Western media has normalized illustrating Asian and Middle eastern people as inferior, mocking their cultures, and normalizing the stereotypes imposed upon them at the hands of western society.
White women dressing up a geishas, automatically associating Japanese films with ninjas, the way middle eastern or asian characters are depicted in drawing are all examples of how normalized xenophobia is in our present day society. Extremely evident in movies, they are depicted as these people in need of saving at the hands of a white hero. Or in other words they are villainized, especially the darker they are. Colorism is also extremely popular in Orientalism seeing as the protagonist, despite race, will always be pale skinned.
Examples:
- Iron Man – An extremely wealthy (white) man was kidnapped by Afghanistans to make a weapon of mass destruction. Not only did they villanize these people and make Tony Stark the hero, they depicted the community as military ridden and impoverished, further more contributing to the stereotypes associated with Asian and Middle eastern culture.
- I also find this interesting because especially during there Cold War, White People (Russians) were depicted as the faces of war and as terrorists but nowadays when you hear terrorist, you associated it with brown faces.
- Aladdin – The depiction of Arab people as thieves, over-sexualization of Princess Jazmine, and considering how the villain, Jafar , is visibly darker than majority of the other characters, specifically the Sultan and Princess Jasmine. They also give most of the villains in the movie extremely exaggerated Arab accents.
- Nicki Minaj – Your Love: In the music video, Nicki dresses up as a geisha wearing traditionally asian clothes and choosing to assimilate the diversity into just one ethnicity, either Japanese or Thai despite pulling several things from multiple asian cultures and only acknowledging which ones fit best into her work. The whole storyline of the video is her falling in love with her sensei.


