Controversy: Kelly called racist!

An imbroglio erupts on Instagram!

Kelly Slater is best at a lot of things that kids do. Like airs. And Instagram. His feed is a constant source of entertainment/information because he seems to take it very seriously. There is no half-assing for the King and so his followers get fairly deep dives into his psyche, history, beliefs, passions. It is a wonderful spring!

Last night he posted two cover shots, one from Surfer one from Surfing World, both at Cloudbreak. In his comment he writes:

Same spot (#Crowdbreak, in Japanese), same section on the reef, same photographer (@toddglaser), same lens (50mm), same week, one year apart. But the one on the right was nearly twice the size and I ate it over the #Foamball. #SameSameButDifferent

And some got angry! One commenter says:

I’m a fan of your surfing, but is it necessary to point out and propagate racial stereotypes? I’d like to hear you try to speak Japanese without messing up a few pronunciations.

Kelly, ever the gentleman, responds:

Strike it’s absolutely necessary when you have a sense of humor. Strike a nerve there?

I don’t understand what that means but the discussion is an interesting one. Is it racist to poke fun at the way others speak English? True, the Japanese have difficulty with the “L” and “R.” Why?

Ryo, a wonderful Japanese linguist explains like this:

When using English letters for Japanese, almost everyone uses the “R” character and drops the “L” from romaji, but the truth of the matter is that neither R nor L exist in Japanese. The sounds signified are usually written as “ra, ri, ru, re, ro,” but these aren’t the same “r” as the ones we use in English. In reality, these sounds are more like a hybrid, or a sound that lies between the phonemic spectrum of L and R.

In other words, the Japanese sounds I just described (ra, ri, ru, re, and ro) are made by using one’s tongue a certain way. Those tongue movements so happen to be different from the way English speakers use their tongue when pronouncing L’s or R’s (i.e., the picture above), which is why English speakers butcher the Japanese language when they try to speak it. So monolingual English and Japanese speakers generally can’t pronounce each other’s L/R-like sounds because they have absolutely no practice in each other’s languages.

So the Japanese could make equal fun of foreigners Japanese pronunciations. Do they? Would you be offended if they did? Would Kelly Slater?