Snapchat has again released a filter that seems to channel racial sterotypes, igniting a backlash from users accusing the company of trafficking in digital yellowface. The new filter debuted Tuesday, and gives users slit eyes and contorted facial features.
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It appears that Snapchat has taken the filter down as of this morning.
"This anime-inspired lens has already expired, and won't be put back into circulation," Snapchat said when asked to comment. "Lenses are meant to be playful and never to offend."
Tweet may have been deleted
Tweet may have been deleted
Nonetheless, the filter was seen as tone-deaf, given America's history of yellowface, a term usually referring to non-Asian actors playing stereotyped or caricatured versions of Asian people onscreen.
Recent examples include last year's Aloha, which cast Emma Stone as a woman of Chinese-Hawaiian-Swedish descent, but the phenomenon also dates back to movies like Breakfast At Tiffany's, wherein Mickey Rooney plays Mr. I.Y. Yunioshi with "taped eyelids, buck teeth, sibilant accent and all."
Other protests this year have focused on the fact that Asian people and cultures are often caricatured, trivialized or infused with a "white savior trope." The hashtags #notyourasiansidekick and #whitewashing became popular this year, the latter in response to a new action movie, The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon set in 11th-century China.
The filter outcry is reminiscent of another racial Snapchat controversy, when the app offered a Bob Marley filter in honor of 4/20. Users called it "digital blackface," and argued that it took "a prolific political figure" and "reduced him to a stoner."
Snapchat also faced some criticism after their CEO Evan Spiegel made some allegedly vague and somewhat flippant remarks about their unease to quantify diversity at the company.
"I should have exact percentages for you but we just don’t think about diversity in terms of numbers that way," he told Recode. "...Because it’s not really cool to think of people as numbers. We think about people and diverse skill sets."
Topics Snapchat Racial Justice
