why Oriental is offensive

[Mark Odegard]

For those who find 'oriental' offensive, does 'the Orient' have the same
negative connotations?

We use 'the West' as a geographic, historical and cultural term to describe
ourselves.

'The East', however, is ambiguous. In antiquity, this referred to the lands
east of the Adriatic, and really, only went as far as the Indus, with India
and beyond being as abstractly far away as moon is for us today. 'The
Orient' is unambiguous; my definition of the Orient is everything to the
east of the western border of China and Thailand, but excluding Australia,
New Guinea and Oceania, as well as the Russian Far East. The 'Far East'
seems to be a different collection of countries compared to 'the Orient':
China, Korea, Japan, the Russian Far East, and perhaps, the Phillippines.

Oriental carpets, of course, don't come from the Orient. Instead, you get
something like 'Chinese rug'.



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