Some Chinese people who are afraid of blacks have done some unforgivably racist things that you may never hear about but trust these racists to keep a record of all black shortcomings. I could very well keep a record of what Asians do in my country but what would I have to gain by doing so. In the end it would descend into comparing which race is more evil than the other. To my Chinese friends these people and their rants are a shame to the country.
Despite the fact that most of their encounters with blacks are not negative they stubbornly fixate on the potential for such. They are unredeemable and absolutely brainwashed. They are the product of a media that forgets to report about the bad behavior of many Chinese living abroad. They don’t represent the best of China and would do everybody a favor by relinquishing their identity cards and jumping into the Changjiang.
They think that by being “yellow” and born here they have more of the country’s interests at heart than a black man who is married to a Chinese woman, has raised a family and has volunteered his free time to make a contribution to the greatness of this country. Their poisoning of minds is akin to that of the racist propaganda master Joseph Goebbels who believed all Jews were evil and removing them was for the greater good of Germany.
They have had little or no exposure to African people. When you show prejudice you should expect to receive prejudice. Finding a scientific explanation to the inferiority of Africans is no different to what the Japanese did during the second world-war when they pursued a scientific basis for the subjugation of China. The Asian population in Africa is in the millions with the Chinese accounting for about close to one million.
There are more illegal Chinese in Africa than there are illegal Africans in Asia or China. Many Chinese setup stalls in markets and sell DVDs on the street while others do manual labor. The whole population of Africans in China is very small. So you see the quality of Chinese going abroad is not so high even in Africa. Whatever experiences you have with Africans here Africans have the same with Asians in Africa and multiplied several times more.
They take half truths from online reports about African crime as official evidence against a whole race.
Well then for every report they bring out about Africans I can bring out two about China. And I emphasize only China one country in Asia unlike them that take the statistics of the full 53 countries in the African continent and group as one. In fact I think I will try to use the same logic they have in discussing statistics this is just to show you how stupid and ridiculous their arguments sound. I will not use China as a country I will instead use the whole continent of Asia because according to them all Africans are the same and therefore by argument Asians are all the same.
According to the latest statistics Asia is the largest producer of Narcotics and has been so for much longer than any other continent. If you don’t believe search yourself, just type Asia Drugs United Nations Report and click “Go” in Baidu where I just learnt that over 90% of the worlds Heroin is produced in Asia. And it doesn’t stop at drugs. Asians are the leading exporters of prostitution, human trafficking, terrorism, war and disease etc etc ..yawn.
911 was an Asian export and so was SARS, H1N1 and the bubonic plague . All the three diseases mentioned originated from China. I glean all this information from the internet and then dump it on say a Ghanian who has never been to Asia. I am sure it would be the last continent he would ever want to visit in his life and wouldn’t want to be anywhere near anyone that looks Asian. There you go manipulation of factual information to influence opinions of the ignorant.
The question is what is your attitude when you meet an African in your daily life? Are you afraid and sensitive or do you think there is nothing to it. The fact is many blacks do understand Chinese but choose to ignore or pretend not to hear people making comments about them in public.
They treat negative comments as rudeness and are more likely to feel pity than anger for people that speak such. Blacks have negative experiences here like Asians have away from Asia but unlike some Chinese they are less likely to blame the whole yellow or Asian race but will just say “that’s how the Chinese are”. All I can say is if you want to find bad in people it is very easy and if you want to find good in people it is also easy.
How welcome are Africans when there are so many people that harbor ill thoughts towards them. Your answers may have an impact on how Africans view Asians especially Chinese.
This is not a comfortable topic for me to bring up because it is sensitive and may be interpreted to mean that I am trying to paint the country as racist. I am writing this post more as a response to the alarming growing number of black hating bloggers and China racism deniers on the internet and their myriad arguments for advocating race hate. They are ignorant of the fact that Chinese aren’t the greatest of role models even in Africa where many of them also commit crime and it so happens they disproportionately outnumber the total of Africans living in China. I will not try to mince words but have to state China has a lot of prejudice and by extension racism.
Racism is prejudice, discrimination and/or abuse based on “race”. A racist is someone who exercises these. And Chinese can be very racist. With exceptions in general Chinese do not have strong convictions against Africans/blacks per se but harbor certain beliefs some negative which they consider factual more so than whites. Chinese have the annoying habit of generalizing people, knowing someone as an individual is secondary. Unfortunately for many native people here my being black IS an issue.
While trying to better educate my Chinese friends of a negative aspect of my life in China I hope fellow “blacks” can share their thoughts on the subject.
