Both “Oriental” and “Asian” derive from words referring to where the sun rises (of course, it does rise there, though it also rises elsewhere).
If someone already made this point, I apologize for the redundancy.
The etymology of Asia isn’t that certain. It may be that, it may be something else entirely.
I’m fuzzy on the Ainu. (I had not known the term frankly, but wiki tells me I guessed correctly that they were from Hokkaido.) My trigger point is different from yours, but I wouldn’t demand consensus from the whole group either. I would evaluate the specific claims made. One complication is that I’m highly dubious about separatist movements inside democracies.
What separates the Hmong/Chinese grouping from the Sudanese/Kenyan/Nigerian one is… how the groups are perceived racially. But that isn’t a trivial consideration, alas. Race is a sociological construct mostly defined by the group’s adversaries IMHO. Unpleasant and embarrassing.
You can’t expect someone to know 190+ countries or hundreds of ethnicities.
It’s perfectly fine to say “That person looks East Asian” rather than (Han Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Zhuang Chinese, Korean, Hmong, etc.)
It’s perfectly fine to say “That person looks white” rather than (Irish, Slovak, German, Albanian, Croatian, Scandinavian, etc.)
No-one’s asking for that.
Why would you have to? And how frequently might you get it wrong? And what shallow superficialities are you using to group people by “looks”?
No, it’s not “perfectly fine”, history has shown it’s anything but.
FWIW, Zainichi Koreans do not consider themselves Japanese. I think most Okinawans wouldn’t consider themselves a separate ethnicity, either.
At this point I’m gonna call you out for your ignorance of American culture. You seem to think that there are no significant commonalities among the experiences of folks from east Asia who come to the US, or for that matter among African Americans, ferchrissakes. You’re operating from a highly theoretical position that is divorced from the realities of racist dynamics in the US, and your theory offers no useful guidance to navigating these matters.
I just wanna call out this specific bit of nonsense. This was in response to my saying–with some emphasis added:
So, no: I wouldn’t have missed the African American who was raised in a non-segregated British school, because every African American on that panel went to a school in my town. They talked extensively about their experiences in those schools, because that was the point of the panel. Nor would I have missed a white person from a Dutch school, for exactly the same reason.
Your theory about race depends on looking for rare examples and using those rare examples to discredit conversations about social trends and commonalities. It reminds me of a radical gender theorist I heard some decades ago who suggested gender was a myth, based on transgender folks, folks with XXY chromosomes, etc.
A poor theory of race may take two forms: it may paint everyone with the same brush (“All black people are…”), or it may deny that there is any relevant social construction of race (“There is no such thing as a black person in any context.”) The former is far more harmful, absolutely–but the latter, which you come perilously close to, is simply incorrect.
Bullshit. I presumed no such thing: I went to the panel to hear about their experiences. The commonalities I’m describing are the ones the panelists talked about. You’re bordering on delusional here.
Ooh, ooh, what if one of the white students was secretly a hamster dressed up as a human being? You can imagine any sort of outre scenario you want–but your scenarios are not what actually happened. Insisting that we can find no experiences that are commonly experienced by black Americans, no matter how narrowly we define the group, disables all conversations about our nation’s racial history. It is, in fact, a favorite tool of modern-day racists, who insist they don’t see race and that therefore there is no problem with race in our country.
That’s kind of my point.
They definitely are. Some of them would prefer they weren’t the same nationality, either.
I mean they don’t consider either their nationality or ethnicity to be Japanese. They consider themselves Korean in both respects.
This is true of the older ones, but my understanding is that younger Zainichi are increasingly taking up Japanese citizenship since the requirement for having a Japanese name for citizenship was dropped.
If you can’t understand that I was pointing out that your parochial experience isn’t universal, I don’t know how to help you. Yes, I understand that you know everyone in your town, and so there were no surprises for you in this meeting. Nevertheless, you went into it with the expectation that the blacks were going to be talking about a shared black experience, the whites about a shared white experience. And it played out for you that way. Good for you. Doesn’t always work out that way.
I’m not arguing against the existence of shared experiences, I’m arguing against making the assumption that that shared experience applies to everyone based just on the colour of their skin.
I’m not saying race as a social construct doesn’t exist. I’m saying we should work towards it not existing, by making a conscious effort at not grouping people on racial lines in our thoughts and our conversations.
You certainly don’t know how to help me–at least we agree on that much. The problem was that I wasn’t talking about some universal experience. I was talking about a specific experience and what happened in that context.
This is too stupid for words. You know better than to engage in petulant hyperbole.
Of course it doesn’t–that’s why I never said that it does. Again, you’re so married to theory that you have to engage in hyperbolic universalities, including accusing others of talking in universalities when they explicitly aren’t.
