Threadless promotes yet another racist T-shirt

by Carmen Van Kerckhove

People sure love to display their racism proudly on their T-shirts. Last June we told you about Threadless’s questionable milk bottle miscegenation shirt, and now they’re back with another racist shirt called “Flied Lice.” (thanks Gina for the tip!)

Ew! A yucky fly on the rice! How unhygienic! And “Fried Crap with Spicy Sauce,” who knows what’s really in that dish! You know what they say about those rat-swallowing, cat-eating Chinamen!

It’s just a t-shirt, you say? Actually, no. It’s just one instance in a long history of defaming Chinese people as unhygienic and primitive. And when you tie it into the recent tainted pet food scares, you start to see a pattern. Word to Jeff Yang:

China has been portrayed as a nation blind to hygiene and blissfully unconcerned about recent reports of food contamination. That’s troubling, because it reinforces the notion that befouled food is the consequence of a foul culture. Chef and gustatory adventurer Anthony Bourdain may have said it best in a 2006 Salon interview in which he noted that there’s “something kind of racist” about culinary xenophobia: “Fear of dirt is often indistinguishable from the fear of unnamed dirty people.”

And this, in turn, spells danger. What one might call “food libel” has long been an aspect of a larger fear of China. The association of Chinese with dubious edibles has insinuated itself into our cultural consciousness in small and seemingly trivial ways — in schoolyard taunting, in sitcom gags about takeout food, in standup monologues about puppy chow mein.

But when the stakes are raised, as they have been by recent scandals, such jokes turn deadly serious. The fringes of the pundit set have already been intimating that these tainted-food incidents are deliberate.

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China's cardboard-filled buns story was a hoax at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture on 26 Jul 2007 at 9:00 am

[...] For more on the recent dirty-food Yellow Peril trend, check out the discussion here. [...]

Comments

Stef wrote:

I get what you’re saying about the T-shirt, but in all seriousness, China really does seem to have lots of contamination scandals on its hands these days, from lead-laden toys to all of the recent food scandals. I think in many instances these instances of contamination *were* deliberate. One of the saddest things I’ve heard is that over a dozen newborn babies died after drinking Chinese infant formula that was later found to have zero nutritional value. It was a completely fake food product, one of many found today. You can hear about this and other stories through these links:

Inspection in China Finds 23,000 Cases of Bad Food – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11478155

Chinese Consumers Fear Tainted Food, Also – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11596211

China Executes Ex-Food and Drug Chief – http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11846089

Posted 17 Jul 2007 at 1:19 pm ¶
robyn wrote:

The design isn’t for sale yet; it’s still in the voting phase and I hope it doesn’t get picked.

My impression was totally different from this post. I thought that the submitter was going for an engrish stereotype , but even if engrish weren’t racist, the design itself still fails for lack of continuity — “fried crap” would be “flied clap” and “rice” would be “lice”.

The more I think about this post, though, the more I’m thinking about how much more history there is behind racist jokes than realized.

Posted 17 Jul 2007 at 2:41 pm ¶
James wrote:

Stef, no one’s denying the problems China faces trying to enforce regulations in a nation of its size, going through the kinds of revolultions its currently undergoing. But if given a choice between cardboard filled buns or U.S. milk, my choice would be pretty simple.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZkDikRLQrw

The problem is the biased view being presented. Read Jeff’s column in the Washington Post, you’ll discover that you probably have more to fear from Danish candy then you do from Chinese dim sum. My guess is that in a few years we’ll discover what’s currently happening is a massive PR campaign by either Democrats laying the groundwork for protectionist measures against Chinese imports, or US-based manufacturing associations looking to protect lost jobs.

Posted 17 Jul 2007 at 4:31 pm ¶
WildMagnolia wrote:

Yikes Carmen, you’ve surely opened my eyes. I have to admit I would have never thought of any of that stuff. Thanks for clueing me in on another facet of racist issues. I guess I get so consumed with the Black /White thing that I hardly gave a thought to all the other negative cultural depictions. The only upside of my neglect is that I don’t harbor those thoughts about the Asian culture.

Love your site!
Keep on truckin’!

Posted 17 Jul 2007 at 5:48 pm ¶
jze wrote:

I have business cards that simply say: Thanks. For being a racist.

I would hand whom ever dons this shirt one of these cards.

