“Said argued that the concept of the Orient as other serves to establish Europe and the West as the norm.“
In regards to the quote above, can the same be said in reverse?
Orient/oriental is an umbrella term that throws people of Asian descent into a neat little box with no further questions. The way we generalize people of certain skin color, ethnicity, nationality, and background has all to do with the norms established long before we learned what any of these things really meant. When Edward Said coined the term Orientalism, there was a sense of an US vs THEM mentality among society and its media that has been going on for hundreds of years—West vs. East. It’s prevalent in our daily lives, ingrained in our pop culture. How many times will we see white writers and directors take on projects that involve presenting an aspect of a certain culture to us before we begin to negate said content that ultimately doesn’t do the culture justice?
The perpetuated stereotypes presented by Western media for Asian men: sexual predators to white women, asexual/emasculated men, flamboyant villains, and Kung Fu masters.
The perpetuated stereotypes presented by Western media for Asian women: hypersexualized, the Lotus Blossom, the narrative of the white man saving the Asian woman during colonial and military history (aka China Doll), and the Dragon Lady (even if Lucy Liu looks like a badass).
As much as we enjoy these characters sometimes (believe me, I love me some Kill Bill) it’s also a matter of being aware that these depictions aren’t as accurate as they could be. It’s just a lot more fun if we can see a culture from a more exotic perspective than a realistic one, isn’t it? White writers would never give you that. It’s the same reason cultural appropriation is a thing–we like the exotic appeal of things, not the true nature of them.
With race relations in the U.S. at an all-time controversial high, it’s safe to say that more and more people are questioning the status quo, asking why it’s still the same group that gets to decide what normal is. The reason this quote cannot be said in reverse is the same reason reverse-racism is not a real thing—who holds the power? If you’re not white you’re a minority, right? So the majority rules—literally. That’s not to say being a minority means you’re free of prejudice or don’t have the ability to push the same racist stereotypes but the shift in power would never be handed over to a minority group. In the grand scheme of things nothing really changes in the overall attitude of society if say a black person is prejudiced against a white person, white is till the norm therefore white remains in power despite whatever the black person does against them. But the problem with who gets to establish what the norm goes far back beyond what we see now.
When Europeans came to settle in North America, they came with a very narrow mindset of what was right and wrong—there were no other groups to tell them otherwise, besides the Native Americans and well that didn’t go down too well. Native Americans were seen as savages, uncivilized, heathens who didn’t know how to govern themselves. Europeans took over and decided that they knew what was best for this group of people. They established a norm just by believing it and enforcing it—because if we stop to think about it, every norm is but a social construct not a rule of nature. Race is a social construct that those same European settlers created when slavery became a “necessary evil” in their minds. To justify their treatment of African Americans they established this ideology that these people with darker skin color were destined to be inferior than them. All throughout slavery’s history, it was widely accepted as the white man’s duty to in some form or other save the black people because without them they wouldn’t know what to do with their poor, uneducated selves. When America was establishing itself as a nation, the more people came in the more diverse society became. With that diversity came conflict and if you open an American history book void of a white-washed perspective, you’re hard-pressed to find that a major non-white culture ever co-existed peacefully with the pre-established notions of race this country had. Racism has always been and remains to be about who holds the power which is why white has to this day remained the default for everything that matters, everything that’s “normal”.
