Where does that leave a person of color like myself?
Since I don’t know you beyond this (and even if we were BFF) that’s really a question you have to answer yourself.

Its just seems a touch of stretch to not code them as just white.
But here’s the thing, they’re not meant to be white. You have every right to code them how you want but the fact remains that the people who actually created the characters do not mean for them to be white. As for hair color, as Bankuei said in his post Asian people do dye their hair, I simply don’t think that hair color can be an indicator of race. Beyond hair dye I have a little brother and two cousins who’re are mixed race and have naturally blond hair and blue eyes. And eye color gets played with all the time in fiction people with purple eyes, gold eyes, white eyes without regard to the race of the character and this is ignoring the simple use of contacts.

As for Avatar I think all the thinks you mention are part of the fandom coding or trying their damnedest to code the characters as white. The bleaching of the skin in fanart, the continual Aang is white argument all of those add up. Also the fact that in one of my later posts I point out a major convention of over 1,000 people is having a panel that describes all the Avatar characters as white. So I definitely think it’s out there and prevalent among fans.

First time here and browsing about.

Where does that leave a person of color like myself?

I come across seeing a number of natural blonde hair (green or blue eyed if they go for natural human ranges) or red hair (and sometimes brown) characters that my mind continually codes as white. Even when these characters are supposed to be (ethnic unless their backstory is display/stated otherwise?) Japanese or Asian. Even in spite of some of them having a Japanese name (full, surname or otherwise).

Its just seems a touch of stretch to not code them as just white.

As for Avatar, I never really came across that sort of thing in the fandom much per se. Though a lot of people tend to code Aang as white–mostly citing that one of the creators in an interview states himself as being like Aang or something. Fan art of the characters are usually bleached/whitened to some extent if not fully outright. Which feels more than a little disturbing when it’s done to characters like Sokka and Katara. Not sure if I wanna touch the part of most RPers and fanficcers who write and/or draw their self-created/original Avatar-based characters on what feels like the identifiably white side of the spectrum.

I can understand getting confused about the races of some anime characters. There are fantasy animes in which it’s really unclear — like Nausicaa, or Trigun, or something — because the white characters are often drawn in the same style as the Japanese ones. So it gets ambiguous.

But most anime? The majority? Pretty clearly Japanese. In fact, so much of it is set in Japan anyway, coding the characters as “white” instead of Japanese seems… well, stupid.

As for using Japanese pick-up lines on Chinese girls… Waow. Just… wow.

But white Westerners look at the unmarked, unracialized characters and assume that they’re white. Because to white Westerners, the default state is white. Any character drawn without specific racial markings must, of course, be white!

On point. Any character that is not compare/contrasted with white characters or explicitly racialized is white in their mind. There’s also a lot of arrogance/privilege in that, that they can believe that this media coming out of an entirely different part of the world stuill has them and their whiteness as a focus. How big must your head be when you can believe that everyone in the world is super interested in whiteness and that they would only make white characters? It blows my mind.

Speed Racer and the way it’s read white is really a good point. That might be why I’ve had this whole push/pull in my head as to if I want to go see the live action movie when it comes out because as much as I loved the cartoon there’s something about there’s been something about the movie that twinges me and I do think it’s the fact that everyone (or almost everyone) is white in the film. Just…ugh! Makes me want to join you in the head banging.

But white Westerners look at the unmarked, unracialized characters and assume that they’re white. Because to white Westerners, the default state is white. Any character drawn without specific racial markings must, of course, be white!

There’s been some back-and-forth about Speed Racer on several blogs where I’ve seen this argument come up. Yes, I’ve seriously seen people argue that characters with names like “Michiko” and “Daisuke” were intended by the Japanese creators to be white.

And yes, I’ve seen the same thing happen in Avatar fandom, too. In the Avatar world, the default state of characters is some sort of fantasy Asian ethnicity; they’re obviously not white. But because they don’t need to be contrasted to white people (there are no white people!), they don’t need to be drawn with explicitly racial markings, either. And some people see the characters drawn without stereotypical racial markings and assume that they must be white, because the default is always white.

I’m sorry for the long comment, but this is an issue that, like I said, makes me bang my head against a wall.