Can a typeface be racist?

[warpus]

I am offended by the presence of asian dishes on an asian restaurant advertisement.

It is clearly just a stereotype that asians eat asian food.

 

[Snorrius]

My stomach was offended by the "borsch" they served me in Hong-kong-style cafe in Singapore. Spicy borsch is almost fascist.

 

[bathsheba666]

I prefer a black font. There....

 

[luiz]

Why wouldn't you care if you risk offending people? You're making of light of things people find offensive as if you don't care whether or not they are offended.

If you feel that people are being thin-skinned and shouldn't take offense at the use of the font, fine. Say that. But turning it into a joke doesn't help anything. In fact, rather than salve the offense a party may have taken at an original work, you're simply contributing to compounding the offense.

I don't care because people who get offended over this are stupid and can go to hell for all I care.

I won't offend people on purpose, but I won't constantly police myself in order to make sure I am not offending some over-sensitive dude halfway across the globe.

What matters is the intention, not the form. People who get offended over forms are stupid.

 

[Yeekim]

I am offended by the presence of asian dishes on an asian restaurant advertisement.

It is clearly just a stereotype that asians eat asian food.

You, sir, are full of win!

 

[Lone Wolf]

No more offensive or racist then fake Cyrillic.

 

[Mise]

Not even the author of the WSJ article called it racist. He did that journobabble thing where he "asked the question" 'is this racist?' in the title, but didn't actually say it was racist himself. He said that it was cringeworthy and extremely stereotypical, and pondered whether racism will ever disappear as long as stereotypes like this continue to "dehumanise" certain peoples.

"Is your font racist?" is clearly an attention grabbing headline.

 

[Algeroth]

The most offensive thing in this is how ugly lower case letters in Chop Suey look.

BTW, why i can the second font identify as mexicanish or aztecish? Asian fonts try to look like calligraphy, but how these fonts manage to convey their "Mexicaness"?

 

[Mise]

Oh and just like the Adidas trainers, the company has removed the "Oriental" typeface from its website. Free market prevails again!

 

[Traitorfish]

No more offensive or racist then fake Cyrillic.

I'm not really convinced that Asians and Orthodox Europeans have an identical history in the United States, and it seems like that this disparity has produced different dynamics that make this sort of equivalence questionable. Specifically, Asian stereotypes have a long history of association with an extremely derogatory depiction of Asian people, but the same can't really be said of Eastern European stereotypes, which tend to have been at worst "lol goofy Old World types".

 

[Leonel]

My take is that if I were Chinese, or Asian, I might be offended by the use of these fonts. These fonts, or fonts like them, have long been used to characterture the Asian community. I can grok how someone can be offended by their use.

You really think us Asian's are so thin skinned?

Heh nah I'm just giving you a hard time Really the only thing that just makes me roll my eyes is the song Oriental Riff followed by a gong.

 

[BvBPL]

What matters is the intention, not the form.

BS.

"Is your font racist?" is clearly an attention grabbing headline.

My headlines bring the boys to the yard. Damn right, it's better than yours.

 

[Mise]

Well I meant the headline of that Tao Jones guy's article, but yeah, yours too

 

[warpus]

My stomach was offended by the "borsch" they served me in Hong-kong-style cafe in Singapore. Spicy borsch is almost fascist.

Spicy borscht is the best kind of borsht

Spoiler :

 

[Formaldehyde]

What makes it even funnier is that this Wall Street Journal blogger engages in stereotyping himself.`
`
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/tag/tao-jones/

In 2008, I wrote a column suggesting that if as Toni Morrison said, Bill Clinton was “the first black president,” Barack Obama — the first actual black occupant of the White House — might well be seen as the first Asian American president.

I pointed to his birth and childhood in Hawaii, America’s only state with a majority Asian population; his years spent living in Jakarta with his Asian stepfather Lolo Soetero and half-sister Maya Soetero-Ng; his close friendships and working relationships with Asian Americans, as a student, a Senator and as POTUS.

Throughout Obama’s first term, that sense of his being a secret Asian man only became more pronounced. His legitimacy as a native-born American was questioned. He was called scholarly and cerebral — the nation’s nerd-in-chief. He was accused of being passive, of lacking passion. All of these are stereotypes that Asian Americans would likely find familiar.

 

[warpus]

Maybe Obama's white, because he wears a suit

 

[Lone Wolf]

but the same can't really be said of Eastern European stereotypes, which tend to have been at worst "lol goofy Old World types".

You could probably dig up quite a lot of anti-Russian sentiment during the Cold War times, especially since the Soviet Union was often referred to as "Russia". See also the cartoon characters Boris Badenoff, Natasha Fatale, and, of course, Larry Wolff's Inventing Eastern Europe.

 

[luiz]

BS.

BS? BS?

So I take it that in your opinion what matters is the form and not the intention. So as long as one uses PC-words it's OK to deliberately offend people, but if one says something without any intention of offending but uses some word that someone somewhere finds offensive that person should be reprehended.

Please, think about what you're saying.

It's freakin' obvious that the only thing that matters is intention. Words can have different meanings to different people, and we can only judge a person by what they are actually saying, not by what they're saying might be misinterpreted into.

It's the same with this font thing. Are they trying to offend someone? Do they want to pass along an offensive message? No? Then who cares? Why should we care? Doesn't the writer have anything better to do than dig for bizarre reasons to be offended?

 

[Farm Boy]

You could probably dig up quite a lot of anti-Russian sentiment during the Cold War times, especially since the Soviet Union was often referred to as "Russia". See also the cartoon characters Boris Badenoff, Natasha Fatale, and, of course, Larry Wolf's Inventing Eastern Europe.

Yea, but Americans still considered Soviets "white-people" so you don't get to be offended by stuff. At least I think it sort of works like that. I have a hard time keeping up.

 

[Lone Wolf]

Dunno, Larry Wolff and his "My-book-is-just-like-Orientalism-but-in-regards-to-Eastern-Europe" had been receiving quite good reviews.

I guess the "Russians are people to whom authoritarianism comes naturally, so it's unjust to attack the Soviet Union for it" line of defence can also take its place in the "Stereotyped and othered Eastern Europeans" list, though some Russian ethnocentrists would agree with that statement.