Flatfrog said:I've recently been thinking about the word 'Asian' which, at least in the UK, is used mostly to refer to people from West Asia (India/Pakistan/Bangladesh), and not to Chinese or other East Asian countries. But in this article it seems to be being used to refer also to people from Arabic countries, and to me this is just getting a bit weird. What seems to be happening is that it's becoming a racial term that is just a euphemism for 'brown-skinned', and that just seems misleading - especially given that the vast majority of actual Asians are Chinese!
I think we need an unambiguous, non-racist word to refer to the mostly Muslim and Hindu brown-skinned population that inhabits West Asia and the Middle East. 'Brown' would work (and before you say it's racist, 'black' appears to be fine), but in the US, it seems to be mostly used to refer to Hispanics (I noticed it particularly in The West Wing). So is there any other word we can use?
I'm tempted to suggest we should revive the good old-fashioned 'dusky'
To be honest it's just another matter of political correctness gone out of control. Nothing to be seen here.
In the most basic sense it's used to describe people from the continent of Asia that fit a certain general description, at least in the US. You know your basic short person, with yellow, tan, or golden skin, dark hair, and unusually shaped eyes by western standards. It's not so much an insult as it is a descriptive generalization, similar to saying "white", "black", or whatever else. It's NOT used for people with dark skin, and even if from Asia certain other groups like Arabs or people from India generally get referred to as Arabs, or if obvious Indians with the specification one does not mean a Native American.
To put things bluntly if your in security for example and get a quick look at someone say shoplifting, saing "male Asian, wearing tan pants, a white shirt, and brown bomber jacket heading toward Cedar Casino on the concourse carrying a golf club he just stole from Fairways" will quickly tell people EXACTLY who your talking about, and where they are, and desciptions like that work perfectly. In fact pretty much that's exactly how we did things (and using locations from Foxwoods, even though Fairways no longer exists). A call like that might be made if say you were standing at an entrance of Grand Pequot Casino (one of the gambling rooms) and some guy from Fairways (a golf shop) had robbed them. A Security Officer won't leave an assigned post to chase someone like that, because it could always be some kind of a distraction or whatever (it does happen, and I won't get into why), but they will put out a call for "rovers" who are security officers that are not assigned to a specific "standing" post to intercept the guy. In the case of the hypothetical call above, security probably would try and cut him off at the pequot garage elevator since that's the quickest root out of the casino with what is probably a several hundred dollar club, and it's off the concourse between the two casinos/gambling areas (ie each room full of gambling is considered it's own casino for designation purposes even if the entire building is a casino). None of what I'm pointing out here is any kind of secret information (I'm not even giving 10 codes which are pretty obvious anyway), and being the world's largest casino some of you might know exactly where I was talking about from having visited the place when Fairways
was open (irrelevent to the specific point, just rambling).
The usage of the term "Asian" tends to be used out of political correctness to begin with as the term "Oriental" is considered offensive to some people due to the way it has been used by people from Europe, and is associated with years of trivialization and warfare with The Orient by The British Empire... which I won't get into the history of since how accurate or fair that is, can be a major topic of discussion.
Nobody has the right to be offended by that anymore than being called "white" or a "caucasian" (which is actually a bit of an issue, but people will know what you mean), or "black", or "hispanic", or whatever. People get uppity when you identify by skin color, but in reality it's an unavoidable way of descibing people, and passing on descriptions is nessicary. Efficiency is far more important in such cases than touchy feely left wing political correctness. For example in the above situation I care more about the guy being identified and intercepted than I do about anyone hugging their inner child, or joining
hands and singing "we are the world". People have differant colored skins and features common to specific regions and understood to be such, and as such when the need arises they will be used as descriptive terms. People will be called Asian, just as I will be called white if someone is trying to describe me. Now granted the fact that a guy from Russia or various satellite nations might also be called White despite some arguements that can be made about geographic region, but that's generally done to be obtuse, since again "white" is an accurate description of color and features going by most of the world, and most importantly people will recognize exactly what I'm talking about even if I personally notice the guy is obviously slavic or whatever due to bone structure and such.
Likewise the disctinction between say "Hispanic", and "Latino" is largly irrelevent for the purposes of a quick description. Either can be used to pick a guy with those features out of a crowd quickly combined with other descriptive factors like clothing and maybe hair style. That might offend the inner child of a liberal, but well, that's just the way things are.
In cases where an ethnicity is not obvious, general descriptions like dark skin or light skin might be used, in varying degrees based on shade. A person being called in as having say mid-dark skin, or perhaps a middle darkie to the irreverant or those trying to be brief because they might say be chasing the guy, generally means that the guy can't be fit into a general catagory for a quick description, but that's the shade of his skin. That in of itself helps because chances are if the guy descibing him can't figure it out quickly, then anyone else will see the guy with mid-dark skin that they can't easily put into a catagory. The same can also happen with white guys as well, albiet in such cases a description might be something like a "tan white guy" or "a pasty white guy" just for extra specification.
In the end, certain people are going to object to ANY term used to differentiate or descibe them, and I'm very sorry, but even out of cases like chasing or identifying a wrong doer, they need to be quickly and easily descibed. Everyone just being "a person" might make the inner child of a left winger gurgle with joy, but unfortunatly when your looking for someone in a crowd "hey I'm looking for a person" just doesn't cut it. A description like "Asian" does not by any means imply someone is less than human, simply what they look like, ditto for describing a skin tone or whatever.
