Thursday, June 21, 2012

Is Your Font Racist? (Tao Jones) - Speakeasy - WSJ

Jeff Yang connects something as seemingly innocuous as the ching-chong font to the 30th anniversary of the brutal baseball bat beating death of Vincent Chin. Yes! that's what I've been saying...

Real people, on the other hand, really get hurt. I’m not saying a font, by itself, is going to draw blood. I’m not saying a stereotype, by itself, is going to kill someone. Sticks and stones and all that. But there’s a psychological toll from regular exposure to ching-chong babble, slant-eyed caricature, cheesy font choices and face-painted minstrelsy. And because these things, in the aggregate, paint a dimensionless and dehumanized picture of Asians, they make it easier for the desperate, unstable or hateful to bully, assault — or worse.
And dehumanization can have deadly consequences.

 Is Your Font Racist? (Tao Jones) - Speakeasy - WSJ

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