I’m ambivalent. Is the term offensive or not??
Printable View
I’m ambivalent. Is the term offensive or not??
Not if you use it occidentally.
Depends how you use it I suppose
Naively, I used to never understand why the term '****' was taken as so offensive. My reasoning being that surely it is just short for 'Pakistani' just as 'Brit' is to 'British'.
I realised later that the offence is in the fact that the term is used sweepingly to describe anyone of south Asian origin which is ignorant.
I think it’s considered offensive in the US because it’s often been used in a derogatory way and is seen as out of date. I’ve not really heard anything about it outside of that though.
I suppose “the orient” is quite an outdated term.
Everything is offensive when it comes to identity politics, even geographic terms. You'd be better off dropping nouns and pronouns from your vocabulary completely.
That's not true though is it? The only terms that are offensive are words that have history of being used in an abusive way and to dehumanize and racially abuse people. There's no problem with Aussie, Brit, Saffa etc.
You have the odd lunatic who'll go over the top but your logic seems the sort of thing posted on 4chan by people who've never left their basement let alone visited another country
The real logic is if you're not a c*nt you'll get by, even if you accidently use an outdated term. If you are a c*nt you'll use an excuse about everything being offensive to try and cover yourself.
What about that old chestnut, the “N” word.
A horrible word, that is only acceptable nowadays if used by black folk to describe themselves.
You couldn’t make it up 🤔
I'm just pointing out that it works in both directions, so we can also be on the receiving end. In fact, indentity politics is an American construct that has made its way to Europe, but it doesn't exist elsewhere so we could find ourselves being called politically incorrect names on our travels, and it would be considered normal.
You seem to accept the word being used by black folk, because of “history and context”, when in reality, it’s like hundreds of other racist and derogatory words and term that are vile, disgusting and outdated, and no matter it’s original origin, should be condemned to the bin.
But what about words like queer and Yid that were reclaimed and stopped being offensive?
It would be better if it wasn’t being used at all but the fact it’s still constantly being used by racists means there’s more power in black people saying it than not.
So, is it okay to keep on calling them Leyton Orient?
This seems a fair summary of how "oriental" should be used to me, but I daresay some will find a problem with it;-
https://www.urbandictionary.com/defi...?term=oriental
I don’t agree with your logic at all. To me, words like Queer and yid still sound offensive, and no matter how many times they get “reclaimed”, they always will.
Racism has been around since time began. Bourne of ignorance and fear of something that’s different.
We have made greAt strides in trying to educate people that it’s wrong, but it will never get eradicated from society completely.
All we can do is carry on trying to educate folk about how pathetic racism really is and condemn as many racist words and terms to the dustbin.
Do you think it would be acceptable in today’s society for disabled folk to go around describing themselves and other other disabled folk as Spastics? It wouldn’t. It’s another vile word and term that needs to remain buried, and not “reclaimed”.