If that’s what you’re arguing, you shouldn’t be arguing with me. I never said that. Never will.
We shouldn’t make such groupings, except when we’re discussing how racism has affected people along racial lines. That’s the time it’s appropriate to engage in such groupings, and even then we need to understand that not everybody of a particular skin tone/ethnicity/cultural background experiences racism in an identical way. We have to take a nuanced approach to the issue. Willful colorblindness will keep the problem from ever being solved.
Also, this is some willful ignorant bullshit. Do you want to know if there were any surprises for me in this meeting? Howzabout you ask me if there were? You might learn that there were surprises, but they weren’t the sort you desperately hope I found (surprise! One of the white speakers was secretly an woman with albinism from the Ainu culture and was impersonating a local high school student–what does THAT tell you about race, smart guy?)
And I was telling you that your specific experience doesn’t have universal application. It’s not as if I thought there was a British black guy at the meeting. It’s that there could have been.
How can there be no surprises about what groupings people fall into, then, if you don’t know everyone?
It should by pretty clear tou you that I wasn’t talking about your singular experience in-and-of-itself.
That’s certainly the implication behind your “their experiences were signficantly shaped by their race.”[sic] - that everyone at that meeting of that race would have a shared experience. Not that they did (which we agree was the case), but that that they necessarily would.
So if it comes to racism, we should, but yet you acknowledge there are exceptions. And those don’t count because…?
But apparently approaching every individual as an individual is too nuanced?
There’s a difference between wilful colourblindness, and consciously choosing to not group people by their skin colour without insight into their individual experiences. I’m happy to examine past experiences of any individual, but you don’t gain as much as you lose by making assumptions about individuals and their experiences.
I don’t need to ask you, because you already told me there were no surprises there for you (in regards the subject of this discussion), in your first post on the subject, when you said the grouping you’d assigned to them was appropriate.
So what? What the hell is your point that there “could have been”? That’s totally beside the point.
NOBODY SAID THERE COULD BE NO SURPRISES. You made that up. If they’d invited a black British dude, I would indeed have been surprised. But they did not.
Nonsense.
It’s probably true that greater than 95% of African Americans who went to high school in this town in 1970 had some similar experiences based on their race. The fact that there might have been a tiny minority of African Americans who didn’t have any particular experience in no way makes it impossible to discuss commonalities among experiences. You seem to think that extreme examples make it impossible to have any sort of discussion.
For the same reason that I can say that a chair is something you sit on, despite the existence of dollhouse chairs. If a single exception negates the ability to use a generality in discussion, then language itself dissolves.
In some circumstances, of course it is. Otherwise, society literally collapses. Can I not talk about what Republicans are doing? Can I not talk about how Google employees behave? Can I not talk about what women experience walking down the street? Can I not talk about the insane pedantry of Dopers?
We talk about such things acknowledging exceptions.
You made this up. I said no such thing. Here’s what I said:
I want to be called God-Emperor Doom, Protector of the Pluton Belt. I assume you will oblige me. e_e
I get what you’re saying, but that’s sort of condemning by association.
This is kind of how I understand it. I think this attitude is probably something I picked up from California-produced media, since it seems the forbidding of the word comes from there.
When someone outside the USA uses the term, I have to remember that it’s still the normal term in much of the Anglosphere.
I’m glad that’s resolved!
Which means it’s purely a conceptual substitution for “Oriental” and the euphemism treadmill would take “Asian” into slur territory too–if being a slanty-eyed yellow-skinned Mongoloid were still seen as a bad thing.
Indian South Africans - Wikipedia Complex. But “Asian” appears to mean “from Asia” there.
I don’t know that there was a fight. In California specifically, there developed a stereotype of old white people who used the term, and “Asian” became preferred. In much of the English-speaking world, “Oriental” is still a fancy way of saying “Eastern,” and is at least a better term logically than “Asian” for Archipelagic Far Easterners like Filipinos and Japanese, who are, after all, seas away from Asia.
You strike me here as like an overeager young student missing the point. Septimus is talking about different ways of seeing as a way of getting past local cultural programming, and you shoot up your hand like an excitable eight-year-old and say, “But stereotyping is wrong!”
There are visual differences between Korean and Japanese people?
I guess you don’t? Then you may hurt the feelings of someone who wants you to compliment their “exotic” looks? You can’t please everybody.
Hey, you try parsing the words and sentences of mere homunculi when you’re coextensive with time and space!
Nor can refusing to acknowledge someone’s blackness be assumed to always be a safely inoffensive move. (It may be usually, and I certainly tried to do it for years, but some people are very into their racial identity.) So you just cope with the randomness of people.
And OP wins the thread.