The story (which isn’t true) literally goes that someone in China ate an undercooked bat and contracted the first Covid case. How could you possibly not think he’s talking about a Chinese person?
Right, but eating bats is now associated with Chinese people. People have been making jokes about the foods Chinese people eat that are considered “exotic” here for decades.
I’m not saying RGIII was being super racist or anything, just that you can’t isolate the racial aspect out of a joke that is very specific to China.
I've only ever heard jokes about Chinese people eating dogs. It's always very specifically dogs, probably because of the implication that eating a common pet species is savage.
I doubt all that many average people even know that Covid is theorized to have come from bats, let alone associate eating bats with Chinese people.
First of all, I never said he was racist. My only claim was that he was referring to a hypothetical Chinese person.
As far as your example goes, it’s not the same at all. He is specifically referring to something that happened in China, not a personality trait that could apply to anyone.
I would not call what RGIII said a dog-whistle, but the problem with your logic is it makes it impossible to point then out. When someone references a known stereotype, the person who sees a problem with that is not racist for simply being aware of the stereotype.
Dude just scroll up. This whole stupid thread started when some guy in got his feelings all hurt that a joke could be made a joke at RG3's expense. The point is that it's a bit hypocritical to bitch about how offensive that is when RG3 is making a joke about a virus that has killed millions of people because, to hear him tell it, a Chinese guy ate a bat. No one's complaining about RG3's joke, we're saying if you're going to get sand in your snatch in defense of a career backup with millions of dollars, why are you just ignoring the one he dished out?
Let me try to understand this. So in the already hypothetical claim that you believe to be untrue that someone in China ate a bat and started COVID, you're claiming he has to be referring to a Chinese person and that it's impossible that person wasn't one of the 145.5 million tourists from the rest of the world in 2019? Currently there are 1.4 billion people in China. Adding that together would equal ~1.545 billion people. That's a 1/15 chance that the first person to hypothetically start COVID wasn't from China and you're saying he has to be talking about a Chinese person. So not only are you saying the bat story didn't happen, you're saying that even if it did, it couldn't have been a non-Chinese person to eat the bat.
The point isn’t what actually happened. We don’t know how Covid started. It could have been a Chinese person, or a tourist, or someone in a different country entirely.
My point is that in the popular narrative RGIII is referring to, a Chinese citizen in Wuhan ate a bat from a wet market and contracted the first case of Covid.
Again, I’m not accusing him of being racist or anything, but he is clearly specifically referring to a Chinese person.
I understand your point now, as he most likely is referring to a Chinese person, but even if he is, is that offensive in any way? The offensiveness comes from any categorization by skin color. The sentence "a white guy stole" and "a white guy stole because he's white" have completely different weight. He might be implying that a Chinese person ate a bat, but he's not saying they did that because they're Chinese.
The only reason I felt it was worth pointing out the racial aspect of it is that an unsubstantiated theory became seen as the factual explanation of how the pandemic started because it aligns with Chinese stereotypes.
Probably for the exact same reasons the rg3 comment is bad, just because it's correct doesn't mean you're not an asshole.
I don't really care about either joke but I understand why they are distasteful. At the end of the day it doesn't matter where covid started. This has happened before and will happen again.
Yeah, makes sense. Bringing up the origin won't help solve the problem in any way.
Though my small interaction here on this post has further proved that I am better off staying away from twitter. I am just too nonchalant/ignorant about these matters and would much rather focus on my work than getting involved in this
How is it fucking stupid that's a 15th of the people who were in China in 2019? Literally a 1 in 15 chance it was a tourist. Also he's not referring to the person who ate the bat, he's referring to the person who said one person can't change the world, which could be literally any of the 7.9 billion people in the world, so it's a 1/8 chance he's referring to anyone who isn't Chinese
Because not all tourists in China were in the country when the virus rose up in the end of the year. Your taking a year's worth of tourists in all of China, and putting them all in Wuhan at one time. That's fucking stupid.
You're ignoring half of what he said in order to make a dumb point.
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u/feint2021 Apr 23 '21 edited Apr 23 '21
But when you make an offensive joke, be prepared for a comeback. Hah! A comeback, guess he wouldn’t understand.
Edit: I’m surprised how dense people can be sometimes 👀