CNN says Chinese-style fonts are racist. Are they right?
I live in a city (Houston) where a countless number of Chinese restaurants use this font on their signs and menus.
Are the Chinese business owners who use this font also racist?
Summit News reports:
CNN has added another entry to the ever-expanding list of things now deemed to be racist, publishing an article asserting that Chinese-style fonts are offensive because they perpetuate “crude” stereotypes.
Author Anne Quito claimed that “chop suey fonts to communicate “Asianness” in food packaging, posters and ad campaigns” are further evidence of “discrimination and systemic racism.”
She made this ludicrous assertion despite admitting that the fonts were immediately adopted by Chinese immigrants who came to the United States to set up businesses.
Apparently, the hundreds of thousands of Chinese business owners across the western world don’t appear to believe the font is racist since they choose to proudly display variations of it on the front of their shops and restaurants.
A scholar of Chinese typography also largely dismissed the claims by pointing out that he didn’t find the fonts offensive and that it was a gross oversimplification to label them racist.
Another respondent feared he could be called racist for using Roman fonts.