As Jesse Watters showed this week on The O’Reilly Factor,mainstream racism still passes muster as long as its targets are AsianHow many trite, stale Asian stereotypes can you cram into four minutes? That’s the question that Jesse Watters, and the buffoonish correspondent on Fox News’ The O’Reilly Factor,answered for us earlier this week in his latest man-on-the-street “Watters’ World” segment. He takes a trip to Manhattan’s Chinatown, ostensibly to interview Chinese American voters on their thoughts on the presidential election. But it quickly becomes clear that the people he encounters are mere props for his (decidedly unfunny) jokes riffing on stereotypes about massage parlors to herbal medicine. He kicks off the segment by asking two women if he needs to bow to them, and following that up by asking a street vendor if the watches he’s selling are stolen. If that’s not enough,he then asks an elderly Chinese man and woman questions in English, when it’s clear they don’t understand him, or decides to throw in random references to karate and taekwondo – non-Chinese martial arts – for wonderful measure. All of this is interspersed with clips of Mr Miyagi from Karate Kid (who is Japanese,if that needed to be said), Bruce Lee and giggling Asian schoolgirls from an Austin Powers film, or set to a backdrop of what I like to call chopstick music. It’s so over the top that it reads nearly as a parody (humorous or ridiculous imitation) of itself.
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Source: theguardian.com