Most of the content on YouTube is designed to be funny and not necessarily offensive. On this page I want to explore the range of content depicted on YouTube dealing with Asians and Asian Americans. The content in this regard is separated into what I consider to be three different categories. First is Asian Americans making fun of themselves, second is other people making fun of Asians, and the third are response videos to one of the previous two categories. The content in the videos themselves is either interesting or funny but the responses that people post to these videos often shines a completely different light on racism and stereotypes. Many people hide behind relatively anonymous screen names and give their opinion on what they just saw. Some of the videos such as "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1ZABV7AQdA" (click here to see it) “Asians are very funny people” are very simple and just show something funny that was filmed just like we see on TV shows like American Home Videos. Most of the comments written below a video like this are pretty benign and just emphasize how funny the scene is. But others still find the time to make seemingly racist comments even when there is no real justification for it. For example, mikegidds wrote, “ Now i have a better view on asians. and they make great shoes”. This I believe was in response to what smoyzil wrote earlier that day, “all those asians could make around 200 shoes in the time it took to film this”. The ability to respond directly to a medium and have the whole world see your responses is a completely different way to gain information. People seem to post on this site as well as many others without care about what people think of them because no one really knows who they are. This could be a great forum for discussions dealing with race but often it just becomes a place for slander.
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