Pool bonus and Oriental

[susandennis]

Swimming was good today.  I'm getting very good at keeping my right arm from getting sore.  I got to the end of my 2,000 yards and was getting out of the pool when I spied the noon aerobics class getting started with a substitute instructor and that instructor was Kelsey, one of my all time favorites.  So I hopped back into the pool and took her class.  Her classes are generally rigorous but today I found that even the most difficult parts weren't that difficult. I think the lap swimming really is doing me good.  I enjoyed the class but I'm glad she doesn't teach it often cause I'm really not that interested any more.

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I can hear my brother and his employees chit chatting in their lab through their webcams.  I don't always listen but sometimes I do and the other day I heard my brother refer to a family of Japanese descent as Orientals.  (And, what brother this back to mind today was that machupicchu mentioned his aunt using the same term.)  To my ears, the adjective refers to rugs - never people and really, unless I'm talking about the book Murder on the Orient Express - which I never talk about - I do not use the word in any of its derivations.  But using the term to describe ancestry is just offensive to me.  I was shocked to hear my brother use it.  Paula Dean and now my own brother???

I wrestled with if I should say something and what I should say so as with everything else in life, I Googled it.  And I found a Wikipedia entry that I thought was fascinating - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orient. It lists the connotation of Oriental by country/geography. And it turns out - in general - only some of the United States considers the term pejorative and the rest of the English speaking world not so much.  I'm not going to use it but I'm also probably not going to say anything to my brother.  If/when he moves to Seattle, I'll tell him but as long as he lives in Texas, I'm leaving him alone on the topic.

Comments

[machupicchu.livejournal.com]

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Ha! I actually went to that very same Wikipedia page before writing my entry. I could have sworn that the Orient referred only to a portion of Asia, not all of it, but that page suggested it did indeed refer to the entire area, and apparently the term moving dangerously close to an epithet was for other, more complicated reasons. All the more reason for me not to even bother bringing it up with my aunt either. Still, hearing it made me uncomfortable.
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Lower Americans

[spiritgirl.livejournal.com]

Interesting. Here we have lots of people from Central and Southern America and I have found that Latino is fine for some and offensive to others and the same with Hispanic. And some people can be from the same area and like or not like the same term.

Re: Lower Americans

[susandennis]

Oh that IS interesting. Around here, I think both are ok but used differently. Latino is used for people from Latin America. Hispanic is used for those from Mexico and/or Spain. (Also I think all native Spanish speakers are Hispanic and some but not all maybe be Latino.)


I do not believe either is regarded as pejorative by anyone... but, I honestly don't know that for sure!

[mrdreamjeans.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a good call:)

[viridescence13]

Interesting -- I've always regarded it as pejorative and any people of Asian descent that I've known personally have felt the same. It's OK for rugs and that's pretty much it.

But it is definitely true that these things vary by country. I recall being on an email list in the mid-90s where someone in the UK talked about getting takeout Chinese food (takeaway, in their lingo :)) and referred to it by a name that the Americans on the list considered a pejorative term for Chinese people. She was totally taken aback by our reaction. After some research I discovered that it appeared that many people in that country -- I think it was Scotland -- used that term for the food, but not the people, with no thought of it being offensive. I don't know if that's changed or not.

Having known many people from different Spanish-speaking countries, it seems to me that their preference is to be referred to by their country of origin, if you know it. But if you don't, whether Latino or Hispanic is acceptable seems to depend on the person. They may all speak Spanish, but the dialects can be very different...and to add to the confusion, there are some (not a large number, but still) Mexicans who don't speak Spanish at all, but speak an indigenous language called Mixtec.

Of course living in the Deep South the blanket term is "Mexicans" no matter what. :P

[osodecanela.livejournal.com]

Personally, I experience no pejorative in the word and I grew up in the north east. That may also be as I heard the word as a descriptor for certain Jews that were from the Orient, ie Sephardi from Iraq, Iran, India and at times, even Turkey. (My family of origin were Ashkenazi and European Sephardi.)

[susandennis]

Interesting. My brother was raised in the Southeast. But he went to high school and college in Maine.

[howeird]

OMGWTFBBQ, y'all. Orient is French for East. France colonized Vietnam and Cambodia not so very long ago, so the French word became widely used. It is no more a pejorative term than soufflé.

The Orient Express ended in Constantinople, home of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The "east" part of "Middle East", you know. It is east of Europe, and hence, Oriental.

Very recently, like in the last 20 years, somehow the Political Correctness Police have decided "oriental" is an insult.

They are obviously disoriented.

[mhaithaca.livejournal.com]

I take offense to your use of the word "soufflé" in that it does not result in me eating a soufflé. But, yes, I agree that "Oriental" is merely the opposite of "Occidental," referring to eastern vs western, and I'm always amazed at what people will find worth taking offense over... often on behalf of someone else.

[rejectomorph]

Such worrying is so Occidental.