Asian = Oriental, etc.

[Gregory {Greg} Downing]

At 01:00 PM 2/9/2001, American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU> wrote:
>I also am a believer in calling groups by the labels they prefer.  But
>I'm amused when it is outsiders who decide that a particular group should
>be offended by a label they're not offended by and then act as PC police
>re the label.
>

As I speculated earlier on this thread, I suspect that a change such as the
one whereby "oriental" becomes stigmatized often has little to do with the
people to whom the word is applied. Instead, it results from later
generations of non-Asians becoming disaffected with the attitudes they heard
or read, perhaps long ago, from older non-Asians. Meanwhile, people of Asian
background may well have had far less open and extensive exposure to these
older users' attitudes toward Asians than did those older users' younger
relatives, acquaintances, etc. It was therefore these younger non-Asians who
would have felt a need to render taboo the words for Asians that older
non-Asians had used. I.e., the stigmatization of "oriental" really has to do
with non-Asians trying to stake out, via language, a morally superior
position with regard to older or older-fashioned non-Asians.

Of course, once such a process becomes as prominent culturally as this one
became from the 1960s on, people *within* the groups that were stigmatized
by older non-members of that group will find this process of some interest
and well may begin actively policing terms used for the members of their
group. Of course, the more terms that can be found problematic and the more
reasons that can be given in support of stigmatizing these older words, the
more such intra-group spokespeople are able to create the sense that their
task of eradicating problematic terms is valid, large, and significant.


Greg Downing, at greg.downing at nyu.edu or gd2 at nyu.edu