She’s Asian but she’s not Chinese.
I don’t think it’s cultural appropriation for two reasons.
1. Chun Li isn’t even a Chinese cultural product. She’s a Chinese character from a Japanese video game that’s internationally popular.
2. The ability to appropriate (just like the ability to be racist, to racially oppress) requires the systematic power to do so. Black people don’t have that structural power in the racial hierarchy. Just as PoC can’t be racist to white people (which isn’t the same as being bigoted or prejudiced), black people can’t be racist to nbpoc. Black ppl don’t have the structural power to alter the narrative around Asian cultures / cultural products (though I can imagine white people seeing the Asian influences in their works and then indirectly appropriating them, but whites are gonna white).
In this, thetrudz / GradientLair talk about the ability to oppress, the black vs nonblack, and “poc solidarity” / “allyship”, using Janelle Monae’s song ‘Yoga’ as the example.
My own only note to add to this link for context, is that when she says ‘antiblackness’, she doesn’t just mean ‘racism that happens to be against black people.’ It’s a specific framework that divides the world between the nonblack and the black, wherein the nonblack structurally oppress the black. (As opposed to the framework of white supremacy wherein it divides the world between the white and nonwhite. These two frameworks can co-exist at the same time imo. In fact, it’s probably the framework of white supremacy that shows why nonblackpoc don’t have as much power to structurally oppress black ppl as much white ppl do, though we still do it.)
3. All of that aside, did I think the video was ok? No.
Because Minaj did just use Chinese culture as a passing aesthetic. (Since this was about, y’know, fictional char Chun Li, and not anything even remotely actually Chinese). I did appreciate how she used actual Chinese writing on the video, but that’s about where the good things stop. Starting the video and the song with a loud gong sound, having dancers wear those rice paddy hats, and doing the whole ‘chopsticks = hairsticks’ thing (not the same!), was all really painful to watch. That’s like some of the most unoriginal and cliche stereotypes about Chinese culture ever. Not to mention having a necklace that just literally read ‘EAST’ and that one off line where she decided ‘ding dong’ wasn’t going to be a racially insensitive thing to use as a rhyme in a supposedly ‘Chinese’ themed video, though it is interesting to see her rhyme that against ‘king kong’ (which has its own history of being racially loaded, but I’m not black so yeah).
There was probably a better way to do an homage to the popular character Chun-Li. Even a possibility to improve on the way the game portrays the character, since I’m sure that’s not problem-free either.
Callouts welcome, as ever.
