your argument is the best one i’ve seen so far. i hate all the, “howard was mean, BUT…” or, “if she’d lose weight, she MIGHT…” your argument is one many AMAZING black actresses have to deal with: no matter how good you are, the work may never showcase that. or it’ll be once in a lifetime.

Also, ‘untrustworthy’ characters tend to have narrower eyes, but also, adults tend to have smaller eyes in series of anime I have seen.

I am printing this out *right now.*

I would ask that people who have only watched the KIDDY anime that’s available in the US to stop commenting on the race of anime characters. Especially when they are watching the shows dubbed and have not even begun to touch the tip of the giant iceberg that is anime and manga in Japan.

US-centric as this topic is, this does seem to be about how it is percieved by audiences in the west somewhat.

You do realize that in the case of Sailor Moon some would consider her, and most of the other characters as white, because when it was dubbed in english they also changed the name of the cast to something more western, right? In fact they did, maybe still, do this with some shows in fact. I never learned otherwise about the actual source material of Sailor Moon until a few years ago.

Which not only adds to misinformation but the english dubs that alter the cast in some way is sometimes the easiest, least expensive, only, etc. ways for some of us to obtain access to anime.

i’ve always watched anime, which is just a fancy, stylized cartoon, with more dramatic storylines. i watch everything from the kiddie stuff like, ocha-ken, nanami chan, bincho-tan, chi sweet home. to more intermediate like Bleach, Tokyo mew mew, Snow Fairy Sugar, Kero Kero chime, Suga Suga Rune, and finally the stuff i won’t allow kids to watch, Beserk, Basilisk, Battle Angel and Higurashi no naku koro ni and more. i am sometimes still blown away by the seeming “whiteness” of these characters who are performing tea ceremonies, and ancient Shinto rituals. some of us did not have the liberty of being raised in Japan, so the way we see the characters of J games/anime/manga, may differ from the way you do. Crybaby Usagi looks like a corn fed, blonde/blu white girl to me. logically i know she’s Japanese, but she looks white. maybe if i were raised in Japan, my views would differ, as yours do.

As a general matter an Oscar does not guarantee future success. To be honest, I’m not too thrilled about the fact that this Academy Award nominee has been relegated to a cable tv show and a movie along side Zoe Kravitz whose claim to fame is she is the daughter of Lenny Kravitz.

Actresses like Cate Blanchett and Kate Winslet are the kinds of actress she is on par with and the odds she would be cast as the lead-equal to them is quite small.

RE: black Latinos, um clearly the writer has no knowledge of baseball at all, those Dominicans super star baseball players make way more than a bag of chips, and no they are not impostors, they have their own cultures

RE: black Barbies at Walmart, doesn’t bother me, if anything it might encourage more non black people to by black Barbies for their children

Yet in one way, he was right– it WILL be hard for her to maintain a successful career in Hollywood because she is black, female, and overweight (big)… but I’m really happy to hear that she’s got more acting gigs lined up.

re– 4th link of 2 men kissing — oh MY god, people need to stop being such little bitches and get over it. The photo is beautiful, simple and honest. It’s two people in LOVE, which can be said more than show-off heterosexual douche-bags holding hands and making out, but not in love with each other.

Anyway, if these whiney crybabies want something to complain about, they should object to sexist, objectifying covers of half naked women posing seductively on front covers of trashy magazines for men, displayed on front stands at shops for the whole world– including children– to see.

Excellent post, I think.

I’ve never had the $$ for video games, nor friends who would drive me over to their places to play them, so while I like them, I only know so much about the characters.

After giving it a little thought, I remembered a number of games here in Japan that basically have white people as main characters and are set overseas.
If I were to make a guess as to *why*, I would say that:
1. Shoot-outs/gun battles are things that happen overseas and things that foreigners do, not Japanese people. Guns are mostly illegal in Japan, and there aren’t street wars. But those things do happen in Hollywood films.

2. Foreign setting and foreign characters means that you cane be looser with facts/etc.
Think Silent Hill vs. Fatal Frame.
Fatal Frame is more Japanese-style horror with a very Japanese cast, while Silent Hill is more western (I think).

When it comes to how characters look, especially the FF ones mentioned, I think that they are based on an Asian look.

I think that in north America, we are used to cartoon characters that exaggerate ethnic/racial features.
Blacks, Asians, Hispanics are almost always drawn with black/dark brown hair, black/dark brown eyes. And Asian characters usually have their eyes drawn differently from the non-Asian characters.

On the other hand, white characters are “free” to have blonde, brown and black hair and eyes of different colors.

Here, we’re getting the same things, but on Asian faces.
Let’s put it this way, if you close your eyes and color the hair and eyes of the supposedly “white” anime/game characters black and dark brown, do they look more Asian?

I honestly don’t know why Japanese game companies make games/characters that are biracial looking and have strange non-Japanese names.
But, what I have learned is that if a character is multiracial, it’s usually written somewhere. If a character is supposed to be white, then they will find a way to let it be known that that character is foreign.

Finally, who called Sailor Moon white?
Are you kidding me? Because she has yellow hair and blue eyes, she’s white?!
Her name is Tsukino Usagi, not Tiffany Jones. She marries a super Japanese looking guy and has a pink-haired kid!

I would ask that people who have only watched the KIDDY anime that’s available in the US to stop commenting on the race of anime characters. Especially when they are watching the shows dubbed and have not even begun to touch the tip of the giant iceberg that is anime and manga in Japan.

Would you (in general and the original poster) consider characters like Rinoa and Tifa to be ones that look Asian?

A fundraiser auction with many cool things is ending this Saturday, March 13, at 11:59 p.m. Eastern. I hope people will check it out–here’s how to browse and bid.

The movie deletes a scene found in the book where Amantha (the main character) sleeps with Rau-Ru, Hamish’s biracial son with an African woman when he was heavily involved in the slave trade.

In this book many of the women start as slaves are are freed and marry their masters and in some cases when they die, marry their brothers to keep property in the family.

In my own family, my grandmother’s grandmother’s father was a slaveowner who allegedly fell in love with her mother and fathered three girls and a son in Derian, Ga. The significant difference is, he freed them all, bought them a house in Savannah and moved them off the plantation. But the story goes that the mother (I don’t think they married-highly unlikely) returned to the plantation to be with him until they both died.

I strongly hope this article will be further distributed and some good will come from it. I’ve long thought that what anti-racism needs are some “founding documents” or “manifestos” (though I dislike the connotations of that term) and this is definitely one of them, along with Racism 101. http://resistracism.wordpress.com/racism-101/

I disagree, just because Japan is virtually monoracial, doesn’t mean the country exist in a vacuum. There is still lots of pressure from the rest of the world where light skin, hair, and eyes are considered both markers of “whiteness” and the standard of beauty. I mean why is light hair and eye color the so popular and marketable? It’s very similar to the phenomenon of white models being so successful in China. These features are foreign, white, and thus seen as desirable.

I saw the game already, I think the girls are made very Asian. They’re a bit petite. But that’s it. The fashion is very Japanese though.

Watch Code Geass. That Anime is really interesting. The British Empire has rule over the world and Japan has become a state of the empire called Area 11. I think there’s probably some truth in that story.