for me, they can be considered as distasteful, but not racist, and in no way were they meant to be offensive.
There’s an issue that I did see troubling. And that’s the Spanish society’s contempt with racial divisions. In the US you have your Asian American groups and your Latino groups… etc. But nonetheless there’s still a cohesiveness between the society, and even though stereotypes exist they don’t determine who is first and who is a second class citizen. In Spain, however, immigration is still a relatively new idea, and even though cities like Madrid are filled with immigrants, they don’t assimilate into our society. I see that as a problem. What’s worse, normal society won’t feel good letting them in, and that’s bound to create tension and problems. The US is a country of immigrants, and Spain is not, there’s no way of changing that other than accepting immigrants and allowing them to build up a niche which is absorbed into Spanish society.
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