Now Jezebel is Racist Too? | The Latest "Asian Stereotype" Controversy at Schema : more than ethnic

Now Jezebel is Racist Too? | The Latest "Asian Stereotype" Controversy

If you rolled your eyes at the new trend of Asian girls posting "before and after makeup" online, you're not alone.

"Oh, how exciting," was my initial reaction. "Asian girls not wearing makeup...and then wearing makeup."

What was more interesting was the tizzy Sadie Stein at Jezebel stirred up in the comments section of her post about it last week.

"Before your eyes, you see these young women go from individuals to, well, 'after.'" Stein wrote in her post, titled, The Uniform Beauty of Asian women 'Before' and 'After' Makeup. The post title, and Stein's commentary about the striking uniformity of the "after" photos, provoked negative responses from its readers.

A commenter named CassandraSays wrote: "Did you, Sadie, a white woman, really do a post in which you wrote that a group of Asian women all look the same? Really? Is this trolling for pageviews or are you actually ignorant enough not to realise how that would be received?"

Out of the majority of mostly negative comments, one commenter named Wagner James Au (who I assume is male) wrote: "As an Asian-American, I have a counter-proposal for most commenters here: All y'all chill the fuck out."

He defended Stein's post, and cautioned against the chilling effects of readers accusing writers of racism:

"One reader complained Jezebel is making the site uncomfortable for Asian women. But since their readers are proving themselves hair-trigger willing to throw accusations of "racist" around any time a topic related to Asian women is brought up, I bet Jezebel is now way less likely to broach the subject at all. Is that what you want?"

This is an interesting question, and one that I haven't seen discussed very much online.

Was Stein's post really racist? Does readers' outcry encourage, or suppress questions about race?

The Too Asian? article in Macleans and the Wall Street Journal's Why Chinese Mothers are Superior have shown beyond a doubt that Asian stereotypes provoke a definite response from readers. Although I personally deplore the cynical page-view-grab tactics of both pieces, I have found the outpouring of debate and personal experiences in readers' comments uplifting and enriching in my own understanding of the issues in a way that I couldn't have accessed if there was no article there to begin with.

Does this mean that I want to see more vulgarized polemics based on Asian stereotypes? Hell no! But I definitely want to see the same level of debate and conversation about race continue in the mainstream.

I hate to admit it, but it seems like stirring the big, boiling pot of Asian stereotype controversy is the only way people are going to keep talking. Or is it?

Tell me what you think.

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Comments

I'm not an expert on makeup, but I really don't see a "uniform standard of beauty on display" (as the Jez poster puts it). I think the women look quite different from each another in the "after" picture. Clearly, certain unique elements of their appearance disappear (like blemishes), but she could have found a much better example than this one. The non-facial elements of their appearance, such as colorful clothing, vary widely.

So the poster's first mistake was that her central arguments were weak. With no meaningful purpose to the post, all that is left is for people to get offended. Her second mistake was messing around with race. Why not find a gallery full of subculture folks (goth kids do the makeup thing well) or multi-race gallery?

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