As the title says, I was sitting down with 2 local foreigners living near my building last night, and one said that a DJ at ICRT (I think he was referring to the Kaohsiung ICRT) was fired for making racist comments on the air last week. This foreigner says that the DJ was an ABC or something, and made comments relating to being tired of always doing things for the white man and for the local girls not to date foreigners.
Now I went home right away and did a google search and nothing at all came up. I am sure if a DJ said something like that, it would have already been blogged about somewhere methinks. I don’t personally care for the music format of ICRT, but I have never heard anything out of the ordinary when I tuned in so I am wondering if this was the rantings of a guy who had a few beers or did this actually happen?
Those remarks were not recently made. They were made by Joseph Lin, who is now the Assistant Program Director at ICRT
He posted ignorant disparaging remarks about Caucasian women and about Taiwanese women who date foreigners on his own Facebook page several years ago.
Last week, some people I know saw them and thought they were recent comments he posted. There is an email message protesting the remarks slowly making its way around among foreigners over the past few days objecting to Joseph Lin’s remarks.
From what I understand, this is not the first time Joseph Lin has made anti-foreigner comments.
If you read through the transcript, his racism is pretty transparent.
Pretty sad for the good folks at ICRT like Tim Berge and Ron Stuart. Personally, I’d feel very betrayed by a colleague who behaved that way on the air.
Yes, he wrote some very overtly racist and extremely obscene comments on Facebook that have been circulated recently and are much too graphic to quote here. Much more direct than the ones on the air.
He’s discussing ‘Taiwan girls are easy’ as coming up on google. Then he goes on this is a good topic for discussion (not it’s a shit topic for discussion on a music radio show), pretty much agreeing with what the band members are insinuating about Taiwanese women and foreign men. Using the names ‘Jim’ etc. to allude to white Westerners. The dude is a Westerner himself, flipping embarrassment or what. His show is an embarrassment and now he’s made a right $#$# of himself. Somebody not getting something eh?
I’ll back any excuse to get rid of the guy. His show is beyond terrible. In the morning I get to drive to work listening to lovely Vicky and the other guy - who are really good and play great music. In the evening I drive home in silence because Joseph Lin is so bloody awful. Those stupid phone calls he makes are excruciating. And the music! Constant Europop and similar crap. If it’s shite Joseph will play it.
I wouldn’t care about any racist comments he made if he was a half-decent DJ. Anything to make my commute home more tolerable.
The Facebook comments were from 4 years ago, and he said that basically that all white people in Taiwan were racist, and that if anyone said that they knew some white people who weren’t racist, he would say just wait, they haven’t shown you their racism yet. And that his professional life was a process of getting *@W%$ed over by white people.
The on-air comments were about Taiwanese girls being easy and that was a few weeks ago.
That’s what I was referring to with the transcript.
When I mentioned Joseph Lin’s comments about Taiwanese women dating foreigners to my Taiwanese wife, she laughed and said: “He’s an ABC. Criticizing foreigners and Taiwanese women. Both ironic and laughable. Taiwanese people don’t really care what he thinks.”
Why on earth is this an issue?
So what if some lame DJ made some silly remarks?
Why would one expect anything else from a vapid vacuous toad that works for a vapid vacuous stool?
I don’t listen to ICRT because I think it’s garbage, but the reason it is bothersome is while it doesn’t affect me personally, there are likely many impressionable Taiwanese people that might take the garbage he spews to heart.
In addition, when I read the apology he wrote, he doesn’t sound sorry at all. In his words (bold mine)
“Last week on the show during an interview with Taiwanmusic group Cosmos People, I may have said things that were inappropriate and judgmental. These were purely derived from the lyrics that their song may have expressed, and I deeply apologize for the misunderstanding and by no means does the station endorse these wrongful comments. Again, I personally apologize to anyone who may have found it offensive, and reassure you it was my mistake and did not mean any of these harm.”
He starts by not admitting that he said anything inappropriate by using the word ‘may’ to indicate all the listeners just simply misunderstood him. He then makes an excuse saying the conversation ONLY came up because of the lyrics of a song. Not a real apology.
In some contexts it is neutral, but not in the way the DJ was using it. A fundamental mission of ICRT (“International Community Radio Taiwan”) is to foster a sense of inclusiveness, so a DJ dwelling on “foreigners” (read: the “them” in “us and them”) directly contradicts this mission.
