Black Tokyo will now post commentary received from BT members as a way to present various discussions found on the BT Discussion Forum. The below commentary was submitted by Ruby Baby:

"All the commentary surrounding the E-mobile CM had me feeling a little down.Why do I feel as though every time black people speak up about racism, there will be a significant number of voices raised to tell us, very basically, that we are merely seeing things? As a black man, I have to tell you that it’s extremely frustrating to have people challenge the legitimacy of my experience by adopting their strategies of denial.The most pernicious idea I’ve encountered in discussions about race and racism, is the idea that racism, real racism, is something that is actually extremely rare. This is because the bar for what counts as racism has been set extremely high. Unless you’re a skin-head covered head to toe in swastika tattoos, and burning crosses on a regular basis in the front yards of black households, you’re not a racist. Racists have malice in their actions. Racist actions are violent, racist language is spewed forth in diatribes, and both are intended to cause harm. Claims of racism become tantamount to claims that someone has hatred for a particular racial group. If the incident you are talking about does not involve real racists with real hatred, then there can be no racism. This characterisation opens the door to forms of special pleading, where the person accused of racism can point to friends or family who are members of the negatively affected social group. One can also claim ignorance or lack of malice; inviting their critics to just try and prove them wrong. The problem with these arguments is that they are no defence at all. The former, because not only are these friends or family irrelevant to the claims or actions in question, but also due to the fact that people are capable of cognitive dissonance. The latter is no defence because the debate about contents of your own mind is a debate you can always win. Asking someone to judge the contents of your mind without using the only observable indicators of those contents -your words and deeds- is a particularly nasty rhetorical booby trap.So let’s try a new way of looking at racism:Did your actions, or the actions of another, factor in race in a way it probably shouldn’t have done?Did your actions, or the actions of another, dovetail with opinions, images or other artefacts that negatively affect blacks, in a way that it would not have affected them were they not black?Did your actions, or the actions of another, negatively affect black people in a way, which, while possibly not simply due to their being black, it would not have if the affected persons were not black?The creators of the E-mobile CM probably did not decide to have their mascot parody Sen. Obama’s campaign because he is black. However the images evoke a history -a history that involves the Japanese- of pseudoscience, myth and other artifacts that link blackness with being less human and more ape-like. These images negatively affect black people, and in this globally interconnected economy there’s no arguing that E-mobile shouldn’t have been questioned about the images they produced."Submitted by Ruby Baby[ad#bt-ads]