The word 'Asian'
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I usually just say brown when I have nothing more to go on, and reserve Asian for East Asians. For instance, I have a friend who's Filipino, Indian, and Spanish and he was born and raised for the most part in the United States. I just call him brown.
Keeping track of ethnicities and national origins is a pain in the ass, and I don't feel like asking every person I meet what country they're from when it's none of my business. I have another friend from New York with Jamaican parents and hates being called either Jamaican or African-American because she was born in the US, while still another gets pissed off at being called African-American because he's from Jamaica.
Keeping track of ethnicities and national origins is a pain in the ass, and I don't feel like asking every person I meet what country they're from when it's none of my business. I have another friend from New York with Jamaican parents and hates being called either Jamaican or African-American because she was born in the US, while still another gets pissed off at being called African-American because he's from Jamaica.
You know, dusky doesn't sound half bad. I may start spreading that around.Flatfrog said:I've recently been thinking about the word 'Asian' which, at least in the UK, is used mostly to refer to people from West Asia (India/Pakistan/Bangladesh), and not to Chinese or other East Asian countries. But in this article it seems to be being used to refer also to people from Arabic countries, and to me this is just getting a bit weird. What seems to be happening is that it's becoming a racial term that is just a euphemism for 'brown-skinned', and that just seems misleading - especially given that the vast majority of actual Asians are Chinese!
I think we need an unambiguous, non-racist word to refer to the mostly Muslim and Hindu brown-skinned population that inhabits West Asia and the Middle East. 'Brown' would work (and before you say it's racist, 'black' appears to be fine), but in the US, it seems to be mostly used to refer to Hispanics (I noticed it particularly in The West Wing). So is there any other word we can use?
I'm tempted to suggest we should revive the good old-fashioned 'dusky'
It may nor be PC, but it is compared to lumping them together under the same term, I call people from the middle-east arabs, those from the far east oriental asians or east asians and those from india, pakistan, afghanistan and sri lanka jusr plain old asians.
I mean, they're too diverse to call them all the same thing, I just don't know the proper terms.
I mean, they're too diverse to call them all the same thing, I just don't know the proper terms.
Behind the times compared to what? Everything is relative. On race relations and gender/gay issues, for example, I'd say we're decades "ahead" of the U.S.misterprickly said:
It's also rather arrogant to assume that your own beliefs are the most modern. It's only really with the benefit of hindsight that beliefs can be said to be ahead of or behind their times.
I see from your profile that you're Canadian. That figures - Canada is the most insanely PC country I've ever visited - but I don't know if you guys are "ahead". Last time I was in Canada (a few years ago) a Canadian woman corrected me for using the term "black" instead of "African American", which was odd because every black American I've spoken to about it said they hate the term "African American". I'm sure she thought she was "ahead" of the times when actually she was behind. Like I said, these things are relative and can only be judged with hindsight.
Oh and BTW, I'm a 34 year old Brit and I've never, ever heard anyone refer to Canada as "the colonies", though I can imagine someone saying that to a Canadian as a joke - that would be a typically British sort of joke to make.
Oh, and on-topic: here in Britain I use "Asian" for brown asians and "East Asian" for yellow asians, but when I'm abroad (I spend a lot of time in the U.S.) I try to use whatever terms are considered PC by the people I'm with.
Just be thankful that they are called Asians, and not something that is actually offensive. it's better than nothing. Although here in Canada the Asia is referred to smart high school students who already are accepted into universities, have their whole life planned, and still have enough time to drink bubble tea. So it's a good insult in Canada.Flatfrog said:I've recently been thinking about the word 'Asian' which, at least in the UK, is used mostly to refer to people from West Asia (India/Pakistan/Bangladesh), and not to Chinese or other East Asian countries. But in this article it seems to be being used to refer also to people from Arabic countries, and to me this is just getting a bit weird. What seems to be happening is that it's becoming a racial term that is just a euphemism for 'brown-skinned', and that just seems misleading - especially given that the vast majority of actual Asians are Chinese!
I think we need an unambiguous, non-racist word to refer to the mostly Muslim and Hindu brown-skinned population that inhabits West Asia and the Middle East. 'Brown' would work (and before you say it's racist, 'black' appears to be fine), but in the US, it seems to be mostly used to refer to Hispanics (I noticed it particularly in The West Wing). So is there any other word we can use?
I'm tempted to suggest we should revive the good old-fashioned 'dusky'
PS. why do you seem to be only defending the Chinese?