Posted 17 Jul 2007 at 6:12 pm ¶
Lahari wrote:

right stef, but the point is that now a lot of people will think that ALL chinese food -whether prepared in australia or arkansas – is dirty and uncontaminated. i mean, the US has had numerous meat recalls, a spinach ban just last year, and have you seen “fast food nation?” – there’s shit in your beef. somehow, americans aren’t universally seen as a dirty, contaminated people. whereas the media here will say, “x y and z family farms contaminated the spinach crops,” when it comes to china they will say, “chinese food is contaminated.” no one ever said, “American spinach is contaminated.” it’s the privilege of context and detail.

Posted 17 Jul 2007 at 6:58 pm ¶
Sewere wrote:

Stef, I still don’t get the point you’re driving at… The T-shirt plays on a racial stereotype of of Asians and Asian-Americans especially here in the United States. The fact that there were a number of products made in China that were contaminated (even if they were purposely done to cut costs) has nothing to do with Chinese restaurants here in the U.S. (especially since restaurants have to be cleared by local departments of public health). The point Jeff was making is that the only correlation between both is race and hence racist – Chinese and Chinese-Americans are two different nationalities. Furthermore, the stereotype that often plays out against Asian-Americans (even those who are not Chinese) is based on such specious correlation.

Case in point, World War II and the way Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps because they were deemed potential traitors based on nothing but their ethnicity while German-Americans were not sent to internment camps (not that that should have been but you get my point).

Posted 18 Jul 2007 at 1:45 am ¶
Leigh-Anne wrote:

I agree with Robyn, to me it seemed more to be perpetuating the “Engrish prease, Mr Blown” stereotype…

I can’t believe people really buy such shirts…

On the other hand, I think of how many people *in my own family* joke about “flied lice” and I see that there’s definitely a market for this type of racism…

Posted 18 Jul 2007 at 2:59 am ¶
Kendra wrote:

Awhile back I took a luch order at work from a client(white male) who had written on the order form “flied lice” I was like WTF is flied lice!?! It really took me awhile to get his “humor” I almost said that to the asian woman on the phone but caught it just in time. If I had actually said that to that woman I would have been beyond mortified. If this person had been a coworker instead of one of our clients he would a have received a tongue lashing and possible beat down from me. But I’m sure that man “didn’t intend to offend.” Jackass.

Posted 18 Jul 2007 at 10:59 am ¶
Stef wrote:

I agree that this particular T-shirt seems to be (inconsistantly) making fun of the Engrish stereotype as well as implying dirty food.

Sewere – Carmen brought up the tainted pet food scare, and in Jeff’s article, at the end, he mentioned that some pundits are saying that these incidents of food contamination in China are deliberate (the implication was that they, in fact, are not). I discussed events in China in response to these things being mentioned in the original post. What I was gettang at was that perhaps the manufacturers of these products did deliberately contaminate them, thus the outrage and mistrust of the current Chinese food situation cannot be totally blamed on racist attitudes or explained as some sort of conspiracy carried out by political groups in the U.S., as James suggests at the end of his comment.

Whatever the reason that China cannot prevent these contaminations from taking place, they are taking place.

Also, James-I cannot watch that video now but will do so when I get home tonight.

Lahari-Two wrongs don’t make a right, so saying the U.S. has also had contaminated food does not negate the fact that people should be concerned about today’s Chinese products as well. Now, I am not the one to defend the FDA or any U.S. food products. I have not seen Fast Food Nation (I do plan to), but I don’t eat fast food much or beef ever, probably for the reasons the film mentions. That film would probably be preaching to my choir, and I’m glad to raise awareness about the products that we ingest. If there are food contaminations in the U.S., we are right to be alarmed by them. As far as how the media treats U.S. food scandals versus Chinese food scandals, there are many differences in the situations of those two countries. If one single crop of Spinach has E-Coli contamination here, word will pread and there will be recalls. But in China, there have been 23,000 cases of bad food and little regulation, so it’s easier to say something general like, “much of Chinese food products is contaminated” rather than name the food products specifically, as with U.S. spinach, which was just a single (or small handful of) incident(s).

Is racism at work with the current distrust of many Chinese food products? Likely, but if so, only partly, because there *are* many unsafe food products found in China today. That can’t be ignored or minimized. That’s all I was getting at with my first post.

Thanks to all,
Stefanie

Posted 18 Jul 2007 at 11:29 am ¶
baby221 wrote:

Have you seen this one from Busted Tees? “Everyone knows the cutest dogs are orange-flavoured” indeed.

