Are they? I thought those words were archaic and offensive to many.
They went away with the 60s, and Civil Rights movement. The whole “any black is black” thing started being taken from the other side, a form of solidarity and empowerment.
Tiger Woods is able to say “I’m not black, I’m mixed race,” because he didn’t live through the era when keeping track of how much of each was standard and used as a social stratification. There’s a generation now (including me) that didn’t experience it firsthand*, so doesn’t have a feel for the issue as it was experienced by the people living through it.
There’s nothing inherently derogatory with “mulatto” except the nature of why it was so important to know that back when the term was used. It is seen as derogatory because of historical usage. Which makes it derogatory.
*Actually, more than one. My generation was the tail end, just after it. The kids coming up now have no clue.
Right – it’s archaic and offensive in a “what does my racial makeup have to do with it?” sense.
That’s why the term “Eurasian” seems archaic in this article; mentioning Ms. Boyer’s race is extraneous (by today’s standards).
good discussion. summing up my views.
i hadn’t originally been commenting on the offensiveness of the term ‘eurasian’, which i think it would have been in the context. i find it to have been used in my lifetime, and experience, which is undoubtedly limited, as a means of defining people according to race.
being a racist because you believe their are ‘races’ doesn’t necessarily make you a bad person. we live in a racist culture, with racist terminology in common usage in the language.
racism used for flattery is still racism.
i used the phrase “perceived need to place the blame for Cooke’s death on a non white person.” as an example of how racist terminology was used at the time of the incident. as i stated, that was supposition. i still have no idea where the term ‘eurasian’ arose in regard to this incident.
the ‘human nature’ argument is weak. murder is human nature also. and i disagree that categorizing people based on percieved physical differences is human nature per se. it may be a product of homogenous and segregated societies. i have seen less and less of this attitude through my lifetime as segregation has decreased in this country. unfortunately it may be human nature to try and blame others for problems, and racism provides an easy way to define ‘them’.
try thinking about how you would explain racism and racist terminology to an alien who might think all humans look alike. i think it makes humans look pretty dumb.
It means they’re from Istanbul, of course!
Wikipedia:
I totally disagree. Separating the world to those within the group and outside the group is basic to all animals with any sort of brains at all. It is utterly as primal as sex. One is survival, the other is continuance. You don’t get more universal than that.
Both apply to humanity as well. Separating insiders from outsiders is part of all known human history. Outsiders have always been afforded second-class status, shunned, put into ghettos, made into enemies, been demonized. This is known to be true in all cultures in all times.
Forced mixing of populations can be handled in the wild with war or various adaptations for acceptance. Humans do exactly the same, although we consider our adaptations to be more sophisticated. We’ve managed to tame sex in the same way.
The history of U.S. racism is due to an unusual pattern of race-based chattel slavery, but it’s hardly different except to degree from the northern European history of treating those with darker skin - Mediterraneans, Indians, Africans - with contempt. The word wop was more often used in Britain but you can find nigger applied to dark-skinned individuals and peoples who were not Africans. The whole Aryan movement to exalt whites was not a Nazi aberration but an outgrowth of a century-long development of philosophical theories by the most acclaimed savants putting white northern Europeans as the pinnacle of human evolution and progress.
Are we doing better than that today? Thankfully, yes, to a great extent. Apparently we’re doing so well that people are able to forget recent history. That’s both good and bad. Let’s condemn racism in all its forms. Let’s also not forget how far we need to go and how recently things were much worse.
ok, well that’s a reasonable disagreement on that point. but we seem to agree on the conclusion.