When I opened Facebook this morning, my newsfeed is full with news from several different media about one topic: Snapchat’s yellowface filter and how people are complaining against such “racist” filter. This filter takes someone’s face and apply slanted eyes and buckteeth, enforcing negative Asian stereotype.
But is an image filter worth such rage and energy?
I’m Asian Australian from Chinese descent, the very target of this “stereotype”, yet the filter itself looks fine for me. I can take it with just a bit of laugh. Never understand why people has to feel offended with every little thing related to race. Discriminating people based on race is bad, that’s for sure. However, mentioning that race X has some physical characteristics is not racism, it’s a fact. Because, well, duh, it’s called race because there ARE physical differences. For goodness’ sake it’s an image filter! No one gets rejected from a job because of it, no one gets different treatment by law because of it. So how about a bit of chill, smile, think positive, and try not to get offended with every little thing.
If everything offends someone, soon we will see a sad society where all people can talk about is the weather. Until one day someone with dark skin color will get offended if we mention dark cloud.
Shame on the media for trying to blow this up out of proportion.
To elaborate more, not all Asians have those characteristics. But it’s still a fact that different races do have unique physical characteristics, not necessarily following how the image filter is portraying it. Which is why the so called image filter does not represent Asians. It’s just a filter made for a chat app, it doesn’t define us. Therefore there is absolutely no need to get upset about it.
My point is, racism is everywhere, is alive and kicking, is painful. It is up to us how to deal with this, with anger, with sadness, with disappointment, or not allowing these people ruining our lives.
The least thing we need to care about is an image filter. Without this, racists are still going to be there. With this, it’s not going to get any better or worse, it’s still equally bad.
If someone can be influenced to act racist towards us because of an image filter, they’re already racist to begin with. Good people won’t see an image filter as any reinforcement of any racial stereotypes.
So in the end, we’re still dealing with 2 groups of people.
What we need, is a lot of positiveness, the ability to laugh at our own traits, not expecting other people to stop doing things we don’t like (because that’s not going to happen).
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