And while we are at is does anyone know where to find a list of currently non politically correct terms?
I really try to keep up with changing vernacular but here in the sticks it can be tough.
And while we are at is does anyone know where to find a list of currently non politically correct terms?
I really try to keep up with changing vernacular but here in the sticks it can be tough.
Mulatto comes from the Spanish word for mule and implies the mixing of the “good” horse and the “less desirable” donkey blood when used as an analogy for a mixed race person. With that in mind, it is not considered a polite term. (It is also limited to white/black procreation, and so provides no term for the mixing of other “races.”) The currently acceptable term, if there is a need to describe a person whose parents are of different races, is “mixed race.”
I know of no list of “approved” PC terms or “disapproved” PC terms. Generally, if one avoids slang, one will avoid giving offense, although that is certainly not a guarantee: many people grew up simply seeing/hearing mulatto with no context and are not aware that it can give offense; similarly, the Asian/Oriental issue is not clearly defined so as to permit one to instinctively know which is preferred.
Generally, I don’t worry about it, too much.
I had a psych teacher who (especially during discussions of race/ethnic backround and how they relate to culture and society) regularly referred to herself as mulatto. Now I had heard that it was deragatory but she spoke as if it wasn’t. Now, maybe that was just her (being brought up that way) or maybe that over the time she just found that it was easier to get her point across by using that term and not constantly explaining what races she is speaking of when using a term like mixed.
I guess I should have explained the context:
My sons girlfriend mentioned that her sister was having a child, the mother white the father black. I mentioned that mulatto babies look beautiful to me. The look on her face made me wonder if I had offended, so I just dropped it and came here to inquire. The dictionary didn’t indicate it’s correctness.
With changing vernacular the politically correct media may have folded under pressure to never use it. But, you also never hear the media give a name to those who are mulatto, or octaroon, or mixed. I looked at Dictionary.com and concluded that the mule mating with a less desirable may be a myth. Here is the definition. It may be however, with this definition calling someone who is mixed mulatto could be innacurate, but not used in a derogatory, only used in ignorance of ones ancestry.
: The terms mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon originated with the racial policies of European colonizers in the Americas, especially the Spanish. Because civil rights and responsibilities were based directly on the degree of European blood that a person had, such classifications were highly elaborated, and minor distinctions in ancestry were carefully recorded. While these terms have highly precise definitions, in actual practice they were often used based on impressions of skin color rather than definite knowledge of ancestry.
Anytime you classify people according to their race, you’re bound to offend. Race is usually not relevant to the conversation.
Using race when classifying someone is not wrong at all in my opinion. We are all people. If that is how we identify one another than that is all there is to it. If we stop identifying people by race and start doing it by shoe size then people will still be offended. Its really a hopeless endeavor.
I’ve learned that it is OK to make sweeping generalizations about race – if the generalizations are flattering. Make an unflattering generalization, and you are a racist. There are some people who will say, “It’s wrong to make any generalizations based on race!” But then a week later you catch the same person saying some PC racial generalization (white people this, black people that, etc.). It’s hopeless.
In Latin America there was a range of words to describe a person’s ancestry. Mestizo/a described an Indian/European mix. Mulatto/a described an African/European mix. Finally, there was a Sambo/a which described an African/Indian mix.
These are not necesarily non-PC terms. They describe racial ancestry and I have not seen PC versions of these terms. If they are deemed non-PC we no longer have means of describing these people.
BTW I am a European mongrel.
I dunno, I think a lot of people find the “flattering” generalisatons offensive at times too, for example the Asian “model minority” stereotype.
Race is not relevant in a conversation about race?
I beg to differ. Bicycles are pertinant to a conversation on bicycles!
We need to toughen up.
I grew up hearing ALL the offensive racial words. At about the age of twelve, I began a concious effort to be “color-blind.” I would find the use of the word “mullato” offensive, but better than “high-yellow.” I will agree that babies of Black/White parentage are especially appealing.
For what it’s worth, I still find myself describing people as “the Black guy” or “the Mexican guy” or “the Japanese guy” and so on. I think it is an easy way to identify a specific person, when other attempts at identification have failed.
Were you speaking Spanish or English at the time?
I don’t speak Spanish at all, but as best as I can tell “Mulatto” is, in Spanish, a neutral term. In English, however, it carries derogatory connotations partially because of its link to the word “mule” and partially because it is just old fashioned, like “Negro” (another word that is still perfectly acceptable in Spanish).
How do you decide where to draw the lines? Eventually you either get into talking about ethnicity (not race) or you have a system where those in between cant be placed in either category, thus defeating the point. Are mulattos black? white? Are Italians white? Greeks? Turks? Slavs?
And better yet - why would you even care to try and create some sort of division?
I think in either case it can be unfair. For example the stereotype that asians are smart. What happens when one encounters an asian who doesnt meet that high expectation?
I’m an 8-wide and a “femalo”. I had a mother and a father, one was a FEmale and one a MAle.
Cecil discusses some of these at the bottom of this column here:
Irrelevant. Since when is a long-forgotten etymology the primary criterion in determining the offensiveness of a term? One does not see many left-handed people decrying the use of the word “sinister”, or women complaining about “hysteria”.
psychonaut I doubt that tom needs to be informed about his post. He definitely knows that a “long-forgotten etymology” isn’t “the primary criterion in determining the offensiveness of a term?” He might have worded his post better. But trust me, he knows.
He was trying to give the etymology and then explain that it was still considered impolite.
Fine; I was merely stating that the etymology has little relevance to its perceived impoliteness, so it had little reason to figure so prominently in his explanation.
Perhaps the word, as originally conceived in Spanish, was meant to be a racial slur. But as we have seen from another post, the word certainly doesn’t carry any negative connotations in Spanish today. I’d wager that it was a neutral term even at the time it was borrowed into English. Certainly none of the 16th- and 17th-century sample usages supplied by the OED imply that the term was being used as an insult. (This stands in stark contrast to examples provided for denigrating racial terms, such as “nigger”.)