Why is Pokemon not so ethnically diverse?
What I mean to say is that the Pokemon anime is viewed internationally and kids of various ethnicities watch the show, well, because it’s freakin' cool. So then, why are there only a few dark skinned characters in contrast to thousands of whites and a few browns? Isn’t it a little racist? See below:
Ash Ketchum
Dawn
Cilan
Elesa
Misty
There are thousands of others. Now for that other colour which is equally as beautiful:
Iris
Lenora
Marlon
Grant
Marshall
Well there might be a few others, but these are all I know. So why???
Pleaselog inorregisterto add a comment.
“Why doesn’t Japan conform to American ideas of race?”
What you’re doing is considered being ethnocentric, which is ignoring the culture that somebody or something comes from in favor of your own culture. While I’m not going to say it’s racist, because I’m not some crazy social justice type, I will say it is ignorant of broader cultural issues. Japan is a country that is racially homogeneous due to their policies of isolation through much of history. People who under the American categorization of race are considered black generally don’t live in Japan, except for a few there for business reasons (since Japan is one of the technological centers of the world).
It is not at all racist for a country’s cultural exports to reflect their own people and culture. Not every country is the United States.
Interesting to note is the Game Freak added more people of darker skin color to the games with the Unova region, which is a representation of the United States (New York to be specific). Here we see an example of a group of people respecting another culture by depicting the racial groups of that culture within a game about that culture.
Sidenote: The people who in the United States are racially categorized as Asian fall into a pretty hilarious spot. They’re “white” when people want to call them racist or privileged. It’s sort of like Arabs, who for quite a good chunk of time were considered “white” under our classification system until 9/11 happened and all that changed.
I’m sorry lol but if you watch any anime at all, you’ll realize that dark skinned characters are rare in comparison to light skinned ones. I dont think it’s racism, just preference and/or differences in animation between light skinned and dark skinned characters.
This quote from Lusty pretty much sums up your answer. I don’t watch many anime (AoT yeeeeaahhhh), but I have friends that do. I mean, they’re obsessed with it. Their screensavers are anime, they read manga, they download anime to watch on the bus… so you could say I’ve had a decent amount of exposure to it (there’s this one guy who watches the “creepy” anime, but that’s beside the point). I can say, for a fact, that the vast majority of anime, manga, and Japanese game characters have white skin. They’re not being racist, or anything, they’re just doing what their culture does.
TL;DRAnime in general isn’t very culturally diverse, and Pokémon is (technically) an anime.
