How come this only any issue for black character? No one ta[es their eyes for asian characters?
This is just my take, but I think it's about the need to be understood. These levels of double-standards where certain things apply to some races, religions and sub cultures are funneled in an emotional state of being as well as a cry for change.
An example.
I've had a few dozen run-ins with middle eastern aquintences who hate Jews. Not people from Israel, but outlive the Jews are greedy, eat children, run the world, made up lies about the Holocaust.
When I have talked to people who are denying or downplaying the Holocaust - If I get into a debate about facts, and hypothetical scenarios and semantic argumentation, things rarely get resolved. My view doesn't change, their view doesn't change. It's just stuck in a quagmire.
However, recently I have just been listening to them without counter-argumenting, and the results have been phenomenal. In the 4 times where I have done this, every single time, the person has done a 180' and sort of brought themselves back to a self-realization that their personal situation is shit, and their bleak outlook on life and getting upset over things that are out of their control.
It became more about the fact that the situation is shit in the middle-east and that the middle-east was heavily ignored post-WW2 where few people talk about their casualties. Their hatred and bigotry seemed to be channeled through jealousy. Perhaps a justified sense of jealousy in that things are shit because of what happened in the past, and here is this neighborer who is doing much better than you. Suddenly to make sense of all this history and geo-political climate, it's simply becomes easier to blame the people who have, when you're the one who haven't.
One of them said this. "I wouldn't be so angry with them if things weren't as fucked in my country".
It's a powerful realization for me.
Because that's how I am too. Not with religion, race or ethnicity, but I start blaming everything when my life is shit too. And I get beat up over shit I can't possible change. There is a satisfaction or sense of release to point fingers at something else. Like the state, or culture, or someone who has wrongfully done something to you. You know you're the underdog and your cause is just.
It makes me go "a-ha" when you know they are just saying; "everything is falling apart in my community. the police is corrupt. we go to jail 10x times the amount of most other peoples. we have no options. we cant get out. we are stuck".
Then suddenly it becomes much easier to see why people need to "vent". I used to think of this as complaining, complaining, complaining, but now I see it as venting frustration.
Complaining is when you sweat the small stuff. "fuck these postcards at Wallmart", but when it comes to feeling ignored, left out and out of option, and the reason for it being, is the color of your skin, the religion forced on your upbringing or the sexuality which you have, it tends also be the only choice you have to be heard.
For me personally, that is empowering. Because my personal life motto is basically "Intent is king". If OP's cosplay lady made a blackface character to ridicule or make fun or mock, then it's insensitive and possible racist.
If it's a serious cosplay that honors a character trying to look the way it looks in real life(or in the tv show) then it's not racist. It can't possible be.
However, for me to argue is INTENT IS KING INTENT IS KING INTENT IS KING, over and over, has simply brought me no closer to understanding, or feeling like that my view is being understood and absorbed in a way which I would like.
For me, censorship is the ultimate fear. Fear of censorship is big on GAF in so many of these threads, and when we see news stories where people redraw statements, companies fire individuals and peoples lives gets ruined, sometimes over insignificant and/or minor controversies, I think the fear of censorship grows.
Which just brings me back to a powerful realization that it's much more about being understood and talking about these issues which just don't go away. One might say, that cosplay shouldn't be held hostage in a discussion the current standings and trends of black people and their rights America, but it is in their right to speak off.
And I think this right applies to everything. Women and sexuality in video games, transgendered people taking offense over crossdressing comedies, rape jokes, if it's okay to use the word faggot and gay, and all these other things we discuss so much on GAF.
We're always either you're an insensitive prick who can't possible understand X and Y" or "this outcry is the first step for the removal/banning/prosecution of people who look at this differently".
So we get stuck. I get stuck in between, because I feel on the side of the first group of people. If cosplaying as black people makes some people upset, its easy to cosplay as all the other people you can. It's like going to a party at your parents house. Some people will find your dirty joke funny, but most of them won't, so better not tell it publicly. I understand this logic to things. If some people thing faggot is unacceptable, regardless of its origins and all that semantic argument-style of rhetorics, fine. Let's use something else. We get plenty of words we can use to convey whatever we want.
But on the other hand, there is within me this fear of being restrained, censored, told what to do, that goes in a slippery slope until I can't say what I want or feel without being prosecuted. Not words out of hatred, or even insults, but just the unpopular opinion.
I think it's so vital to my way of being for me to offended, as almost all my personal growth came from a place of being offended and checking my own bullshit.
"ohh I see. The fact I got angry at that thing, that person or what was being said.. it was just my emotions catcalling me".
But my sense of being offended to check myself, has little to do with how other people get offended.
That has been something I had not given enough credence to in my time here on GAF. It never occured to me, that people get offended in different ways and feels different about it. I was not open up to the possibility that someone being offended over something can be so traumatic they want to go home and kill themselves.
I know it sounds arbitary, but can you imagine the clusterfuck in communication when being offended to me, almost always ends up making me enlightened?
TL,DR; I rant about how fear of censorship that arises when news stories come out about people losing their jobs and ruining their lives over something they sai
