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May 2, 2018 - Tim Pool Daily Show
12:08
Social Justice Activist gets called out for using racial slur

A woman posted a photo of herself wearing a "qipao" a traditional Chinese dress. This prompted the ire of a Twitter user who complained about cultural appropriation. However other users surfaced(presumably) old tweets where this activist used racial slurs against black people. Support the show (http://timcast.com/donate) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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On April 22nd, an 18-year-old woman posted a photo of herself wearing a qipao, a traditional Chinese dress, that she said she was going to wear to prom.
This prompted a massive backlash after a Twitter user accused her of cultural appropriation, and since then there's been a massive debate as to whether or not what she is doing is offensive, with many people saying it's not, and many people saying it is.
She even appeared on Fox News.
The debate over cultural appropriation has been a key aspect in what we call the culture war for some time now.
But there's been an interesting turn, as it appears now that the individual who called her out might actually be
racist themselves.
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From USA Today, Chinese prom dress draws rage, but Utah student said she meant no harm.
A Utah teen stands by her decision to wear a traditional Chinese dress to her prom, a move panned by some as cultural appropriation but embraced by others.
Kezia Dahm said she won't give in to pressure and delete an April 22 Twitter post showing her posing with her prom date in the red cheongsam qipao.
To everyone causing so much negativity, she tweeted.
I mean no disrespect to the Chinese culture.
I'm simply showing my appreciation to their culture.
I'm not deleting my post because I've done nothing but show my love for the culture.
It's an effing dress and it's beautiful.
The post in question is just a series of photos of a young woman and her prom date.
And she is wearing a traditional dress.
In response, a user named Jeremy Lam said, My culture is not your goddamn prom dress.
And he received nearly 42,000 retweets and 178,000 likes.
He goes on to explain the history of the cheapo and ends, In short, I'm proud of my culture, including the extreme
barriers marginalized people within that culture have had to
overcome those obstacles.
For it to simply be subject to American consumerism and cater to a white audience
is parallel to colonial ideology.
And there's been the debate.
A lot of people saying this is totally fine, and people like Jeremy saying it is not.
Many people came to his defense, but something interesting happened.
Users eventually noticed that he had some pretty damning tweets from a while back.
Jeremy responded by saying, Yes, I used to be more ignorant than I am now.
My youth was not perfect.
It was problematic.
I was problematic and didn't know better.
I sincerely apologize to all the people it possibly affected,
but my past does not define me.
But many people were quick to point out tweets from this man
as recently as January 12th, where he used a racial slur and disparaged black people.
I can't verify the authenticity of these tweets because it would appear that they either don't exist
or he deleted them.
But based on the fact that Mr. Lam has apologized for his past problematic behavior, I would assume that they are real tweets.
Now, again, take it with a grain of salt, because screenshots are easily manipulated, and some of these posts might be fake.
But again, Jeremy Lam apologized for his past problematic behavior, so in my opinion, these posts were probably genuine.
So if this person who's claiming that cultural appropriation is offensive is actually racist himself or has actually posted problematic things in the past, why should we believe that his post is sincere?
Let's take a look at some of the responses to the idea of cultural appropriation.
In a series of posts on Quora dating way before this event, many people had asked about whether or not it was offensive to wear a qipao, and almost all of the responses are that it is totally fine to do.
It is described as wearing a tuxedo.
That's the analogy they give.
You wouldn't wear a tuxedo walking down the street, and you wouldn't wear a qipao walking down the street.
It's for events.
Maybe like prom.
But just because some people say it's okay doesn't mean it is okay, and there is a debate raging about whether or not this is cultural appropriation.
But there is an interesting video by a YouTuber, Serpensa, whose video is titled, Foreigners Can Wear Chinese Dresses.
In this video, he walks around talking to locals, showing them a photo of a woman wearing a qipao and asking them if it's okay.
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They do get very insulted if people say bad things about their culture and do bad things towards them.
However, wearing one of their traditional dresses is flattery.
It's something that they like.
They love it.
Whenever you go to get pre-marriage photos, if you have a Chinese wife, she will force you as a westerner to wear those mandarin color, you know, special outfits.
You see cheapos everywhere and they love it when foreigners wear them.
So this whole thing is a load of rubbish.
There's no such thing as Chinese people being offended by foreigners wearing cheapo.
Real Chinese people.
I'm not talking about entitled college students that grew up in the States or in Canada.
I'm talking about Chinese people on the streets as you saw.
tim pool
Now for obvious reasons, I have always kind of taken offense.
To the idea of cultural appropriation.
If you follow my work, you know that me being offended typically doesn't result in me doing anything about it because just because I'm offended doesn't mean I have a right to do or change anything.
It just kind of ticks me off that people would imply that one culture adopting another person's culture is somehow offensive or wrong.
Originally, the idea of cultural appropriation is supposed to be that you are a majority group adopting a practice of a minority group in a way that erases the historical or cultural context or is in some way offensive to that culture.
