Memes

Same. The color never came into the equation in my head but now I can see how it could be considered racist, yeah.

Idk I dont think it's racist because it wasn't used because Pooh is yellow he just happens to be yellow. Use piglet or Eeyore for all I care.

Dude looks like Pooh tho in the face all color aside ur spot on.

Yeah. As always, white-savior OP is whitewashing things and taking them outside of context to make everything about race

It's strange that this concern for context only ever goes in one direction. Symbolism, like words, develop meaning through their usage.

If I were to say that I ejaculated during intercourse with your wife last night, would you take that to be an insult or would you be dying on that same context hill that the verb to ejaculate used to refer to suddenly making a statement and that intercourse used to refer to having a discussion with someone?

Probably not.

Would you say that the swastika isn't a Nazi symbol because it originated in Indo-European religious and cultural symbology?

Maybe. I can't speak for you.

The origin of something doesn't determine its usage.

It did, as a light-hearted joke comparing Xi and Obama walking side by side with a resembling image of Tiger and Pooh. Of course, westerners then proceeded to take it and turn it into their own distortion and elaborate some story about how China is banning Winnie the Pooh and that is why painting a chinese man yellow with photoshop is a sign of resistance against a government on the other side of the globe and totally not racist.

It resembles a lot the same thing that happened with that image that floated the internet around a few years ago of Putin photoshoped as a stereotypically and comically flamboyant homosexual man, which is totally not homophobic even if the punchline is "he's gay" because you can always make it up that the image is banned somewhere and thus is a sign of resistance and contains no reactionary sentiment behind.

It's less that and more "ohh, it's fine when they say it, but when I say it, it's racist" which isn't reasonable in the first place for the n-word, but doubly so in this case since we know there's a lot of racism going around in the HK independence "movement."

I challenged this notion with a lib the other day.

The watermelon originated in Africa. That doesn't mean that the vile caricaturised depictions of black people eating watermelons is somehow not inherently racist.

You can also look to the origin and continuing usage of the swastika, especially in Asian cultures, as another example here - you aren't going to tell me that the right-angled unicode swastika being used by westerners on the internet isn't done in service of fascism 99% of the time.

And on that matter, don't let erm-ackshually dorks tell you that the 90 degree swastika wasn't used by Nazis and isn't representative of them. One of the most famous depictions of the Nazi swastika is a right angled one:

https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1214749781387436032/pu/vid/450x360/o0Nxlts0lffM8lUv.mp4

These colonial worshipping kids have been kneeling so long that they've forgotten how to stand.

Their beloved 'prime minister' Churchill has quotes that wouldn't feel out of place in Hitler's collection:

“I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion”

[the Pashuns] needs to “recognise the superiority of race”

“I hate people with slit eyes and pigtails. I don’t like the look of them or the smell of them — but I suppose it does no great harm to have a look at them.”

We shall have to take the Chinese in hand and regulate them… as civilised nations become more powerful they will get more ruthless, and the time will come when the world will impatiently bear the existence of great barbaric nations who may at any time arm themselves and menace civilized nations. I believe in the ultimate partition of China—I mean ultimate. I hope we shall not have to do it in our day. The Aryan stock is bound to triumph.

The last one still rings true with the "just the government not the people" libs nowadays.

The "Xi got butthurt and banned all of Winnie the Pooh in China" thing is mind numbingly easy to disprove. Just search the phrase on literally any Chinese internet service. If they still spout that claim, they've obviously not done even one minute of research or fact checking and are so clearly just blindly regurgitating propaganda (which they also accuse people who support China of doing, funny how that works) that all of their opinions on China can be safely ignored.

You know what I did when I first heard that claim? I went straight to Baidu and searched up Winnie the Pooh, in English even, and surprise surprise it returned results like any other search engine. And this was when I was still a liberal who didn't like China.

Mostly depends on the shading the artist uses. He's often depicted just as yellow as rabbit, or just as orange as Tigger.

I have. Especially in the context most westerners use it. You're welcome.

And I know Indians who don't think swastikas are racist. Doesn't mean racists don't use symbols and images as a trojan horse for racism.

For what it's worth, I've never even noticed the skin colour connotation as I just laughed at the matching stance the two of them shared and moved on. I think the people that immediately noticed that over the obvious comedy are telling on themselves and their own latent racist ideas.