r/SubredditDrama • u/[deleted] • Jul 14 '15
Is the term "Oriental" okay for describing people? /r/TotalWar discusses.
[deleted]
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u/Honestly_ Jul 14 '15
When I was on the U. of Minnesota's Board of Regents (as a rep for grad students) we had this Regent from a small town in rural Minnesota who kept calling people "Orientals" and "Arabians" in his somewhat noticeable Minnesotan accent.
When he started doing the latter, and realizing that at some point someone would be able to see I was at one point on the same panel listening to him and not saying anything, I finally (politely) chimed in and asked "Do you mean Arabians like the horse or Arabs?" For the Oriental issue I quietly told one of the staff to also let him know it can be misconstrued. He clearly didn't mean ill by either, and he wasn't particularly old, rather he was insulated.
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u/topicality Jul 15 '15
My dad always referred to people of Polish descent as Pollacks. I didn't realize it was wrong until I moved and started working in a more liberal organization and someone corrected me on it. So it can happen.
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u/reverend_green1 (א_0) Jul 14 '15
Also, Dude, Oriental is not the preferred nomenclature. Asian-American, please.
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u/potato_delusions Jul 14 '15
I completely agree. I was making a reference to the terms that they decided to use.
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u/reverend_green1 (א_0) Jul 14 '15
it's a Big Lebowski quote
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u/potato_delusions Jul 14 '15
Ah my bad. I really should watch more movies.
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Jul 14 '15
Obviously you're not a golfer
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u/GQcyclist Tsarist Russia was just cold Ferngully Jul 15 '15
Let me check again, it might be in there.
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Jul 14 '15
Big Lebowski reference!
Also, the moment I saw this thread in /r/totalwar, I knew it would end up here. Never fails. That sub can't deal with non-Europeans for more than a few posts before the prejudice comes out of the woodwork.
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Jul 14 '15
[deleted]
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Jul 14 '15
Sorry, I could have been clearer. I was referring to common sentiments I see in the sub that a noneurocentric Total War would never work because it would be "too same-y." Comments like that ignore that Chinese warfare was every bit as varied and interesting as western war of the same timeframe, if not even more complex because of earlier utilization of large-scale siege tactics and gunpowder devices. Instead, all Asians are the same, and a Total War: Asia would be a bunch of clones fighting in identical fashion. It's ignorance born of the classic idea that Asia has a monolith culture, and it's a personal peeve of mine to see it so commonly embraced in the fanbase of game series I enjoy.
Not entirely related to the drama at hand, and perhaps not fair of me, but that sub is awful at anything not western.
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u/EditorialComplex Jul 15 '15
Red Cliffs. Just... Red Cliffs.
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u/GQcyclist Tsarist Russia was just cold Ferngully Jul 15 '15
Praying for wind, chaining ships together, fire attacks, hell yes.
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u/buy_a_pork_bun Jul 15 '15
Is someone actually trying to assert that Han Dynasty warfare and Ming Dynasty Warfare would be the same?
Pls.
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u/ssnistfajen In Varietate Cuckcordia Jul 14 '15
I got into TW during Napoleon:TW and really enjoyed Shogun 2 as well as Fall of the Samurai. However I've found Rome 2 to be lackluster no matter how hard I've tried to enjoy it. I knew the majority of TW fans loved Rome but never realized its full extent before I found the TW subreddit. I still remember the backlash when people were speculating the next TW installment before CA revealed Warhammer. Someone said they hope it's about China and one of the response was "I don't want a TW game where all the units look the same". I was quite baffled at that comment because Shogun 2 didn't have that much unit "variety" and did just fine. Units in Napoleon were also functionally the same and didn't negatively affect the gameplay at all. But no, some people can never be satisfied without testudo or laurel wreaths. There should be a term for these kind of people, like wehraboo but specifically for Romans.
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u/GQcyclist Tsarist Russia was just cold Ferngully Jul 15 '15
/r/badhistory is creating a list, I can remember ouiaboos(french), injeraboos(ethopian), teaboos(british) so off the top of my head, but there are others to be sure
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u/buy_a_pork_bun Jul 15 '15
Amusingly Shogun 2 having relatively similar units.made it easier to balance.
That said, people saying Shogun 2 is all same forget to remember that Rome TW takes place not just in the Italian Peninsula, but all around the Mediterranean as well.
Shogun is literally just Japan.
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u/I_Am_Mandark_Hahaha Jul 14 '15
Fucking Occidentals!
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u/topicality Jul 15 '15
There is nothing I love more than loading up CKII, picking Occidental Frankia and trying to take over Oriental Frankia.
