juanjo's comments

Olympic Spanish Basketball Players-Not Funny - Blog Entry

18 Aug 2008 01:26 AM

So then I assume that you are chinese and that you have felt outragedly offended, right? Then please accept my apologies as Spaniard.

I think we all should teach our children that it's silly to apologise without understanding what one has done wrong. Well, you may have difficulties to understand this (I'm sure you're much more aware of asian culture than spanish one) but nobody in Spain would picture that picture as an offensive one, why?

As someone already said in some forum, those who think that imitating the Asian almond eyes is racist, it's because they consider people with almond eyes inferior, therefore the problem is with them.

You may disagree with this statement, but it's the reality in Spain, we even consider almond-eyes very attractive, that's why people find it difficult to apologise for something that was done with goodwill (the picture is not supposed to be funny but pleasant). And I think this is the right attitude. As opposed to the english language where sorrys and thank yous are everywhere just for the shake of it, in the spanish languages those are only used we we mean it and we tend to use more the tone of the sentence to express feelings, which is not well materialised in writting media.

Another history is that actually that picture was offensive for asian people, in which case the first thing to do is to apologise

If you don't think that if the question would have been... - are you aware that millions of chinese now feel offended for that picture you took? the answer wouldnt' have been... - wow, really? we didn't mean it that way at all, we're very sorry. then I'm afraid that you are the racist for thinking spanish people won't react like human beings.

About the churros thing, I cannot speak for every spaniard, but for sure I'd have found it funny, even more if coming from a english-speaking media.