misterwong.gif 

I am not sure which I find more interesting; the concerns over the cultural (in)tolerance that Ernie raised in his post about the Mister Wong social bookmark site (with the subtitle complete in English), or the fact that the limited English pages begin with "Welcome, Dude!" It is certainly more engaging (i.e., memorable) than del.icio.us.

misterwong2.gif

With these said, I wonder what target audience they have in mind? Better yet, since almost any depiction of anybody else can be perceived by somebody or another as being insensitive, where does that leave us? Perhaps this is why so many new car models have numbers and letters as their names instead of words? Does using a depiction of an Asian (or Hispanic, African-American, Gay, Republican, Woman, Handicapped individual, etc.) automatically mean something is intolerant? Can only members from that group talk about that group?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 23rd, 2007 at 12:55 pm and is filed under Politics, Power & Positionality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

One comment

 1 

“Can only members from that group talk about that group?”

YES. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, YES. :)

Seriously though, what made me offended of the depicted Asian wasn’t because the mascot was Asian, but because the Asian had features which I automatically associate with coolie stereotypes which were used a lot against Asians in American culture and society.

And context has a lot to do with it as well. I would probably be MORE offended if the Mister Wong mascot was, say, on a humor site because the connotation would mean “laugh at me.”

May 23rd, 2007 at 2:11 pm

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