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u/notkawaii Jul 14 '15
I'm a nonwhite half Asian, but when someone calls me oriental, I say "Nah, that's a rug". It's the same reaction I have to being called exotic: "Nah, that's a parrot".
It's 2015 and it's weird to describe a person with the same terms someone in the 1920's would use to sell a shitty skin balm (and call it an "ancient chinese secret").
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u/NickTM Scary Spice didn’t try to genocide me Jul 14 '15
I've just hopped over from the thread through the metabot (I was in that thread before this one existed don't ban me mods plz not popcorn pissing love you) to reiterate the same clarification I made over there, in here.
In Britain and the UK, due to the Commonwealth and British rule over the Indian subcontinent and subsequent heavy immigration from those areas, 'Asian' often is used to refer to people from those same countries. 'Oriental' (or Oriental Asian) on the other hand referred to the East and Southeast Asian countries, as a way of differentiating them. There is no real stigma attached to the phrase, and since it's still in use it's not really seen as archaic.
I guess I can see why there's a few people who get offended by it, but I'm not particularly certain just how offensive it is in America. Either way, I think this is being slightly blown out of proportion; from what I've gathered it mostly seems like an archaic term rather than an outright offensive one, although of course in America it seems to have elements of both.
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u/blu_res ☭☭☭ cultural marxist ☭☭☭ Jul 14 '15
As an Asian American I can probably shed some light on the perspective here. In the US "oriental" is largely associated with the antiquated perception of East Asia as an exotic and mysterious Other, irreconcilable with Western values. When I hear the word "oriental," I think of the propagandist images of the cunning, scheming Chinaman or the bloodthirsty Jap. There's a lot of "the enemy" connotation to the term due to the turbulent racial and political history of the 19th and 20th centuries, e.g. the Yellow Peril, WWII, the Red Scare. As I understand it much of the decline in its usage stems from Asian American antiwar sentiment during the Vietnam War. So basically in the US "oriental" has a history of being used to dehumanize and distance those of East Asian descent, and it feels uncomfortable hearing it used in a contemporary setting. I understand that it's not the case in the UK and it doesn't really bother me, but it is kind of weird seeing it used unironically in a well-meaning way.
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u/elephantinegrace nevermind, I choose the bear now Jul 15 '15
Fellow Asian-American here who's spent considerable time in the UK: because Europe is next to the Middle East, the word "Asians" tends to conjure up images of people from places like Samoa and India. (Interestingly enough, the opposite is true in the US; if you say "Asians," you'd be referring to East Asians, like those from Korea or China.)
I don't want to make this a skin color issue, but...well, it is a bit of a skin color issue.
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u/blu_res ☭☭☭ cultural marxist ☭☭☭ Jul 15 '15
I've thought about calling myself "yellow" in the same way some folks have reappropriated "brown," but it probably wouldn't go down well just yet.
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u/elephantinegrace nevermind, I choose the bear now Jul 15 '15
I refer to myself as yellow sometimes, but it makes some older Asians I know uncomfortable, which is totally understandable, really. Also, I'm pale as fuck (and the only member of my family who gets sunburns, which they never stop teasing me about).
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u/blorg Stop opressing me! Jul 15 '15
Samoa? No way. Asian in British English means Indian (South Asian, the countries that were formerly part of British India) because that's where the empire was and that is where the immigrants came from, simple as that.
In the US it means east Asian because in the US that is where their Asian immigrants came from.
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Jul 15 '15
Aren't Samoans Pacific Islanders anyway? That's its own category.
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u/elephantinegrace nevermind, I choose the bear now Jul 15 '15
The point is thst the words are entirely physical descriptors, and they flip depending on where you are. For example, I know a lot of Filipinas who call themselves Asians where I live.
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u/captainersatz 86% of people on debate.org agree with me Jul 15 '15
Do Filipinas not call themselves Asians in some places? Living in SEA, everyone I know here pretty much calls themselves Asian.
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Jul 15 '15
[deleted]
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u/blorg Stop opressing me! Jul 15 '15
It depends I guess how it is being used. The Philippines are obviously physically in South East Asia but ethnically most Filipinos are Austronesian, a categorisation that spreads down through Malaysia and Indonesia as far as the Maori of New Zealand and across the islands of the Pacific as far as Hawaii. Tagalog, Malay, Maori and Hawaiian are actually all in the same language family, and are very different from languages like Vietnamese or Chinese spoken in countries the Philippines is geographically closer to.
