How about identifying a culture? I identify as English. Raj identifies as Pakistani. That’s more than genetics - it’s history, culture, a part of who you are. “So and so is Native American” can mean that they identify with Native American culture. I don’t see what your objection is to normal people using terms that simply refer to ancestry or culture.
Jolly well done for the “we’re all one species, lets all be equal” but terms that distinguish between groups of humans are simply useful for referring to cultures, history, ancestory, identity. I don’t see why you’d want to reject the use of them for these reasons.
Dear boy, the kind of people who would refer to “Red Indians” - it’s a slightly archaic phrase over here, donchaknow - are perfectly capable of drawing the distinction between Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Sri Lankans, Burmese, Nepalese, Chinese, Japanese and Malays, for a start, without calling them all “Asians”.
I can’t apologise enough for the BNP, but at least our extremist rednecks have a suitably minute representation in our official government. Lord above, I wish only that some other countries could say the same.
Now that won’t do, my old trout. Nothing we ever did in India, for a start, compares to Wounded Knee, or indeed the whole campaign of displacement and extermination that made a mockery of this whole all-men-created-equal, life-liberty-and-pursuit-of-happiness thing. :rolleyes:
Learned? You set about improving on the lesson as soon as you’d got rid of the evil British, and it’s not a bit of good pretending otherwise.
Oh dear. I’m sorry to keep harping on the facts, but they’re rather inarguable. Whatever semantics we adopt, I’m afraid we have to concede that the Indians have had India back since 1947 (and it’s not as though we got kicked forcibly out), and the “Red Indians” will be getting America back shortly after the beginning of the nuclear winter, I should think. What’s left of them, that is. Do you really think they wouldn’t swap places with the modern-day Indians in a heartbeat? Population a thousand million strong, and a lovely sub-continent all of their very own? Shall we ask them?
Then please do, sonny. And when you’re done, I can soon let you have some more
Speaking as someone who was born and raised in the USA, along with parents, grandparents, etc. for several generations back, I am annoyed that I can no longer call myself a Native American (which I am) because another group of Native Americans has decided that it is politically correct to co-opt this term to apply to themselves exclusively.
Along the same lines it bothers me that I can no longer use the word “gay” to describe someone with a happy and carefree personality, because the homosexual community has decided that it is now their word.
That’s a great idea! But it’s a bit long. Maybe we could abbreviate it by combining the beginning of the first word and the end of the last word (like “SPiced hAM”):
It doesn’t seem very archaic to me; while it seems to be more common in older Brits, the few people I’ve heard use the phrase “Native American” have done so with that tinge of distaste many British seem to reserve for other peculiar American phrases such as “Have a nice day”. Maybe the people you know are different.
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I won’t blame you for the BNP as long as you don’t blame me for Trent Lott.
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That’s because the British don’t believe that all men are created equal (hence the House of Lords). And I seem to recall Britain was not without its massacres in India. Plus, it’s a lot harder to displace people who outnumber you greatly, at least for very long (although I suppose the South Africans managed it).
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Did you know the British railway companies in India as late as the 1930’s employed people to “shoot wogs” who were causing trouble (and sometimes just for the hell of it)? One does hear such interesting stories from the older generation.
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Heh. More to the point, it’s not like you could have stayed even if you’d wanted to. The writing was clearly on the wall by that point. It was not by any means a gracious gesture on the part of the British (although, unlike the French and their colonies, the British at least left before they were pushed).
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Well, if you don’t mind 280-some million Americans moving back to the UK, I’ll see what I can do. Of course, the Canadians will have to move back too, and the Australians, and the New Zealanders – hey, if you think the Underground is crowded now, just you wait…
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Oh Lord – I’m sure there’s already a thread on this one somewhere (which probably started as an argument over aluminum/aluminium).
If we’re going to be using these terms to identify culture, we’ll need to self-identify with them. Culture is more chosen than born into once the person reaches majority, after all.
I don’t self-identify with any word other than human. I think I’ve become interested in too many things from too many regions to be classified narrowly.
There’s something to what you say. We don’t find the Indigenous Americans dropping into conversation as often as all that, so I suppose we don’t keep up on the current forms, and none of the alternatives sound all that comfortable. And in any case, this doesn’t address the fundamental irony: dancing around the proper form of expression to use for the people you’ve dispossessed beyond all hope of repossession.
