Racism abounds following Rosie
The problem with this argument is that neither French, nor British, nor German people are considered non-White minorities in America. Racism does not occur in a bubble, but exists as an ongoing history of racism in America. When Michael Richards made his “fork up the ass” joke at the Laugh Factory, the racism was not that Richards actually wanted to find a Black person and stick a fork up his ass, but because this paralleled a racist American history that included numerous instances of popularized lynchings. The fork metaphor (i.e., equating a Black person with a food item) futher referenced the characterization of lynchings as Bar-B-Q’s.
Similarly, Rosie O’Donnell’s use of “ching-chong”-ery occurred amidst a history of oppression against Asian Americans and Chinese Americans in this country, which had already included use of “ching chong” as a form of degrading and dehumanizing Chinese people. Had Rosie targeted countries of predominantly White people, there probably would not have been a backlash involving racism.
But Rosie chose to demean Chinese people. We, and other members of the Asian American community, have long been targets of discrimination based on race that include mistreatment and xenophobia towards Asian culture and heritage. Therefore, the use of the hypothetical is misleading, and once again, its use changes the subject from racism against Chinese people to perceived mistreatment of Whites.
3. “Ching Chong” is a Bad Accent of an Otherwise Accurate Representation of Chinese
On one forum (and in this blog), the issue arose as to whether “ching” and “chong” actually exist in any dialect of Chinese. Over at the Gothamist, a reader wrote,
But to most people, that is exactly what they make of the Chinese language when they hear it. She just thought out loud.
At TV Squad, another reader wrote:
But, here’s the deal, [Rosie] doesn’t speak Chinese – she made a phonic representation as to how she hears the language. We as human animals do this. We mimic the sounds we hear every day. I’m sure if she wanted to take the time to learn the language she could harness those sounds she made and attach them to actual Chinese words
On her blog, Rosie continues to refer to her joke as a bad “accent”. Again, her joke would only be based upon poor accent imitation if she were speaking true Chinese, albeit badly.
Chinese is a tonal as well as phonetic language. In all dialects (including Mandarin, the dialect I speak), words consist of both a phonetic component and a tonal component. Each phonetic sound may be pronounced with four or five different tones, each of which is associated with multiple words (based on context). Moreover, most meanings in Chinese are derived from two or more words — “ching” alone is meaningless without other words surrounding it. For example, depending on how I inflected “ching”, I could be saying “please” or, in association with another sound, I could be saying, “stringed instrument”.
Chinese is an extremely complicated language, and one that isn’t structured at all like the Germanic languages (including English). Therefore, though “ching” and “chong” are phonetic sounds that might be made when speaking Chinese, they are not actual Chinese words because the tonal components are missing. Therefore, any reference to “ching” and “chong” as accurate but poorly executed Chinese is misleading.
4. “Ching Chong” Is Funny
Many readers are defending Rosie simply because they think mocking Chinese (and other non-English languages) is hilarious. One reader at TMZ wrote:
Actually, Rosie’s comment was pretty funny. I’ll be if the headlines were printed in somewhere in Africa they would phonetically say:
Abulla booga moogie wa-linga Danny DeVito!
I really don’t think I need to respond to why this type of comment is ignorant.
5. “Get Over It”
Many comments that I’ve read have cited racial minorities as hyper-sensitive. According to them, we are too quick to cry racism, and unwilling to “forgive” the racists when they try to apologize. At TMZ, one reader wrote:
im so sick and tired of everyone being offended. I remember a day when nobody gave a damn. Now you cant sneeze without someone claiming they are offended. Get over it already! call me a craker… i dont care. call me a honkey i dont care.
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