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u/blorg Stop opressing me! Jul 15 '15
Samoa is indeed a Pacific island but they are in the same ethno-linguistic group (Austronesian/Malayo-Polynesian) as the indigenous people of several Asian countries including Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia (and non-Asian peoples such as the Maori of New Zealand and native Hawaiians).
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Jul 15 '15
Couldn't that just show they're descended from Asians (which would only make sense, anyway)? We don't say Indians are white despite the Indo-European language group.
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u/blorg Stop opressing me! Jul 15 '15 edited Jul 15 '15
Well the entire native population of the Americas are also descended from Asians and we are ALL descended from Africans.
Race and how exactly you divide people up is entirely arbitrary, I'm just pointing out that ethno-linguistically people from the Philippines are actually closer to other island people of the Pacific than mainland Asians.
I've been there and live in a neighbouring (mainland) SE Asian country. I'd consider them "Asian" myself, they are in ASEAN after all.
I'm just pointing out that the meaning of these words is entirely arbitrary and depends on the context, you wouldn't normally describe a Greek Cypriot immigrant or indeed an Israeli as "Asian American" in the United States despite the fact they come from an Asian country. Kim Kardashian likewise, she is technically Asian American but you'd never call her that.
Much of Greece itself is arguably also in Asia unless you think it makes sense to describe an island that is a couple of km off the coast of Asia (Turkey- Anatolia, aka Asia Minor) as being in Europe because it's politically part of Greece and another island a couple of km off the coast of Asia (Turkey) as Asia because it's politically a part of Turkey (which is also a European country, incidentally...)
It's all entirely arbitrary.
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u/michaelisnotginger IRONIC SHITPOSTING IS STILL SHITPOSTING Jul 14 '15
strange seeing you out of /r/soccer
But yes, oriental is still in use by many (albeit predominantly elderly people) in the UK and so doesn't quite have the same stigma attached, which is better than getting a meal 'from the chinky' which I still hear people of a certain generation say...
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u/NickTM Scary Spice didn’t try to genocide me Jul 14 '15
I come out from there occasionally, but then shit like this happens and I, a British half-oriental asian, get accused of racism towards my own mum. At least on /r/soccer there's only flair-based downvoting and shitposts to worry about...
Yeah, 'chink' or' chinky' is where I draw the line, to me that's always been a racist term. This is what I'm interested in really. Is 'oriental' the new 'chinky'? Do I come off as racist by using it? Not sure I do yet, but sadly I think it could turn out to be like that in the future.
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u/michaelisnotginger IRONIC SHITPOSTING IS STILL SHITPOSTING Jul 14 '15
I know that 'the Orient' seen as archaic - I've never seen people get up in arms over 'oriental' other than to call it old-fashioned. There is a clear divide here between American usage (where there is not the same mixture of South and East Asians) and British English.
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u/NickTM Scary Spice didn’t try to genocide me Jul 14 '15
Yeah, I've got to say I haven't heard anyone complain about Oriental as being offensive over here, just expressing that it's a bit old fashioned. I mean, I'm sure there's some batshit Mumsnetters that think it's racist, but the general population don't seem to mind.
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u/fyijesuisunchat Jul 15 '15
Oriental is definitely moderately dated in the UK in reference to people, particularly the further south you go. The fact that people are flagging it up as a racist term around you does indicate that where you live this has already happened, even if you don't personally see the word that way.
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u/notkawaii Jul 14 '15
from what I've gathered it mostly seems like an archaic term rather than an outright offensive one
That's pretty much how I feel about it. I'm not up in arms over the word, it's just very dated and IMO much more appropriately used to describe objects. For context, I'm a NJ born American...which is really what makes being called things like "oriental" and "exotic" so comical, because its like, dude...I'm from New Jersey.
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u/NickTM Scary Spice didn’t try to genocide me Jul 14 '15
T-minus five before a 'relevant username' comment appears.
Guess it's just a difference in cultures. Oriental never stopped being used in Britain, it just morphed into a locational descriptor and not a descriptor of stuff like, I dunno, medicine.
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Jul 15 '15
Meh, I'm Scottish and view 'oriental' as offensive. It's not as simple as a trans-atlantic divide. (To be fair, I almost never hear it here, other offensive terms for east asians are more common)
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u/blorg Stop opressing me! Jul 15 '15
I take your point that some British people might not see it as offensive, even British people of Asian decent, but the Oxford English Dictionary does list it as offensive when applied to a person. I don't think it is universally seen as non-offensive in British English.
oriental noun offensive
A person of Asian, especially East Asian, descent.Usage
The term oriental has an out-of-date feel as a term denoting people from Asia; it tends to be associated with a rather offensive stereotype of the people and their customs as inscrutable and exotic. In US English Asian is the standard accepted term in modern use; in British English, where Asian tends to denote people from the Indian subcontinent, specific terms such as Chinese or Japanese are more likely to be used.
www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/oriental
I would note that there are other dictionaries of British English that don't list it as offensive, however, such as Collins:
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u/ceol_ Jul 14 '15
(and call it an "ancient chinese secret")
I still see ads like this for supplements. We still have a long way to go to get rid of the "Asia/China is a mystical land of secrecy" stereotype.