Please understand my whole experience in China is not negative just a part of it is. I get reminded every single day that I am a black man like that is what my whole identity is about. And those by the way are the good days. I would like for at least a day to walk out of the house and not hear a single person say “hey look a black man”.
I am aware that Chinese are prejudiced about each other, which goes to show how much ignorance they have of each other. However they rely on cues, dialects and other things to tell each other apart where as Africans in China stand out, are understood even less and therefore are easily on the receiving end of prejudice. Let me give an example of racist behavior that is not as uncommon as many Chinese think.
Yesterday I was in the subway when two young men entered saw me and one of them started trash talking blacks in my presence. “These niggers probably can’t get jobs in their country” “blacks just like to womanize, it’s in their culture” blacks are this blacks are that. He just kept at it until I’d had enough and told him to “shut the f*** up, no more talk about blacks”. I understand and speak Chinese well. He uses both the derogatory heigui and trash-talk of blacks within earshot and only after seeing me. I have encountered more blatantly racist things and yet I still choose to not condemn a whole race (yellow/Asian) it’s just a stupid logic.
I can’t even count the number of times I’ve been called heigui anymore. The feeling is that too many in China not excluding Hong Kong and Taiwan associate black people with negatives. Don’t get me wrong there are many good Chinese but there are also many ignorant, hypocritical black hating Chinese out there that are trying to spread fear of the black pigmentation. Seriously how many bad Chinese are there in African countries there are many and yet the attitudes are different. I mean you have a situation where a person of color is being abused simply because the perpetrator heard or read somewhere about the deeds of an evil “black” man. By similar asinine logic I can in my country abuse an Asian looking person I meet walking down the street because of the deeds of an evil “yellow” man I read in the newspaper the previous day.
Prejudice in China is still the norm and is not completely frowned on. How do you get a harmonious society with this retarded ideology. With all this prejudice around there is a tendency to keep one’s guard up especially in big cities in public places where sensitivity or apprehension towards blacks is most manifest. Many ordinary Chinese do not understand the issue of racism in China because they do not realize the extent to which other races can be subjected to prejudice. It’s never talked about, swept under the rug or just downplayed. Let me stress as an African I don’t view the topic of racism as a black man topic.
No one is justified in being racist against another human being period. Every so called race is guilty of racism. If one finds themselves becoming more negatively color sensitive then I would strongly recommend some time out from their environment. Like in any other country the white race here is worshipped and envied at the same time. Some whites call us sensitive or jealous or something in between. I just laugh at these insinuations. I know my experiences and they had everything to do with me being black and that’s all.
I have been assaulted twice both for very racist reasons and completely unprovoked. I will not include the thefts I experienced or the attempted robbery in broad daylight my friend experienced because I believe it has more to do with us being foreigners. If you ask a local about racism in China their response is always the same. “People being abused because of their skin color? Not in China no way”, “People being insulted because of their color in China? No it cannot be it has never been reported in the papers”. What is common for blacks is the subtle discreet fear that is encountered almost every day the frequency of which I have noticed differs from region to region. I once joked to a friend of mine about Chinese and the fixation with the “blackness” of blacks, blackness ambiguously meaning skin pigmentation or evilness.
I wouldn’t mind if all of this attention on me was just amusement or positive. But some of this attention is negative. What I typically get is the “wow a genuine black man” and “how can a person be so black” which after a while can get annoying but I DON’T consider offensive or negative. What is offensive is “hey be careful behind you, a black man” and “take care of your bag there is a black man”. This kind of racism is stuff I only heard about when I was a kid and only in movies. Never would I have thought I would experience it in my life. It is shocking and exasperating. Blacks who can’t understand mandarin aren’t completely oblivious to this behavior. On any day I can go to any public place and besides all the sensitivity every once in a while there are people who check their pockets when I am in the vicinity or women inspecting or keeping their handbags closer. I used to think I was seeing things or just being too sensitive until other observant people confirmed my suspicions. These subtle tell-tale signs of fear happen every day.
What is done more openly is the talk. Because locals think foreigners can’t speak their language you get to know how much racism exists in the society by learning the language. Racism will never be an issue in China because it is a homogenous nation. Blacks will just have to keep a manual on how to keep sanity in a country where being black is considered odd or associated with the negative. I don’t enjoy sounding negative and making blanket statements about whole groups of people. Coz maybe some guy from that group may be on the receiving end of the same kind of negative treatment I get but it’s difficult when it comes to race. Like I mentioned earlier every race is guilty of racism in one form or the other, for anybody to claim otherwise is irresponsible. China is changing and hopefully this post of mine will have less relevance ten twenty years from now. Calling China a racist country I feel maybe an over simplification but to say there is racism in China is accurate and unfortunately too annoying to ignore.
