What’s offensive varies from country to country - I don’t think that Americans are thin-skinned just because different words are offensive in the US compared to Australia.
Well, we’ve heard from many places where it is not considered offensive. In my experience it is always a slur, and I have lived in the same area as the OP, so it’s odd to me that he has not experienced it that way. In any case, in the original post that precipitated all this, Crafter_Man was pretty clearly using the term offensively, saying that he wouldn’t buy Japanese imports because of “what the Japs did to us in WWII”.
Seriously? I imagine “Turkish Kurd” would about cover it. Or if you were saying it to their face and they were ardent Kurdish nationalists that found that construction off-putting, just “a Kurd from Turkey.”
As is commonly the case, the usage of the term “Paki” has an odd history. Here in Canada, it was in the '70s and '80s a vicious and even violent ethnic slur - it was associated with skinheads “Paki-bashing” (that is, beating up people, presumed to be recent immigrants, of south asian origin - who may or may not actually have been Pakistani).
These days, I haven’t heard the term “Paki-bashing” in years - no doubt there are still racist skinheads, or their equivalent haters, around, but they don’t appear to be specifically targeting south asians, particularly. Perhaps as a result, the term “Paki”, while still offensive, is losing some of its bite and is even being used in a ‘reclaim the word’ sort of way by some people of south asian origin to describe themselves.
There are really two different questions being discussed in this thread, and I think that as a result folks are talking past each other. On the one hand, there’s the question of whether “Jap” or “Paki” or even “nigger” is offensive, and on the other, there’s the question of whether it should be offensive. The “should” question could be endlessly debated (what does it even mean to ask whether a word “should” mean something?), but for the “is” question, the answer is yes, those words are offensive, at least in some contexts.
Well, some people in Britain seem to use “Paki” indiscriminately to mean people from India, Bangladesh, or anywhere else in South Asia. So you could argue that:
(1) The denotation of “Paki” should be a person from Pakistan, and
(2) The connotation should be neutral, rather than derogatory as it seems to be.
I understand what you are saying, but may I suggest, that under no circumstances can “nigger” be regarded as anything other than offensive…unless spoken by a black. It has never been used by others in a context that is friendly to or respectful of blacks and never will be. There simply is no reason to do so.
I suddenly find myself ignorant about which peoples or ethnicities or regions do constitute races unto themselves. Could you tell me how you divide up the world into obvious races?
I don’t, race is a social construct and I believe the conventional divisions of race are of little significance.
But to respond, it is my understanding (and you may correct me if I’m wrong) that those who do divide people into races observe the “colours” white, black, yellow, red and brown. :D.
Are the Brits a race? If so, then you are entitled to call the Jap anese a race.
I was unclear there: I didn’t mean to imply that there were contexts where “nigger” is not offensive. I put in the “at least in some contexts” because of the other two, since folks in this thread have mentioned contexts where “Paki” or “Jap” aren’t offensive.