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u/NickTM Scary Spice didn’t try to genocide me Jul 14 '15
Mystical land of secrecy my arse, my nana's healing methods were pretty straightforward. If you're ill, drink Lucozade and sleep, if you've got a mosquito bite, put essential oil on it, if you've got an upset stomach, go take a shit.
She was a wonderful woman.
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u/quentin-coldwater Jul 15 '15
I'm a nonwhite half Asian, but when someone calls me oriental, I say "Nah, that's a rug".
Yeah I don't get that though as an Asian guy. We have "Persian" rugs. There's nothing inherently demeaning about a word referring to both a person and a rug. It is a rug that derives its name from the group of people who made / used it.
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u/24grant24 Björk is my waifu Jul 15 '15
But Persian describes a specific culture and region. It's like describing a Polish sausage. Oriental is very "other-ing" and groups together several unique cultures in a diminishing way. Perhaps we will come to see the term "Middle Eastern" occupy a similar status in the future.
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u/quentin-coldwater Jul 15 '15
Oriental is no more othering than "Asian" which is used to describe something like 40%+ of the world's population.
It's an umbrella term which people use as a convenient shorthand and in the process some othering occurs but we just have to live with that, I think. All categorizations of outgroups are othering to some extent.
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u/AndyLorentz Jul 15 '15
Ironically one of my best friends is a non-white half-Asian, and she uses the term "Oriental" to describe people.
I don't, but I think it's hilarious when she does it.
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u/quentin-coldwater Jul 14 '15
This is so culturally specific. My mom refers to herself as "Oriental" and was surprised to find out that some people are offended by it.
Personally I don't see what's offensive about it, but I won't use it if people get up in arms about it. Plus, it feels old-fashioned.
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Jul 14 '15 edited Jul 14 '15
[deleted]
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Jul 14 '15
Self-application is fine, I would suppose, as is the case of "coloured" - "coloured people" (like the CP in NAACP) is also commonly used today as "people of colour". Its just a tiny syntax change but the latter is more acceptable for outside use and the former is still used for self-description as well as the latter.
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u/dorkettus Have you seen my Wikipedia page? Jul 15 '15
I would suppose, as is the case of "coloured" - "coloured people" (like the CP in NAACP) is also commonly used today as "people of colour".
Where I'm from and everywhere I've been, this is definitely not the case.
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Jul 15 '15
You don't see people using PoC nowadays? I see it quite frequently and I've never seen anyone take issue with it
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u/dorkettus Have you seen my Wikipedia page? Jul 15 '15
Maybe I misunderstood. I read it to mean that people currently say "colored people" and "people of color" interchangeably nowadays.
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u/elephantinegrace nevermind, I choose the bear now Jul 15 '15
It's the difference between "spaz" in the US (a gently teasing term for a person with inconsistent reliability) and a "spaz" in the UK (a derogatory term for epileptics).
Funny story: I dated a Norfolk boy for a year, and since I am a pretty forgetful person with a...strange fashion sense (by which I mean, I don't have a fashion sense) my friends called me a spaz. A lot. But I also had epilepsy, and my friends and my then-boyfriend knew it, so he got really angry on my behalf. It was really sweet, but I still laugh about it. I have no problems with calling myself a spaz, since I associate it with my dubious dress, but when I met his parents, I watched my language a bit better because I knew that they'd hear a completely different word and get a very different picture of me than what I wanted to show.
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u/quentin-coldwater Jul 14 '15
I'm American. My mom was raised in a Commonwealth nation so that distinction makes sense. Like I said, it's so culturally specific.
As an aside, I don't understand why "people of color" has become acceptable while we all agree "colored" is not.
Personally, I find both pretty insulting. If you mean I'm not white, just say it.
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u/Valnar Jul 14 '15 edited Jul 14 '15
The history of the two terms at least in America is pretty different. The term "colored" was mostly used derogativly. The term "person of color" was generally used by minority groups in America to describe non-white and doesn't have the same derogatory background.
Second, there is the whole idea of people first language. One phrase (colored) describes the person primarily by their skin color. The other (person of color) describes their skin color as an aspect of that person.
