Several years ago when I was in school, late one evening, nobody was around and I was sitting in the 'Atrium' (our cafeteria) taking a break from an animation shoot. This guy with an eastern european accent showed up out of nowhere and offered me $20 to touch up a drawing of Yul Brynner. Sure, why not? I got my pencils and erasers out of my bag, figured out what kind of lead the original artist had used, and got to work.
While I erased and re-drew, he explained that he worked for an organization which strove to combat negative representations of Roumanians. Since I didn't know what he was talking about, he had to explain it to me backwards, i.e. by informing me that 'gypsy' is in fact a derogatory term. For whom? For Roumanians. Oh, now I get it.
At one point I felt I'd fixed up the drawing, and showed it to the guy for review. "Oh no", he said, "I'm sorry, that won't work. You see, this whole thing with the wide nose. People who indulge in stereotypes often mock the wide nose, saying it's a trait of the Roumanian."
"Okay," I shrugged, feeling like the overprivileged white male which I actually am. "Do you have a photo I could work from?"
"Ah, yes, I do." He pulled out of his briefcase a photo, probably an old publicity still from The King and I. On it was Yul's face in the same position and expression as the pencil drawing I'd been repairing. The nose I'd drawn on him was already a good deal narrower than his real nose in the photo, but apparently it still set off the Racist Mockery Caricature alarm in this guy's head.
So I spent another ten minutes trimming Yul's nostrils down even further. The guy still didn't like it much, but he handed me a $20 anyway, and left. I sat there and finished my cigarette, thinking it over, feeling like some sort of fall character in a sitcom popular among right-wingers.
