"Asian people get asked all the time if they know karate or kung-fu. that's insulting. that's demeaning. you're no longer a person but a sum of various caricatures. how would you like to be treated like that?"

Sorry for the "man," in my defense I've called my wife "man," before, it's a Southern California thing.

Look man, I'm a Jew, so we're effectively in the same boat. Do you know how screwed up it is that anti-Semitism has been diluted so badly? If you want to complain about something, feel free, but don't pretend that you are above everyone else with some executive privilege on how a term like "racism" is used. Your…

Yes, I am saying that calling a sitcom racist for using a martial arts movie trope is inappropriate. Given the enormity of the harm caused by racism in American society I actually think trivializing the term racism is harmful and ultimately promotes racism by using it in such ridiculous ways that it's hard to…

Sorry, but calling me a racist for criticizing the criteria by which this is judged racist is not persuasive. "Cultural appropriation" is clumsy and ultimately damaging to art and culture. Racism is the (loose) label for negative or harmful racial stereotypes and the damaging behavior that results from that. I…

Please ask China and Taiwan to ban Wuxia, then, and ask Japan to ban Jidaigeki. This is a microscopic blip in the face of the sum of martial arts based drama (produced mostly in Asia), so focus on the larger problem - that martial arts movies exist, and work to solve that. Perhaps you could picket the next John Woo…

I prefer to judge both art and people on an individual basis rather than with sweeping abstractions. "Cultural appropriation" is a lazy sweeping abstraction that is toxic to art and culture, we need more nuance.

"I mean the thinking that if it's harmful to minorities it doesn't matter unless someone is swinging from a tree."

Exactly. Racism is a clear social evil. Dressing up in a kung fu suit in an homage to Kill Bill isn't so much racist as something that offends people trying to find things to be offended by. The more I think it through the less actual harm I find in it. So if there was a different word to distinguish these things…

So what do you think are the consequences of some people dressing up like kung fu masters? What is the historical wrong that people dressing up as kung fu masters helps to spread as a vehicle? I don't see this episode leading to the Yellow Peril or WW II internments, do you?

One is a clear social evil that is harmful to a population (actual rights deprived), the other requires complicated arguments to justify (no actual rights deprived, but bad because reinforcing of social stereotypes can cause social issues in the treatment of a population, in theory).