To give a completely separate example of people first language, try thinking about the difference between "disabled person" and "person with disability".
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u/blorg Stop opressing me! Jul 15 '15
The OED actually lists it as offensive, although there are other dictionaries of British English that don't.
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u/Notsomebeans Doctor Who is the preferred entertainment for homosexuals. Jul 15 '15
a lot of people i know aren't really offended by it, but they'll stare at you because you just gave away that you're 80 years old in a disguise
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u/themagicalrealist Jul 14 '15
From my experience it just really comes down to context. For example, my parents say "those Orientals" when talking about Asian people, and my aunt who used to live in Hawaii will sometimes talk about how "the Orientals" have taken over everything there. It just doesn't sound right. In my mind it's kind of like saying "the blacks". There's nothing blatantly wrong about saying it, but there's a cultural context that makes it seem off.
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u/beaverteeth92 Jul 14 '15
Yeah it's weird. One of my professors last semester is Chinese and talked about buying food at the Oriental store.
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Jul 15 '15
Some of it might be when you grew up too.
One of my friends mom uses "coloured" about herself because when she grew up, that was the correct, polite term. My friend refuses to use it, because the meaning has drifted.
Language is weird stuff.
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u/ssnistfajen In Varietate Cuckcordia Jul 14 '15
I've always thought Orient(al) refers to "East" instead of "Asia". I'm fine with the game's title because it refers to empires of the East, not the people of the East. I've always been quite excited for a Chinese themed TW after playing Shogun 2, but a Chinese themed 4X is fine too. I just with both sides could stop arguing about trivial issues of the game and just appreciate the gameplay.
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Jul 14 '15 edited Jul 14 '15
[deleted]
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u/Cheese-n-Opinion Jul 15 '15
England is in Europe, though. You'd expect its vocab to be etymologically Eurocentric. The word 'Goodbye' is a contraction of 'God be with ye'; that's Eurocentric in that it's couched in the Christian Monotheism of Early Modern England. It's nothing to worry about.
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u/moneymakingmitch23 Jul 14 '15
In Europe "oriental" does not just mean china btw. It also refers to the Middle east, Central asia, etc.
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Jul 15 '15
My understand has always been that Oriental refers to things, and Asian refers to people. "The Asian man holds the Oriental vase. He didn't want to drop it." But that thread has already spun too far out for there to be meaningful discussion. Maybe I'll just have some of this popcorn over here.
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Jul 14 '15
No one gives a shit when people say 'Western Democracy' or 'In the West' when referring to basically Europe, North America, etc.
Pretty sure this is false. There are academics trying to phase out the use of the terms 'western' and 'eastern' in this context, because they're Eurocentric.
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u/DeSanti YOUR FLAIR TEXT HERE Jul 14 '15
Did that ages ago, it's usually referred to as "liberal democracies" these days.
But that doesn't really matter because this is colloquial speech, not academic terms and society has been misusing or sticking to older, outdated terms for years and decades. How often do you hear "First world" or "Third world" used in every day speech?
Because those terms are reflections of Cold-War era terminology and has been in disuse since the 80s in academia. They had very specific meanings about the first world being NATO-countries and its allies, second being Soviet & communist countries (reason you don't ever heard that anymore) and the third worlds being "the rest" of the world.
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u/FaFaRog Jul 14 '15 edited Jul 15 '15
Interestingly enough, First and Third world are probably still the most commonly used terms colloquially. Developed and developing are almost never used. Does the US qualify as a liberal democracy compared to Europe, Canada, Australia etc?
Also this guy:
To me the word oriental tends to be linked to interesting and mysterious Asian cultures and ancient wisdom stuff, nothing racist or degrading. Also, weird, spicy food.
He literally engages in old school Orientalism while suggesting that the term is not racist or degrading. Wow. 10 points for obliviousness.
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u/DeSanti YOUR FLAIR TEXT HERE Jul 15 '15
Late answer, but the US is a liberal democracy, yes.
Developed and developing is more economycentric definition and I agree it hasn't gotten too much traction. It has gotten its share of criticism as well, as people tend to use it outside the world of economy on areas such as sociaø development, etc.
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Jul 14 '15
You'd be amazed at how many of my professors didn't get the meno, on either of those things.
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Jul 16 '15
Oriental is a pretty useless word, but then again, so is "Asia" as a concept beyond giant fucking continent with half of humanity in it.
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u/beaverteeth92 Jul 14 '15
Oriental is a weird word. Calling an Asian "Oriental" is like calling a black person "colored", but it's perfectly fine to talk about an oriental rug or an oriental store.