In general, recent American political movements make me feel uncomfortable. From Hollywood blockbusters to my casual conversations with American people, most of the time they are trying to lecture me about something political.
Recently I met an English teacher on Preply who is a former military personnel. He was indeed a nice guy overall, but only one thing bothered me, he was talking too much politics. When we first met, he claimed he didn’t like to talk about politics. However, every time we had a lesson, he would spend a portion of the time talking about how Trump is a bad person. Considering it was a paid English lesson, I felt embarrassed.
This is not the first time I have been annoyed with political talk from an English teacher. Back when I was in Shimane around 2017. It was during Mr. Trump’s heyday before things fell apart. Most Western teachers on campus hated Trump. I still remember they said Obama was a good man and Trump was not “their” president.
More and more non-white actors appear in American shows and movies. There are homosexual characters in almost every title. By itself, I think this is a good thing because it means more and more people from various backgrounds can now have more opportunities in the entertainment industry. What confused me though, is the intention behind these changes. It is too political.
Sometime inserting a non-white character in a show seems unnatural to me, kind of out of place. On some occasions even worse, they made a former white character black like the black Wesker in the Resident Evil Netflix Series. The homosexual orientation rarely serves any purposes in telling a story. They just happened to be homosexuals. Maybe the reason is that they first made a story with mostly white straight characters and tried to diversify it by adding random non-white characters and making some characters homosexual.
Am I racist? I am a straight non-Japanese Asian male living in Japan. Of course, as a male I may be able to take more advantages than females in modern society. Besides that, I am actually quite a minority. Don’t get me wrong, I think everyone including LGBT people have their own rights to be what they want to be. Still I feel confused and uncomfortable, sometimes even offended by American political movements, especially from the left wing.
I heard nowadays that people are valued not only by their hardworkship or talents but by their “characteristics” in America. People are intentionally divided by race, gender and sexual orientation, none of them can be decided or changed by the willingness of that individual. I doubt if it is a more advanced way to run society. It is not fair. In fact I think the idea of dividing people by their attributes sounds pretty discriminatory.