Fair enough. Neither of us is responsible for the worst excesses spewed up by the democratic system. We seem to have some shocking ornaments on both sides of the Pond, don’t we? shakes head
Look here, old chap, that’s rather getting away from the point, isn’t it? Why, in the very document that mentions the bit about the Creator-given inalienable rights, I believe your founding fathers had some rather harsh things to say about the Redskins.
“Life, liberty” and so on made a jolly good rallying cry while you were rousing yourselves to chase the hated King George’s Men out of your colonies and throwing perfectly good tea into harbours and so on, but you really owed it to yourselves to apply those beautiful and moving words to the chappies who already lived there, as well as the blacks who hadn’t exactly asked for the boat ride.
Now, as long as you’re dragging us off-topic long enough to argue about the House of Lords, I rather feel it was no bad thing. We got around to giving the bulk of the power to the elected chamber, you know; and there’s definitely a makeable
case for having the second chamber one that isn’tanswerable to every party-political straw in the wind. I don’t say it was an unqualifiedly good thing, but it wasn’t self-evidently terrible.
Massacres in India? Well, it wasn’t all one-way traffic. A distressingly large number of white women and children got on the wrong end of some unpleasantness in the Indian Mutiny, you know. And really, whatever we did didn’t exactly amount to cornering the whole of the population in, say, Uttar Pradesh, after shooting the ones who wouldn’t go, and filling up the rest of the country with our ethnic kith and kin, did it?
Outnumbering - well, the Spanish seemed to do a pretty good job in South America. And we did have the Maxim gun and industrialised arms production and so on. If we’d been that bent on it, we could probably have given it quite a convincing go. I’ve heard it put thusly (of the British Raj): We were their Romans; we could have been their conquistadors. shudders at the vile thought
It’s funny you should mention the South Africans. I believe we went over and gave them a good spanking a hundred-odd years ago, and part of the reason was how they treated the blacks. Don’t forget that a largish part of the colony was of Dutch extraction, not English, won’t you? Blame where blame’s due, and all that.
Simply dreadful. And see some interesting things on the television in the present day, if it comes to that. Really, you’re not going to get away with using that brush and not get any tar on yourself, now are you?
Yes. We didn’t exactly get forcibly kicked out in the end, and we’re moderately pally with the Indians even now, though not everyone agrees, I know. There are quite a few working in the office where I do, and they seem quite cheerful about it - odd when you consider we’re their former colonial oppressors and all that. And, one way and another, at least the Evil Empire kept the Japanese out. They gave the Chinese and the Koreans a pretty fair picture of what their idea of Asian solidarity meant. :rolleyes:
Now you’re talking as though the whole problem was in some wayour fault! Look, you were a nice modest-sized thirteen states on the Atlantic seaboard when you threw off the shackles of the hated tyrant, and then you started advertising for the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, and all that stuff; or to put it in other words, “Europe, please send us plenty of white breeding stock while we grab some lebensraum, push the ghastly savages ever further West, destroy their way of life, and reduce them to a tattered remnant living in beggary”.
You’ll have to share quite a few of them among Poland and Germany and the Netherlands and France and so on, anyway. Oh, and Ireland.
As to Canada and Australia and New Zealand, I’ll have to defer that question to an expert.
Or just carry on, as a sop to your consciences, agonizing over what to call the poor blighters… which is where I came in.
Doesn’t Canada refer to its aboriginal people as the First Nations? Seems like a very true and respectful title to me. It avoids the word “aborigine” which has Australian connotations. What do you think?
And as for the land claims stuff, this link will cover what’s going on here, anyways.
My only comment on land claims is…perhaps it would have been better to ensure that the process was staffed by people who had some idea of what they were going to do for employment AFTER it was settled…seems a tad counterproductive to settle the land claims when that means you’d be out of a job, eh?
I’m sorry to keep harping on the facts, but they’re rather inarguable. Whatever semantics we adopt, I’m afraid we have to concede that the Indians have had India back since 1947 (and it’s not as though we got kicked forcibly out), and the “Red Indians” will be getting America back shortly after the beginning of the nuclear winter, I should think. What’s left of them, that is. Do you really think they wouldn’t swap places with the modern-day Indians in a heartbeat? Population a thousand million strong, and a lovely sub-continent all of their very own? Shall we ask them?