Posted 18 Jul 2007 at 2:13 pm ¶
Kai wrote:

Actually, from what I gather the recent ban on all Chinese seafood imports was initiated in Mississipi, Alabama, and Louisiana, who happen to be the three biggest US producers of farm-raised catfish and shrimp. It’s not a dark conspiracy, it’s how the US corporate-political establishment works, quite openly.

I know that nobody here is defending racism. And there’s no question that we could all use higher food standards; here in the US, in China, everywhere. But the stereotyping of the Chinese as disease-spreading rat-eaters etc has 150 years of history in white racist propaganda, with innumerable consequences ranging from unjust to bloody to unimaginably tragic. Historical context is an important consideration when evaluating media imagery and the bolstering of popular narratives against racist backdrops.

Posted 18 Jul 2007 at 9:34 pm ¶
crista wrote:

*last comment was unfinished and didn’t mean to post, please post this**

The issue with the food contamination is a legal issue about the difference between international food standards, and international laws on copyright protection and branding, displaying the nutritional value on products. etc. All those things are LEGAL rules in america. (look, in the past food standards were seen differently in america. We changed because of standards and ideas of liability. NOT because of superior white majority driven evolution of thinking)

They have nothing to do with race. and especially nothing to do with people in America, who are American, who are racialized as Asian or look ”chinese”

Connecting the two highlights our socialized racist thinking. Thinking someone who ”looks Chinese” on the outside and making a value judgment on their ideas about food production/product liability based on a few instances.

Anyway, to further illustrate this is a legal issue re: sold food, think of how you prepare food in your own home or at a family gathering and let the flies land on things, sit out forever, etc. and then how you EXPECT a product you are buying should be. different standards. its not cuz white people are all clean and nice and have great standards.

to further debunk the myth of Chinese= bad food standards: ever heard a Chinese from China person talk about how ”bad” the fish are in america and complain about freshness? their fresh food standards are different from ours.

Posted 18 Jul 2007 at 11:39 pm ¶
Kai wrote:

crista, to answer your last question: Chinese folks complain all the time about how unfresh fish (and duck and chicken) are in the US. In China (say, Guanzhou province), when you order a fish at a restaurant, they bring a bucket to your table with a living fish in it, the way sommeliers in the US show you a bottle of wine before opening it. After you approve, they take it back to the kitchen and prepare it. In the US, fish are generally dead for at least several days before being served. Very different standards.

I’ve spent a lot of time in China and quite frankly tend to eat a healthier diet there than I do in the US, as it’s based on local greens and rice and fresh fish, with smaller portions of pork. If you ask me, kids in China sure look healthier than the kids in the US. Generally speaking, Chinese folks are much pickier about food than Americans; they (we) consider a lot of American food an abomination.

Peace.

Posted 19 Jul 2007 at 9:32 am ¶
Wendi Muse wrote:

only asian food is tainted, eh?
check out this article on toxic chili made right here in the u.s. of a:
http://www.pittsburghlive.com/x/pittsburghtrib/news/cityregion/s_518171.html

maybe i should make a shirt for this…though i doubt anyone would buy it…stereotypes sell better than the truth

Posted 20 Jul 2007 at 11:36 am ¶
Expat in Asian wrote:

I don’t think such t-shirts do the anti-racism cause any good if they are allowed to proceed and are at a minimum, very bad taste.

For an exploration of issues surrounding asian racism and links to anti white-supremist and victims of racism support sites please take a look at http://www.asianracism.blogspot.com

Posted 23 Jul 2007 at 5:08 pm ¶
rob wrote:

here’s another racist shirt…
http://www.bustedtees.com/shirt/wheremydogsat/male

Posted 22 Oct 2007 at 4:22 am ¶
bler wrote:

Just wanted to comment on Sewers reply:

“Case in point, World War II and the way Japanese-Americans were sent to internment camps because they were deemed potential traitors based on nothing but their ethnicity while German-Americans were not sent to internment camps (not that that should have been but you get my point).”

That’s actually not completely true, many german-americans were interned during WW2, roughly 11,000 in the US by the end of war had been sent to these camps. Atleast 4000+ were interned in Latin America. That pales in comparison to the japanese americans (110,000 or something) but “no german americans were interned” is obviously wrong to say.

Posted 02 Jan 2008 at 12:14 am ¶