Roughly a quarter of these results employ elements of blackface, originally a mid-19th century, US theater tradition where White actors put on dark makeup to play black people in minstrel shows. Curiously, while invisible to users with US phone numbers, these stickers borrow from US aesthetic traditions, reproduced but also imbued with a life of their own in China.Īt the time of writing, users with Chinese phone numbers who type the word 黑人, “Black person,” into the search bar of the WeChat sticker gallery will get 65 results. What makes these racist WeChat stickers unique is not that they are ethically questionable. Nor is it surprising that there is “ uncivilized” content in WeChat’s sticker gallery: Although WeChat’s submission guidelines demand all content be “accordance with moral regulations,” there are, among the cats, bunnies, and other cuddly creatures, images of beatings, suicides, and shit- literally-in the sticker galleries. Photos of African people next to photos of animals at an art exhibit in Hubei last month. From the “ This is Africa” exhibit at the Hubei Provincial Museum, where photographs of African people were put alongside images of wild animals, to the 2016 Qiaobi commercial where a black man is shoved into a washing machine and comes out Chinese, there’s a persistent pattern of prejudice against African and African diaspora peoples in Chinese popular culture. Racism in Chinese media is by no means new. This may not be apparent to every user I never found out until I changed my WeChat account registration from a US phone number to a Chinese one, which gave me access to a new set of sticker offerings based on my new region-one that’s apparently into casual stereotyping of black people. Last month, an African-American woman living in Shanghai reported that WeChat’s translation function turned “黑老外,” a mild pejorative for a black foreigner, into the N-word.īut that controversy is just the tip of the iceberg: WeChat’s sticker galleries, where users can download animated and often user-submitted biaoqing (表情), are a nexus for blackface and anti-black representation, where longstanding racist tropes are reinterpreted with Chinese characteristics. China’s biggest messaging service is no stranger to race-related controversy.
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