BLACK MASK, YELLOW PERIL: ANTI-ASIANISM IN NETFLIX’S OTHERWISE BRILLIANT DAREDEVIL by Takeo Rivera

So let’s get one thing out of the way: it’s probably safe to say that Marvel and Netflix’s Daredevil is the finest piece of television ever made in the superhero genre. With its stellar cast and consistently tight writing and direction, the show can easily go toe-to-toe with any other major serialized TV drama in this golden age of Mad Mens and Breaking Bads, elevating superherodom to an unequivocal status of high art in much the way Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica elevated the space opera. And, as a cherry on top, Daredevil happens one of the most progressive shows of the genre; in particular, Matt Murdock battles not some alien Super-Wario intent on blowing up the planet with an ancient glowing Rubik’s cube, but a scion of urban “redevelopment” — read gentrification — in Wilson Fisk, and spends an unhealthy time fighting white collar crime and community displacement by punching the crap out of it.

But Daredevil also has one massive problem: Asians. That is, Asians are the problem, and Daredevil’s problem is that Asians are a problem.

It’s such a problem that every time I recommend this frickin show to fellow Asian Americans — usually emphatically, with liberal repetition of “omfg” — the response is pretty much a unanimous “Well, that was great, except for the RACISM.” And then I’m sheepishly like, “Uh yeah, that’s true, yup” and shrug it off and keep watching anyway, because yes, it is that good, but, BUT, at a certain point I came to realize that, in the words of prophetic white space man Jean-Luc Picard to Alfre Woodard, “The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!”

Right now, you’re either 1.) getting as defensive as an otaku blabbering on about the legitimacy of schoolgirl hentai and demanding that it is perfect in every possible way; 2.) shrugging like I’ve been and being like “yeah, but it’s still so good;” or 3.) asking “what is a Dare Devil? What is this internet thing? I live in the 1920s and I think eugenics are swell.” If you’re #3, I can’t help you, but guys,Daredevil is indeed pretty racist, and we probably shouldn’t excuse it.

Here’s how it goes down: The villainous conspirators of Daredevil consist of a cabal of capitalists and criminals; besides Wilson Fisk, there is Fisk’s lieutenant Wesley, corporate accountant Leland Owsley, the Ranskahov brothers of the Russian mob, and then the two Asians, the yakuza Nobu (played by Peter Shinkoda) and the triad queen Gao (Wai Ching Ho). In the first episode, we are introduced to this crew of malevolent plutocrats atop the roof of a skyscraper, and both Nobu and Gao are stoic, inscrutable, and do not speak English, communicating primarily through disapproving scowls.

Nobu and Gao each reappears at the end of the episode during a pulse-pounding montage of Murdock’s nemeses: Nobu overlooks a worksheet of the city plan for Hell’s Kitchen with a large kanji character menacingly drawn over several city blocks, while Gao regally hobbles through a dimly lit warehouse overseeing rows upon rows of blinded (and as we learn later, voluntarily blinded) Chinese workers packing heroin for distribution.

Obviously, both Nobu and Gao represent pretty long-standing Orientalist/Yellow Peril tropes and stereotypes. As my friend Miyoko Conley exclaimed to me over social media, Gao is “literally a Dragon Lady,” a ruthless science fictional Chinese lady with a propensity for vast threatening power. Gao’s Chinese drug workers, who voluntarily blinded themselves in service to her, reflect the longstanding orientalist notion that Asians, while competent, have no sense of independent thought and blindly (in this case, literally) follow authority, like a mindless horde!

They are even zombielike in their affectation; in Episode 12 “The Ones We Leave Behind,” Murdock attempts to liberate the blind workers, but instead they swarm around him, extending their arms mindlessly towards him and groaning in classic zombie fashion, pretty much providing proof of scholar Eric Hamako’s thesis that the contemporary zombie trend reflects post-9/11 orientalist anxieties.

And of course we have Nobu, the ninja-yakuza who you can pull straight out of William Gibson’s Neuromancer (more on him in a hot minute). All of these characters are portrayed as single-minded threats without any interiority, redeemability, or depth beyond their own menacing desire to spread their own form of evil.