But most of the time, when we hear about something like a cultural appropriation incident, it's actually just normal culture mixing.
Which, as someone who comes from a different culture heritage, I think it's fantastic.
If you were to ask me, I'd say this whole idea about cultural appropriation is typically nonsense.
As I just showed you in this video clip, a man went around asking people in China if they cared, and they all really liked it.
He even made reference to the fact that you have people born in America acting like they're somehow more connected to the culture than the people who actually live in that culture.
And we can see some of this ridiculous behavior over the past several years.
For instance, from the BBC, Lena Dunham says sushi is cultural appropriation.
And this story dates back to December of 2015, from the Atlantic, a food fight at Oberlin College.
Students complain that banh mi made from ciabatta and sushi from undercooked rice are evidence of culinary cultural appropriation.
Last week, students at Oberlin made national headlines for casting complaints about bad dining hall food, a perennial lament of collegians, as a problematic social justice failure.
Word spread via people who saw their behavior as political correctness run amok, the New York Post gleefully mocked the students at Lena Dunham's college.
On social media, many wondered if the controversy was a parody.
In fact, it's quite real.
Why am I bringing up such an absurd story?
Well, it's because I'm going to present to you my personal argument that cultural appropriation is fake.
This idea that some of these things are offensive is fake.
As you just saw that last line in The Atlantic, many people thought it was a parody because it is so ridiculous to think eating food from another culture or poorly preparing that food is somehow offensive.
But take a look at the start of the story.
The major news about the Chinese prom dress and how offensive it was Started when an individual who himself has used racial slurs, presumably used racial slurs because, again, I can't verify that these tweets are real, but this person apologized for their problematic behavior in the past, and it would seem that this individual isn't sincerely opposed to racism, it just looks more like someone trying to exert power over another individual.
It seems often these are opportunities for individuals to try and claim moral high ground to gain power over someone else.
In fact, interestingly enough, there is a word in Chinese culture for this type of behavior, and it's baizuo.
The term baizuo, or white left, was firstly introduced to Americans by Fox News, which is similar to regressive left, in the context of the Western world.
In China, Baizuo literally means those Europeans and Americans who speak love and peace every day, but do not know the difficulty of survival and the complexity of real world.
Meanwhile, they also distort the spirits of left-wing and result in the reversed discrimination, aiming to appeal to political correctness.
From Wikipedia, Beizhua, literally, white left,
is a derogatory Chinese epithet that came into being in the middle 2010s.
The word received attention in Germany where it was seen as criticizing the immigration policies
of Angela Merkel.
The word Beizhua is, according to political scientist Zhang Qianqian,
a Chinese word that ridicules Western liberal elites.
The term has also been used to refer to perceived double standards of the Western media, such as the alleged bias on reporting about Islamist attacks in Xinjiang.
The word was defined as, people who only care about topics such as immigration, minorities, LGBT, and the environment, and have no sense of real problems in the real world.
They are hypocritical humanitarians who advocate for peace and equality only to satisfy their own feeling of moral superiority.
They are obsessed with political correctness, to the extent that they tolerate backwards Islamic values for the sake of multiculturalism.
They believe in the welfare state that benefits only the idle and the free riders.
They are the ignorant and arrogant Westerners who pity the rest of the world and think they are saviors.
Baizuo is used as an insult among Chinese netizens.
And this word has a similar connotation to social justice warrior or regressive left.
But the reason this is so interesting is that China, as a culture, has actually developed a word to represent exactly what happened with a Chinese traditional dress.
This individual from America is a Chinese person, Jeremy Lin, presumably, because he called it his culture.
But he's also someone who has presumably, it is alleged, he has posted racial slurs.
He has apologized for problematic behavior.
So let's pretend for an instant that what he said on Twitter using racial slurs isn't real.
He has apologized for some problematic behavior, so we can use that as our starting point and say, this is an individual who doesn't believe their own rhetoric.
This is an individual who has had to apologize for the things they have done in the past because of what they are saying now in the future is contradicting their own behavior.
One thing that I've noticed in this cultural civil war is that there are people who are actively paying attention to what's happening in the world and there are others that simply parrot it.
There are people who see opportunity and try to use incidents like a qipao prom dress as a chance to generate some kind of attention or to just feel morally superior.
Being offended doesn't inherently grant you any rights.
Being offended doesn't mean you get to change anything.
And what we're seeing now is that among Chinese people, they really don't care.
So who is offended by this?
It is the Baizhua.
It is white leftists in the United States.
And it is, as defined by Serpentza, American-born college students who aren't actually on the ground and actually understanding the real culture.
But let me know your thoughts on cultural appropriation in the comments below, and we will keep the conversation going.
How do you feel about the word, Baizuo?
I think it's, I think it's really funny.
Because Chinese people are kind, they're not very politically correct, and as we can see, they're very critical of those that are.
So comment below, we'll keep the conversation going.
Stay tuned, new videos every day at 4 p.m.
You can follow me on Twitter, at TimCast.
Thank you all so much for watching, and I will see you all tomorrow.
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