Epicanthal folds. Talk about epicanthal folds and everyone will cotton right on.Anjel said:I'd just like to add that I am in no way racist, I just wanted to use simple language and despise the use of the word 'slitty' to describe the eye shape of people from some Asian countries. I use it here to explain this, not to describe aforementioned girl
Anyway, here in the UK 'Asian' used to be generally used to mean South-Asian. Folks rocking epicanthal folds would probably be 'oriental', and I have no idea about the Middle East. Now though, I think 'Asian' is used for pretty much anyone in Asia, probably due to American influence referring to oriental people as Asian.
Same, but English.Toasty Virus said:
No we aren't, isn't used that often, no we don't.misterprickly said:
So err... well done you?
OT: I usually say Arab/Arabic/Middle Eastern. Asian is not a way of banding together all the "non-white shades", its people who are from Asia.
Flatfrog said:I've recently been thinking about the word 'Asian' which, at least in the UK, is used mostly to refer to people from West Asia (India/Pakistan/Bangladesh), and not to Chinese or other East Asian countries. But in this article it seems to be being used to refer also to people from Arabic countries, and to me this is just getting a bit weird. What seems to be happening is that it's becoming a racial term that is just a euphemism for 'brown-skinned', and that just seems misleading - especially given that the vast majority of actual Asians are Chinese!
I think we need an unambiguous, non-racist word to refer to the mostly Muslim and Hindu brown-skinned population that inhabits West Asia and the Middle East. 'Brown' would work (and before you say it's racist, 'black' appears to be fine), but in the US, it seems to be mostly used to refer to Hispanics (I noticed it particularly in The West Wing). So is there any other word we can use?
I'm tempted to suggest we should revive the good old-fashioned 'dusky'
To be honest it's just another matter of political correctness gone out of control. Nothing to be seen here.
In the most basic sense it's used to describe people from the continent of Asia that fit a certain general description, at least in the US. You know your basic short person, with yellow, tan, or golden skin, dark hair, and unusually shaped eyes by western standards. It's not so much an insult as it is a descriptive generalization, similar to saying "white", "black", or whatever else. It's NOT used for people with dark skin, and even if from Asia certain other groups like Arabs or people from India generally get referred to as Arabs, or if obvious Indians with the specification one does not mean a Native American.
To put things bluntly if your in security for example and get a quick look at someone say shoplifting, saing "male Asian, wearing tan pants, a white shirt, and brown bomber jacket heading toward Cedar Casino on the concourse carrying a golf club he just stole from Fairways" will quickly tell people EXACTLY who your talking about, and where they are, and desciptions like that work perfectly. In fact pretty much that's exactly how we did things (and using locations from Foxwoods, even though Fairways no longer exists). A call like that might be made if say you were standing at an entrance of Grand Pequot Casino (one of the gambling rooms) and some guy from Fairways (a golf shop) had robbed them. A Security Officer won't leave an assigned post to chase someone like that, because it could always be some kind of a distraction or whatever (it does happen, and I won't get into why), but they will put out a call for "rovers" who are security officers that are not assigned to a specific "standing" post to intercept the guy. In the case of the hypothetical call above, security probably would try and cut him off at the pequot garage elevator since that's the quickest root out of the casino with what is probably a several hundred dollar club, and it's off the concourse between the two casinos/gambling areas (ie each room full of gambling is considered it's own casino for designation purposes even if the entire building is a casino). None of what I'm pointing out here is any kind of secret information (I'm not even giving 10 codes which are pretty obvious anyway), and being the world's largest casino some of you might know exactly where I was talking about from having visited the place when Fairways
was open (irrelevent to the specific point, just rambling).
The usage of the term "Asian" tends to be used out of political correctness to begin with as the term "Oriental" is considered offensive to some people due to the way it has been used by people from Europe, and is associated with years of trivialization and warfare with The Orient by The British Empire... which I won't get into the history of since how accurate or fair that is, can be a major topic of discussion.
Nobody has the right to be offended by that anymore than being called "white" or a "caucasian" (which is actually a bit of an issue, but people will know what you mean), or "black", or "hispanic", or whatever. People get uppity when you identify by skin color, but in reality it's an unavoidable way of descibing people, and passing on descriptions is nessicary. Efficiency is far more important in such cases than touchy feely left wing political correctness. For example in the above situation I care more about the guy being identified and intercepted than I do about anyone hugging their inner child, or joining
hands and singing "we are the world". People have differant colored skins and features common to specific regions and understood to be such, and as such when the need arises they will be used as descriptive terms. People will be called Asian, just as I will be called white if someone is trying to describe me. Now granted the fact that a guy from Russia or various satellite nations might also be called White despite some arguements that can be made about geographic region, but that's generally done to be obtuse, since again "white" is an accurate description of color and features going by most of the world, and most importantly people will recognize exactly what I'm talking about even if I personally notice the guy is obviously slavic or whatever due to bone structure and such.