I mean, damn, it’s an impressively comprehensive smorgasbord of Asian stereotypes, and they’re all things we’re fairly used to. But in some ways, despite its lack of originality in this category, I think Daredevil’s orientalism deserves some special attention for several reasons:

1. Daredevil is really good. Since the critical consensus is that Daredevil is the best thing since half-sheet paper towel perforations, it makes sense to ensure that said metaphorical paper towels aren’t pre-smeared with the viscous bacon grease of RACISM.

2. Daredevil owes Asia. Let’s face it: any rapid fire non-boxing martial arts flick owes something to Asia. Especially f’ing Daredevil, the blind super-martial artist hero who rights wrongs and fights for the disenfranchised, who comes straight from the blind swordsman Zatoichi in Japanese cinema (the first Zatoichi film even predates the first Daredevil appearance in Marvel comics by two years).

As NOC’s Bao Phi has already pointed out, there’s a frustrating and racist irony of white men appropriating Asian martial arts while not providing any depth to its Asian characters.

3. The Anti-Asianism is Very Specific and Targeted. Among the villains, Wilson Fisk is provided the most complexity and depth, seducing the viewer into sympathizing with him. The other white American villains Wesley and Leland are not specifically racialized in their roles and could be easily color-blindly swapped. The Russian mobsters are certainly ethnicized quite strongly throughout the show, but are given thorough background, and one of them even exhibits a change of heart and sacrifices himself to help Daredevil in his final moments. Nobu and Gao come only in one flavor: inscrutable mysterious menace. They aren’t villains who happen to be Asian; their Asianness is central to their villainousness. Yo Daredevil, Executive Order 9066 called — it wants its Asian treachery stereotypes back!

4. Daredevil problematically racializes urban displacement as Asian. I’m not going to argue that East Asian investment is indeed contributing to displacement of the urban oppressed, as is portrayed in Daredevil. In fact, the show’s confrontation of the issue in general is extremely commendable. But the biggest problem is that Asian Americans — many of whom are older Chinese ladies who don’t look unlike Gao — are quite often also the victims of such corporate displacement and gentrification. The visibility of these Asian corporate fiends, paired with the utter lack of Asian American characters — much less Asian American poor — reinforces a monolithic image of Asians as synonymous with “foreign oppressor.” It’s the kind of logic that motivated anti-Asian events from the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act all the way to the hate crime murder of Vincent Chin in Detroit a hundred years later in 1982.

5. Asian Lives Don’t Count as Lives. And this is the one that’s really heavy.

To explain what I mean by point #5, what was most stomach-wrenchingly disturbing was the treatment of Nobu in Episodes 9 and 11. By Episode 9, Murdock has become so incensed with Wilson Fisk that he contemplates literally killing him, a line that he has not crossed throughout the whole series due to his moral code. Episode 9 temporally cuts back and forth between the central narrative and the climactic battle scene Murdock has with Nobu, who is dressed in a red ninja outfit and wielding a swinging blade on a chain.

Much of Episode 9, entitled “Speak of the Devil,” consists of a beautifully rendered discussion Murdock has with his priest, discussing the ethical and theological implications of taking one life for the greater good. As one would probably imagine, the overall message from the conversation is that killing corrupts the righteous person who does so. Nevertheless, Murdock is pushed over the edge when his client, elderly resident Elena Cardenas, is assassinated, and sets out to kill Fisk, anyway.

So what does Murdock do? He ends up killing Nobu.

Nobu has laid a trap in a moon-lit abandoned building, and he and Murdock engage in a rather epic, brutal combat sequence through which Nobu has an upper hand most of the time. At the end, Murdock manages to bash Nobu into a barrel of gasoline, the fluid covering him thoroughly (foreshadowing!). Nobu gets up, flings his chain-blade thing at Murdock once more, Murdock deflects it, hitting the lamp above, causing sparks to rain down on Nobu, which of course proceed to set him on fire. As Nobu is incinerating, Fisk arrives on the scene, thanks Murdock for taking out his rival, and Murdock futilely attempts to fight Fisk before escaping with his life.

