The Pooh Bear meme originated in China, amongst Chinese netizens, criticizing Xi.
I think you should get a better argument becase racists take things that minorities were doing and ruin them all the time. E.g. how “woke” lost its meaning when white people started using it. Even if the first time Xi and Obama were compared to Winnie the Pooh and Tiger it was done by Chinese internet users (which, by the way, doesn’t even mean it wasn’t racist, there’s a lot of racist crap on the Chinese internet too) doesn’t mean that when Western internet users do the same thing they mean it the same way.
Another example is how the Dave Chappelle Show used to have an audience who appreciated the way Dave Chappelle made fun of racists by embodying caricatures, then it slowly started to build up an audience of racists that didn’t know the joke was on them. It got to the point that Chappelle stopped doing the show because the audience had gotten so white and so racist that when he talked about anything going on in the Black community, he felt the show’s fans were just weaponizing it against Black people (see his famous “there’s n words, and there’s n words” joke). Just because something starts out within a minority community and isn’t necessarily racist in origin, doesn’t mean that when white people pick it up and decontextualize it it’ll remain benign.
I think you should get a better argument becase racists take things that minorities were doing and ruin them all the time. E.g. how “woke” lost its meaning when white people started using it. Even if the first time Xi and Obama were compared to Winnie the Pooh and Tiger it was done by Chinese internet users (which, by the way, doesn’t even mean it wasn’t racist, there’s a lot of racist crap on the Chinese internet too) doesn’t mean that when Western internet users do the same thing they mean it the same way.
Another example is how the Dave Chappelle Show used to have an audience who appreciated the way Dave Chappelle made fun of racists by embodying caricatures, then it slowly started to build up an audience of racists that didn’t know the joke was on them. It got to the point that Chappelle stopped doing the show because the audience had gotten so white and so racist that when he talked about anything going on in the Black community, he felt the show’s fans were just weaponizing it against Black people (see his famous “there’s n words, and there’s n words” joke). Just because something starts out within a minority community and isn’t necessarily racist in origin, doesn’t mean that when white people pick it up and decontextualize it it’ll remain benign.