LEXIE TUCKER WRITES – What’s more scary – hate speech coming from the mouth of an adult or a child?
When Jimmy Kimmel asked on the October 16 episode of his live talk show, “We owe China $13 trillion US of debt; how shall we pay them back?” He was greeted with this horrifying answer from a 5-year-old boy: “We should go around the world, and kill everyone in China.” Mr. Kimmel responded by saying, “Kill everyone in China? That’s an interesting idea.”
After this clip aired, an overwhelming amount of complaints flooded the ABC network’s office. While many Chinese-Americans rallied outside the ABC headquarters in Burbank, California on November 9 to protest the Jimmy Kimmel show, what is even more interesting are the comments coming from mainland China after the video went viral.
A blogger with the screen name chinahjing wrote: “Just how did these parents educate their children? A bunch of bandits after all!” Another with the Chinese screen name 航湖 typed “Not surprising, this is exactly the mentality of the American government.” Finally, WUWANWO writes “Give the American Indians back their territory. Pay back your debts to various countries of the world. Return justice to the world.”
Compared to anti-African-American or Jewish issues, other instances of racism including the anti-Chinese ones have not been as widely publicized. Jin Canrong, a professor of international affairs at Renmin University of China, responded to the incident by saying, “The US political correctness on racism has not covered Chinese-Americans yet.” Is a simple apology from Mr. Kimmel enough or should this be viewed as a symptom of a larger problem?