Stereotypes and Power in M. Butterfly

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Cynthia Heredia Prof. Moore English 1B 9/12/17 Reading Critique “Orientals will always submit to a greater force,” (Hwang Henry David. “M. Butterfly”. Penguin Group, 1988.), a line that was said to Toulon by Gallimard in the play. This one simple line was created on stereotypes. Throughout the entire play, we see these stereotypical messages in the things that these characters say and the way they act. As quoted in the first line, Gallimard is letting Toulon know that the he believes that the Vietnamese will surrender to the Americans because they are Orientals and believes that all people in the east are weak and unable to stand up for themselves. That is not the only time in the play where a stereotype is bluntly represented. During …show more content…

I believe that it will encourage people to think that is okay for everyone to express their own stereotypes about others, thus not really making it a serious matter and will lead to more biases being created and the message not being taken seriously. There are going to be those people who exploit stereotypes and will have excuses like, “well if they said this about me , i can say that about them”. Again, i do not believe that it is okay to fight racism or stereotypes with even more negativity, but unfortunately, a lot of people use it in order to get their points across. The example i`m going to talk about may offend a lot of people because at one point it offended me and it kind of still does even know i know that it just seen as a joke to most people. There is a video on YouTube known infamously as, The Mexican Song. The video is just some dude literally doing a cover of a song but instead of singing the original lyrics, he sings nothing but terrible stereotypes about Mexican people and people of Latin descent. If you look through the comments, a lot of people including some latinos, are calling this video funny and are saying that it's okay for this video to have been posted because it was only for humor purposes. What they are not realizing is that encouraging them to post such a video and allowing our community to be made out to be a joke is just

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