I was all set to call this article about an American actor who regularly portrays Whitey in Chinese films racist, but then I saw the picture at the top of the story and I got confused. Now I think it's Chinese being racist against themselves. Or their cavemen anyway. Wait, did China have cavemen? What country were cavemen from incidentally? Sort this shit out for us, NPR:
It's a typical Chinese chop-socky kung-fu film, with a mustachioed baddy fighting a plucky heroine, kicking and whirling, all the while balancing atop red poles arranged in a yin-yang symbol.
But there's just one big difference.
Despite his fluent Mandarin, the mustachioed baddy flying through the air is actually American. For Jonathan Kos-Read, 37, it's just an average day at work.
Woh, solid lede. Didn't see the twist coming. Here's another twist: the Americans are usually the good guys in these films, Kos-Read says, whose name I'm having some trouble stereotyping and that's making me a little uncomfortable.
"I can't think of an evil character that I've played who was American," he says. "For the most part, the evil characters are French and English, and the dumb characters are German." That's not racist at all, unless you count French, English and German as a race, and no one does that except the French, English and German.
Lest we all start sucking eachother's race dicks here, there are still some stereotypes that remain for the actor, who is married to a Chinese woman. In the TV shows he's acted in, whenever a Chinese woman marries an American, one of three things happen: "They turn bad, they die or they live out their life in unhappiness," he says. Although in fairness to the Chinese film-makers, those last two things are exactly what happens every time an American woman marries an American man as well. Call it even.
FINAL VERDICT: NOT RACIST.
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