Likewise the disctinction between say "Hispanic", and "Latino" is largly irrelevent for the purposes of a quick description. Either can be used to pick a guy with those features out of a crowd quickly combined with other descriptive factors like clothing and maybe hair style. That might offend the inner child of a liberal, but well, that's just the way things are.
In cases where an ethnicity is not obvious, general descriptions like dark skin or light skin might be used, in varying degrees based on shade. A person being called in as having say mid-dark skin, or perhaps a middle darkie to the irreverant or those trying to be brief because they might say be chasing the guy, generally means that the guy can't be fit into a general catagory for a quick description, but that's the shade of his skin. That in of itself helps because chances are if the guy descibing him can't figure it out quickly, then anyone else will see the guy with mid-dark skin that they can't easily put into a catagory. The same can also happen with white guys as well, albiet in such cases a description might be something like a "tan white guy" or "a pasty white guy" just for extra specification.
In the end, certain people are going to object to ANY term used to differentiate or descibe them, and I'm very sorry, but even out of cases like chasing or identifying a wrong doer, they need to be quickly and easily descibed. Everyone just being "a person" might make the inner child of a left winger gurgle with joy, but unfortunatly when your looking for someone in a crowd "hey I'm looking for a person" just doesn't cut it. A description like "Asian" does not by any means imply someone is less than human, simply what they look like, ditto for describing a skin tone or whatever.
Actually, on a lot of those issues we're clearly not that far behind the times at all. In fact the UK is, largely speaking, quite a progressive country.misterprickly said:
Our movies win awards and critical acclaim, how can you claim we're falling behind when two British pictures have won best picture oscars in the last five years, our music is some of the most acclaimed and successful in the world (still) and our TV shows are exported worldwide?
We have a pretty good record on human rights, gay rights, gender relations and... well maybe not mental illness or age relations, but on the whole we're far from behind the times. If anything, we're a little too sensitive about human rights and discrimination issues. I see you're Canadian, well we (by which I mean England) legalized homosexual relations before you did, and, while we don't have gay marriage, they can have civil unions, which is better than a lot of countries. On the whole we're a very tolerant towards homosexuals as a nation. Also, London is actually the most ethnically diverse city on Earth (even more than Toronto, I think, even if it isn't its up there) and the UK is similarly diverse as a whole. Considering the huge mix of races here, we get on fairly well. of course, there is some friction, but there's always going to be when a great many cultures live in close proximity. While i do admire Canada as one of the few countries we should aspire to emulating, we are no slouches and I resent us being called a backwards country simply because we don't quite live up to the high standards of Canada.
Also, the west Indies is a perfectly reasonable term, they even call their own cricket team that, so where's the problem? Either way, aside from the Cricket team I've never heard it called that and I have never, ever called Canada, or anywhere, the colonies nor have heard anyone else say that. I don't know where you got that from, but speaking as someone from quite a conservative, rural area of the country where you would imagine such anachronisms would be common, I can say that that is not true.
If you're going to denigrate my country, at least do it right please.
When people say Asian here in the states, they often imply people from Eastern Asia, like Chinese, Korean, Japanese.
"Asian" is as broad a term as saying "European" or "African". As far as I figure, it basically implies they are from that continent and doesn't specifiy their country.
"Asian" is as broad a term as saying "European" or "African". As far as I figure, it basically implies they are from that continent and doesn't specifiy their country.
I have yet to ever see it being used that way :s im from canada and when people refer to asians its chinesse jappanesse tai you know slightly tan squinty eyes trying not to be racist here :SFlatfrog said:Well, I'd have thought so too, but that's the point of the question - look at the article, they're not using it to mean that at all, and I don't think this is exclusive to them. 'Asian' to the British press has meant for a while a brown-skinned person who likes Bollywood movies and Bhangra. (Slight exaggeration...) I think it may date back to Goodness Gracious Me, which was supposed to represent 'the Asian experience' in Britain, but was mostly talking about India and Pakistan.Anjel said:I thought Asian meant you were from a country in Asia. Go figure