Now, I don’t have too much of a complaint with Murdock killing Nobu per se; it was even, in effect, accidental. But the biggest problem is that on the tortured ethical scale that Murdock struggles with, it does not even register. Two episodes later, Murdock is debriefing with his priest once more, and the priest asks him if he killed his target, and Murdock says, “No, I didn’t kill him. But I tried to.” There is literally no mention of the death of Nobu in this scene, which is so preoccupied with the ethical choice of taking lives. Thus, for Murdock, Nobu’s life doesn’t even register as a life. Even the life of Murdock’s greatest nemesis, white man Wilson Fisk, deserves consideration.

During the Vietnam War, General William Westmoreland infamously stated, “The Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient.” Such a statement, of course, served to justify the Westerner’s devaluing of the Oriental’s life; why value their lives when they themselves don’t value them? The world of Daredevil is a world in which Asians are willing to gouge out their eyes, and suicide bomb, to better serve their masters; these are not lives worth a second thought.

Depending on your stomach for epistemic violence, this is a pretty hard pill to swallow. And yet, I’m still out there recommending Daredevil to all my friends due to its immense aesthetic rigor. It’s just important for people to know what they’re getting into, or, even better, for Marvel to dramatically improve the race politics within what currently stands as its most impressive franchise.

Takeo Rivera is a playwright, poet, and PhD Candidate in Performance Studies at University of California, Berkeley. His interests include techno-orientalism, queer theory, Asian American stuff, and an embarrassing number of playthroughs of Bioware RPGs.

The SAT was created by a noted racist and anti-immigrant activist who had previously written difficult, biased exams intended to prevent immigrants from becoming citizens. Happy test day!!

source, and the full text of his work that was later used to fuel anti-immigrant sentiment and prove the superiority of the “Nordic” race.

specifically jewish immigrants who were too smart and filling up the ivy leagues http://m.dailykos.com/story/2014/03/19/1285854/-The-SAT-s-Anti-Semitic-Roots

as some of y’all may know, max gilardi or hotdiggedydemon is a pretty popular internet artist who was behind such things as the pony.mov series. he’s also a racist who does offensive caricatures of children’s cartoon shows.

here’s an antisemitic caricature he did of steven universe:

twitter link /// tumblr link

i don’t feel like i particularly need to explain why this is offensive but needless to say drawing a character with ethnically jewish features who is based off a real life jewish person as an antisemitic caricature is extremely offensive and was very upsetting to me and many other jewish people. i really hate to think about jewish children who are fans of SU seeing this, especially since i know if i had seen it as a child it would have absolutely crushed me.

he also did this shitty and racist comic about connie!

tumblr link

again, this is extremely harmful, offensive and upsetting, and i really hate to think about children seeing it. it’s really unacceptable for someone with this much internet following to be mocking ethnic minorities point blank. 

what i’m asking as a jewish person and a lover of steven universe is that people report max gilardi’s twitter and tumblr!

here’s a link to his twitter, and here’s how you report a twitter

here’s a link to his tumblr, and here’s how you report a tumblr

please consider showing your support for marginalized people by taking action against those who would mock and vilify us. thank you very much for your time and sorry about the long post.

so i think i mentioned how my entire junior class got to sit in our auditorium and listen to ruby bridges talk about racism for two hours yesterday, but i didn’t talk about one of the most powerful moments in the presentation?

so we got to the end—like, the last twenty minutes—and she asked for questions. and we had a few standard questions (”how do you feel about people taking their education for granted?” “what would you say to the people who stood outside and protested you going to school if you met them again?”) but there was this kid waiting in the question line fidgeting nervously. and everybody could see it?? when he finally got up to ask his question, he asked her about her opinion on the events on ferguson.

and she mentioned her sons again, who she talked about earlier in the presentation. and then she told us about her son who was murdered. and she talked about the mothers who had their children taken away and how if you took a life unjustly and forsake your role as a keeper of the peace, you should be punished. and then she talked about how everybody chooses a side in this thing; good and evil.

and then she said that racism today is scarier than it was to her when she was growing up.

and the entire junior class was silent.

