byzantiums:

wow okay can i just break down this ‘coloured folk are super respectful of their elders’ claim that’s being promulgated here - like i can’t believe this website is recycling these tired as fuck sentiments but whatever. i mean, firstly whenever you claim that all people of colour behave in a certain way, you’re doing us a disservice and picking up on a rhetoric that’s been used for years by racists and imperialists that we’re all some big seething homogenous mass and our individual cultures are unworthy of being distinguished from one another, which is how you end up with situations where ignorant people can calmly declare that ‘africa is a country’ or ‘there’s no difference between india and china’ or some such shit. apart from the obvious, there’s nothing that all people of colour uniformly and universally do. 

second, i’ll acknowledge that there may be a kernel of truth behind the statement that ‘poc are very respectful of their elders’. hey, i’m from a south asian subculture and even though i was raised pretty much a secular indian, i still couldn’t escape the associations of being culturally hindu and the teachings of a religion that laid down the dictum that teachers and parents should be treated with the same respect as deities. but just because certain poc cultures might preach that message that doesn’t mean that all people within those societies are going to absorb it and internalise it. i mean, there’s something inherently outdated about the ‘respect your elders’ aphorism and maybe even a little illegitimate, because it suggests people are worthy of your respect without having done anything tangible to earn it. it’s not surprising for people to chafe against such an attitude, particularly in the case of a young girl trying to overcome the institutionalised sexism of the culture that she resides in and is currently denying her. and lastly, is it not way past time that we started discarding this idea that there are codes of behaviour that are inherently ‘white’ or ‘asian’ or ‘latin’ or ‘black’ or what have you. associating specific traits with certain races is exactly how racism starts. 

also, asserting that a series and its characters are white despite the overwhelming evidence of asian culture that’s influenced said show is pretty weak-sauce. particularly when, there’s such a dearth of poc leads (and particularly woc heroines) in the media today and you’re just denying viewers the possibility to identify with some of the few that do exist. i won’t talk about the danger of denying poc accurate reflections of themselves in the media because my boy junot diaz has already done that better than i ever could but if you have problems with a piece of television and the way it handles race and culture, a reasonable argued post is the way to go, not making some rude comments on somebody else’s photo-set i mean come on.