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Comment by casualracism | Hacker News Reader

Not sure what the timeline is here. TFA strongly implies it’s a tweet on March 21 inciting a response on March 28, but buries the lede about the racist cartoon posted at an unknown time that the professor claims to have received an email about.

I’m sure political factors play the leading role here, but it’s long past the point where you can casually post racist cartoons and act surprised when you’re hit by undesirable consequences. Imagine an African American studies PhD student casually posting racist cartoons depicting black stereotypes. People have been disciplined for much less (e.g. that professor who spoke a common Chinese phrase resembling the n word several times to caution students and later got suspended).

And before you accuse me of things, I’m a long time HN user and I’m not paid to comment. Using a throwaway for radioactive topics.

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"And before you accuse me of things,"

You're using a moniker 'casualracism' trying to exploit the notion of a cartoon which has 'Chinese Characters' as inherently racist, even though that's entirely likely to be a weaponized use of the term given the political context.

"If you criticized China, you are Racist" is bad form.

It's a very easy and common method of CCP duplicity to simply blow the 'racism' dog whistle and have 1/2 of Westerners immediately lose context and get distracted.

There's no way what the PhD student did should lead to anything other than someone being trite on Twitter and that would be the end of it.

TFA tried very hard to bury and brush off this detail but had to include

> It depicted a comic character that had been altered and had stereotyped Chinese features, with yellow skin tone and slit eyes. This drawing circulated on social media in the spring of 2020, and was deemed racist by some users.

The student reluctantly admitted

> In retrospect, I realize I didn't question the rendering of the Chinese person enough

Given TFA’s clear sympathy for the student and intentional omission of what the cartoon actually is, one simply has to assume it’s at least as racist as TFA claims (oh who am I kidding, it’s more racist). It’s clearly not a case of “the notion of cartoon which has ‘Chinese character’ as inherently racist.” Asking “have you read the article” is frowned upon on HN but this is a case where the question justified. It’s either that or you’re arguing in bad faith.

original tweets need to contained within articles like this. Timelines should be standard, before the body of the argument. Way too easy to spin a narrative for an audience hungry to believe.

anti-asian propaganda is thriving right now

sadly, there is a thirst for it.

>TFA strongly implies it’s a tweet on March 21 inciting a response on March 28, but buries the lede about the racist cartoon posted at an unknown time that the professor claims to have received an email about.

I continue to be amazed with how creative propaganda can be. It is a simple misdirection (but oh how effect, just read the comments here). There is a paper trail showing what tweet the pushback had been about but the article still takes the liberty to draw up a strawman, and concludes -- Criticising the CCP is supposed to be «Neo-Nazi» like? Hawww.....

One thing I have realized over time is that it is one thing to recognize deficiencies in an argument you are against, and a completely different thing to recognize the same in arguments for a cause that you do believe in.

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