for those of you who don’t know, Ruby Bridges was the first black american child (one of the first???) to go to an all white school in the south, meaning all those photos you’ve seen of little black kids being harassed by a violent mob full of white adults - she grew up with that. and despite growing up in that environment she still thinks racism today is scarier than when she was growing up. idk but that comment got to me. 

to everyone who has said that racism is gone or isnt as bad as it used to be “back then” - here’s someone who grew up “back then” saying that not only is racism is still alive today, but it’s even scarier than it was when she was growing up. go and read that comment again and think about it

“Approximately a dozen Native actors and actresses, as well as the Native cultural advisor, left the set of Adam Sandler’s newest film production,The Ridiculous Six, on Wednesday. The actors, who were primarily from the Navajo nation, left the set after the satirical western’s script repeatedly insulted native women and elders and grossly misrepresented Apache culture.

The examples of disrespect included Native women’s names such as Beaver’s Breath and No Bra, an actress portraying an Apache woman squatting and urinating while smoking a peace pipe, and feathers inappropriately positioned on a teepee. 

Among the actors who walked off the set were Navajo Nation tribal members Loren Anthony, who is also the lead singer of the metal band Bloodline, and film student Allison Young. Anthony says that though he understands the movie is a comedy, the portrayal of the Apache was severely negligent and the insults to women were more than enough reason to walk off the set.

“There were about a dozen of us who walked off the set,” said Anthony, who told ICTMN he had initially refused to do the movie. He then agreed to take the job when producers informed him they had hired a cultural consultant and efforts would be made for tasteful representation of Natives.

“I was asked a long time ago to do some work on this and I wasn’t down for it. Then they told me it was going to be a comedy, but it would not be racist. So I agreed to it but on Monday things started getting weird on the set,” he said.

Anthony says he was first insulted that the movie costumes that were supposed to portray Apache were significantly incorrect and that the jokes seemed to get progressively worse.

“We were supposed to be Apache, but it was really stereotypical and we did not look Apache at all. We looked more like Comanche,” he said. “One thing that really offended a lot of people was that there was a female character called Beaver’s breath. One character says ‘Hey, Beaver’s Breath.’ And the Native woman says, ‘How did you know my name?’”

“They just treated us as if we should just be on the side. When we did speak with the main director, he was trying to say the disrespect was not intentional and this was a comedy.”

“The producers just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave.’” —Alison Young

Allison Young, Navajo, a former film student from Dartmouth, was also offended by the stereotypes portrayed and the outright disrespect paid to her and others by the director and producers.

“When I began doing this film, I had an uneasy feeling inside of me and I felt so conflicted,” she said. “I talked to a former instructor at Dartmouth and he told me to take this as finally experiencing stereotyping first hand. We talked to the producers about our concerns. They just told us, ‘If you guys are so sensitive, you should leave.’ I was just standing there and got emotional and teary-eyed. I didn’t want to cry but the feeling just came over me. This is supposed to be a comedy that makes you laugh. A film like this should not make someone feel this way.”

“Nothing has changed,” said Young. “We are still just Hollywood Indians.”” 

read the whole article here 

aicosu is a pretty popular cosplay duo on tumblr that posted a tutorial on youtube on how to brownface for fenris cosplay. sylar’s fenris cosplay has won like three awards and its entirely brownfaced (theyve done oberyn too which was also brownfaced). ppl on their video have told them how Not Cool their brownfacing tutorial is + they’ve been met with angry fans vehemently defending them. don’t reblog their cosplays, don’t let them encourage racism in an already Pretty Fuckin Racist community dont let them use their fame to get away with this horrible thing lmao 

Patel was accused of having a abortion by her doctor and he called the police on her. Patel is the first woman in America to be convicted of feticide. Miscarriages are natural, NO POWER on Earth can prevent them. Even if she did get an abortion, why should she be sentenced to 20 years in prison???!!! How does that affect society??? Jail rapists, not women who had miscarriages.

We need 88,830 more signatures by May 1st. Regardless of what your beliefs are, this is wrong. I have almost 120,000 followers, can you all please take 3 minutes to sign this petition and spread the message?

Click here to sign the petition to overturn Patel’s sentence and condemn Indiana’s feticide law.