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Analysis
In the depths of TikTok this week, I stumbled across a “comedian” who gets his “laughs” by making fun of Chinese peoples’ accents when speaking English—AKA, he makes racist, viral videos that punch down and ridicule Chinese people.
The comedian calls himself The Mannii Show and has a whopping 22.7 million followers on TikTok. He graced my FYP because a creator I follow stitched a video of his posted in April in which he pretends to be flying “China Airlines,” on a plane that is “plastic” because it was made in China, flown by a pilot who doesn’t know how to fly a plane, and who eats cats and dogs. The audio, which appears to be Mannii’s own, is voiced in a stereotyped Chinese accent.
The video is truly hard to watch, it is so racist and regressive. The creator I follow called him out for his egregious sinophobia, or anti-Chinese sentiment.
Many comments on Mannii’s video condemn the racist jokes, but that hasn’t stopped him from making other anti-Chinese TikToks. Just this week, he made a video again making fun of the way some Chinese people sound when they are speaking English. What’s worse, the audio used in his video wasn’t even his voice: It’s the voice of another “comedian” named Roy Veal, and has been used almost 800 times in other sinophobic videos.
And the problem continues to compound. Though some commenters call out how racist these videos are, there are many more that laugh along with the mean joke.
Why it matters
In addition to giving airtime to harmful, false stereotypes about Chinese people, what Mannii and other creators’ sinophobic videos do is “other” them, or make Chinese people seem entirely different and less human than non-Chinese people.
Unfortunately, othering a community makes them more susceptible to violence, and the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes has been staggering in recent years. And while sinophobic, racist videos don’t physically harm Chinese and/or Asian people, they do contribute to anti-Asian sentiment that drives hate crimes.
TikTok has banned The Mannii Show a handful of times, so much so that Mannii has created #UnBanTheManniiShow, which he uses in the captions of all of his videos. On his website, Mannii writes that TikTok’s algorithm is “evil” because it censors his “comedy.”
“Comedy is under attack from censorship,” he writes on his website. “Comedy speaks truth to power.”
While Mannii’s not wrong that comedy has the potential to speak truth to power, many would agree that Mannii’s videos do just the opposite.