Fenty would never do this to me
Yesterday, someone at Tarte Cosmetics with no brain or heart posted this racist meme for the makeup brand's 7 million followers to enjoy:
So I shouldn't have to explain why saying "ching chong" is racist, but because I know someone is going to bring it up in the comments, there is a long history of using reductive, offensive noises to "imitate" how Westerners thing East Asians sound. It's essentially the go-to phrase for mocking Asian people, and it's, in a word, despicable.
After a wave of initial backlash, Tarte silently deleted it. Then, bowing to public pressure from both customer and high-profile beauty industry forces like Allure's Michelle Lee, they issued this weak apology meme and blamed it on "the intern." Where have I heard that before?
Since then, Tarte's CEO issued a longer, more sincere (hopefully) apology. And turned off the posts' comments:
Tarte cited "hateful and negative language" and after a quick scroll through Twitter, it was clear there are two sides to this: People who are justifiably angry about the meme, and white people yelling at them to shut up and get over it. Look at one of many tweets to Michelle Lee:
As gross as it is that Tarte posted that memes, at least they're owning up to it and apologizing. As for the thousands of non-Asian people tweeting "get over it" and "it's not that big of a deal", you're an even bigger problem than Tarte.