The Slants

[Dan Goncharoff]

Golden Peril -- wasn't the last dynasty of China the Golden Dynasty?

Also:
 1894 May 7 Rocky Mountian News -- A Chinese Trick Slant-Eyed
Individuals Have a Way of Beating the New Law, and Allowing Their
Friends to Come in with Papers.  [Article datelined Washington about
registration of Chinese under the exclusion act.  Some legal
immigrants are registering more than once, "and as a photograph of
one Chinaman might readily pass for another", the duplicate
certificates can be sold to those not entitled to register.  Surely
derogatory at least.]

Is this the first expression of the notion that all Chinese look alike?


DanG


On Fri, Mar 9, 2012 at 12:24 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       "Joel S. Berson" <Berson at ATT.NET>
> Subject:      Re: The Slants
>
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>
> I've lost track of this.  Are you-all saying that "slant-eyed" as a
> slur is recent, at- or post-Vietnam?  Are you-all saying it is rare,
> or that it was rare at the time of the Vietnam war, or that it was
> rare before then?  Do you-all make a distinction between a "(racial)
> slur" and "just" a derogatory usage?
>
> I have faint traces of "slant-eyed" as a slur from either World War
> II or the Korean War (which were not too far apart).  Is that "old as
> dirt"?  But I assume those who are researching this must have checked
> those periods.  Perhaps one has to look in comic books rather than
> newspapers.  (Or the New Yorker, where two Chinese boys are reading
> about sinister, round-eyed Johnny.)
>
> So I've looked a little bit.
>
> I would like to see more context for the OED's earliest quotation --
>      1865    Daily Telegr. 17 Nov. 5/2   A slant-eyed, saffron-coloured
> race.
> Might it be derogatory?  On the other hand, I suppose
>      1870    J. G. Whittier Miriam 126   The slant-eyed sages of Cathay.
> is complimentary.
>
> But 19th Century U.S. Newspapers has:
>     1880 March 20 St. Louis Globe-Democrat -- THE San Francisco
> Merchant tells a remarkable story about a Chinese inroad into Montana
> and Idaho, in which the slant-eyed Mongols sent out pickets to find
> out what goods were in demand, and what prices were paid.  [The SF
> Merchant story is that Chinese merchants are sending wagons with
> merchandise into Idaho and Montana, to support Chinese peddlers
> selling tea at a lower price than "white merchants".  The
> Globe-Democrat comments "If the worst offense of the Chinese is
> furnishing the miners with tea at cheaper rates than they have
> hitherto paid for it, we hardly expect the miners to join in the cry,
> 'The Chinese must go.'"]
>      1893 April 24 St. Paul Daily News -- [An article about a troupe
> of "thirty-four celestial sons of the flowery kingdom", Mongolians
> members of a "Chinese theatrical troupe which is to give the
> slant-eyed drama in sections of ten hours each" at the Chicago
> world's fair.  Somewhere between a condescending attitude from a
> superior race, and a racial slur.]
>      1894 May 7 Rocky Mountian News -- A Chinese Trick Slant-Eyed
> Individuals Have a Way of Beating the New Law, and Allowing Their
> Friends to Come in with Papers.  [Article datelined Washington about
> registration of Chinese under the exclusion act.  Some legal
> immigrants are registering more than once, "and as a photograph of
> one Chinaman might readily pass for another", the duplicate
> certificates can be sold to those not entitled to register.  Surely
> derogatory at least.]
>
> And Google Books between 1940 and 1956 has (allegedly), just in the
> first 20 of about 2,060 --
>      1941 Sept. Boy's Life -- "A slant-eyed youth in a dirty smock
> appeared from below."  [Within a story titled "Golden Peril"  Without
> attempting to read tiny print, from the illustrations I assume the
> peril comes from evil Chinese, perhaps pirates.  "Golden" seems to
> refer to the metal, but perhaps also in a double sense to the
> Chinese.  Before Pearl harbor, but during the period of Japanese
> expansionism.]
>      1943 Jan. Boy's Life [date at top of page]  "DIMLY outlined in
> the murky darkness of the passageway was a leering slant-eyed
> Oriental. He was creeping stealthily forward with a service .45 in
> his hand, obviously with the intention of catching the pilot
> unaware."  [After Pearl harbor.]
>      1943  Library of Congress, Musical compositions, part 3 [date
> at top of previous page] -- "You slant -eyed yellow bums.
> 3383"  [Index of song titles?]
>      1951 Robert William O'Brien, Readings in general sociology --
> "For example, if all drug addicts were slant-eyed, and if non-
> addicts were not slant-eyed, then all we would have to do to
> determine that a person is or is not a drug addict would be to look
> at his eyes."  [An interesting, to say the least, choice for a
> logical argument.  GBooks also reveals a similar syllogism using
> "slant-eyed" in a book on psychology.]
>      1952 Aug. 11 Life [magazine] "Vigorous, brunet faces, strong
> black eyebrows and dark eyes, and candid expressions mark the tribe.
> They do not look Oriental in any slant-eyed or "sinister" sense but
> most of them are very distinctive people."  [So others, although not
> Life, must have associated "slant-eyed" with "sinister"in 1952.]
>     1956  Selected works of Ly Hsun [pseud]  "We need not mention
> illustrations in novels; even textbook illustrations often have
> children with caps askew, slant eyes, fleshy jowls and the look of
> hooligans. Among our new hooligan artists is Yeh Ling-feng^_Mr- Yeh
> has plagiarized ..."  [Snippet]
>
> There is much more in this period.  Some is "slant-eyed" as sinister
> without *direct* reference to Asians, but I think that is the unstated
> origin.
>
> Joel
>
> At 3/9/2012 06:53 AM, Ronald Butters wrote:
> >...
> >I note that Wilson protests that "SLANT-EYED" is "old as dirt." That
> >may be, but it doesn't appear to be all that old as a putative
> >racial/ethnic slur. In any case, why would he think that the
> >relative scarcity of "anti-slant-eyed" worth reporting, except to
> >demonstrate that "slant" itself is an ethnic slur? I find only 5
> >Google hits for "anti- yellow skinned"--so what?
> >
> >JL's comment that he found only second-hand attestations to actual
> >usage during the Viet Nam era is interesting. If there wasn't much
> >actual usage, that would further strengthen my argument that SLANT
> >is of negligible importance as a slur--and hasn't even been used
> >that way since the 1940s. Of course, one wonders why the sources
> >that do indicate a Viet Nam War usage were saying that it was.
> >Surely someone somewhere had heard it used disparagingly. Because
> >there were so few of them, it would not be surprising if there were
> >very few quotes from Viet Namese Americans in the 1970s saying that
> >they found the term offensive.
>
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