Screamin' Pete's furious damage control

by: Eric B.

Fri Feb 10, 2012 at 09:15:23 AM EST

Yes, it's always the media's fault.

In the new ad released Thursday, Hoekstra does nothing to directly address the racial overtones that have earned him rebukes from Asian-American groups and fellow lawmakers, but blames the media for blowing the issue out of proportion.

"In spite of what the media says, this race is a chance to tell Washington to spend it not," Hoekstra says in the ad.

The media, members of his own party, Asian-American groups ... they're all colluding against Pete Hoekstra. Does anyone spot the pattern emerging here? Like that when he lost the gubernatorial primary, it was all the fault of Right to Life?

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, here is some important context.

Well-known blogger and Internet freedom campaigner Michael Anti weighed in on his Twitter account @mranti, saying, “I think the problem with the ad is that it’s racist, not anti-Chinese. As a Chinese I should be amused by this ad, because it seems more like Southeast Asia. But Chinese in America are easily enraged by that sort of prejudicial defamation of the image of a Chinese woman. Also, her English is not the Chinglish of a Mainland Chinese.”

On Sina Weibo, the most popular of China’s microblogging sites, one poster said, “The video makes me so angry.”

But as Anti noted, much of the curiosity was over the scene — a supposedly Chinese woman peddling a bicycle with what looks like a Vietnamese cone-shaped hat, in a lush green rice field that more resembled Vietnam’s Mekong Delta paddies than anything in modern China.

In other words, his ad didn't even get their racist stereotypes accurate. They blurred the line between China and Southeast Asia in general, sending the compounded message that they all look alike, those slanty-eyed buggers. And, now, it's the fault of the media that you might have found this offensive.

Oh yes, and he called himself a superhero, which is just as pathetic as that one kid in high school who insisted on giving himself a nickname.

Meanwhile, this is as much an indictment of the newspaper industry as a whole as it is of the original ad.

We don’t believe the Hoekstra ad is racist. It’s clearly a satire designed to needle Stabenow; the young woman in the ad is pictured as a resident of China, whom we wouldn’t expect to speak perfect English. However, the spot does demonstrate a serious lack of sensitivity and understanding. The Chinese stereotypes — the smash of the gong, the peasant straw hat, the imperfect English — echo images used for decades in popular culture to mock, belittle and typecast Chinese and Chinese-Americans. The cultural associations of such symbols were bound to offend many people, regardless of the producer’s intent. It’s not just Democratic activists — who would probably oppose the rising of the sun if Hoekstra came out in favor of it — or Asian-Americans who are upset. It raised the “ick” factor, as one Sentinel reader called it, for people of many backgrounds who are mindful of the malicious use of those symbols in the past.

Got that? The ad isn't racist. It just plays off tin-eared stereotypes that for years were used to belittle Asian people, specifically people of Chinese descent. That's like saying that it's not racist to donning blackface and asking passers-by if you can shine their shoes, just not ethnically sensitive.

But, if you think otherwise, you only have the media to blame. Pete Hoekstra says so.