why Oriental is offensive

[Laurence Horn]

At 4:44 PM -0500 2/9/01, Frank Abate wrote:
>Indigo Som said:
>>>
>>>From one horse's mouth... this is why "Oriental" is offensive to me (&
>other Asians I know):
>It comes from the binary Occidental/Oriental which is an imperialist
>division of the world into "Us/Them", "Us" of course being Europeans.
><<
>
>I grant that one could view "Oriental" as assuming a Western perspective in
>an absolute sense.  But if you pair it with "Occidental" (from Latin
>_occidens_ 'setting', that is, 'in the direction of the setting sun') and
>assume an awareness of the etymology of both, then it seems to me that as a
>pair the terms are neutral.  So I don't see how Occidental/Oriental can be
>taken as imperialist.
>
True enough, the difference being the fact that we
Westerners/Europeans are not, to my knowledge, referred to as
"Occidentals" all that often (although we do have a college named for
us in SoCal ;-), and when we are the term is usually primed by an
explicit pairing or opposition with "Orientals".  I also think the
etymological connection with the rising sun has been lost, and all
that's left is a vague connection with the east.  (Cf. the verb 'to
orient', originally 'to position oneself by facing the rising sun',
now more generally 'to position oneself'.)

As I mentioned earlier, it's usually nouns that function as ethnic
slurs, not adjectives, whence the difference in affect between "an
Oriental" for a person of (East) Asian ethnicity vs. Oriental food,
carpets, etc.

larry