|
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788
Carpal Tunnel
|
OP
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 2,788 |
The DUI Defendant was Taiwanese. The defense attorney was Korean. The police officer witness was some mix of European strains.
Defense counsel was hammering away at the cop for not offering the defendant an interpreter at the time of the arrest, when the defendant never showed any inability to converse in English.
"How could you NOT know that he needed an interpreter? What did he look like to you?" demanded the exasperated lawyer?
"He looked like a drunk Oriental to me," was the officer's answer.
The attorney drew back, as if in horror, and dramatically turned to me on the bench, and demanded that I strike the witness' answer and instruct the officer not to use "racist" terms in the courtroom. I think this was done/said mostly for the effect which it might have had on the jurors.
While I have an ethical duty not to permit the use of racist terms in the courtroom, I wouldn't go so far as to say that "Oriental" is one of them. Am I wrong?
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 273
enthusiast
|
|
enthusiast
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 273 |
A hotbed of liberalism and politically correct tolerance (unless you're Israeli) is still calling itself the School of Oriental and African Studies, so the faculty and students there obviously don't have a problem with the word in itself.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,379
Pooh-Bah
|
|
Pooh-Bah
Joined: Mar 2001
Posts: 2,379 |
The orientalism which lumps all those peoples and cultures together which find themselves somewhere east of the British Isles, or, any way of the 'Occident' (hmm) as though they were one is, indeed, considered racist. But the attorney was no doubt staging a nice bit of melodrama. Though you didn't ask, and it may be presumptuous, I guess you could just note it and ask the witness to choose a different word.
VC beat me to post, so I will add that my experience at graduate school was the opposite, and students from the Middle East were offended by "orientalism."
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757 |
Oriental is now generally considered outmoded and even offensive when used of an Asian or an Asian American.offered without comment from http://www.bartleby.com/64/C006/055.html
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 273
enthusiast
|
|
enthusiast
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 273 |
The point of my post was that SOAS is famously liberal (and recently defined Zionism as racist), yet hasn't changed its name, which it likely would have done were the word deemed to be intrinsically offensive.
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757 |
well, all I can judge is what some people most affected say about this label: http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/livewire/000366.phpPerhaps, when coded in to an institutional name, the cultural baggage slows down the pace of reaction to changing social mores?
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803 |
It's like referring to someone of sub-Saharan African descent. Colored is out unless you're talking about the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Negro is a little old-fashioned unless you're talking about Negro Baseball Leagues or the United Negro College Fund.
Oriental is OK if you're talking about studies of ancient cultures in Egypt or Mesopotamianss or others of that area, but not if you're talking about, ummm, what can you call them? East Asians?
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757
Carpal Tunnel
|
|
Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 4,757 |
Political correctness in the United States
In the United States, some feel the terms "Orient" and "Oriental" are archaic, offensive, and/or "politically incorrect" on the basis that it was defined from a European perspective to refer to a vague and undistinguished group of people, and is therefore no longer appropriate in a modern multicultural world. Additionally, it has been used in a derogatory fashion in the United States as an ethnic slur, and those associations have remained with the term for many Asian Americans (see parallels at "nigger"). Many English speakers worldwide find nothing offensive about the term. One difficulty that the term presents, however, is that it is not always clear what is included within the term and what is not--at one time it referred primarily to the nations and people of the Middle and Near East, and this sense of the term still exists in some forms in the language (e.g., "oriental carpets"). Consequently, the term does not see as much use as the equivalent terms Asian, East Asian, and (for the archaic sense of the term that included Persia and Arabia) Middle Eastern.http://www.answers.com/topic/orientOriental Often Offensive. An Asian. [e.a.]
o'ri·en'tal·ly adv.
USAGE NOTE Asian is now strongly preferred in place of Oriental for persons native to Asia or descended from an Asian people. The usual objection to Oriental—meaning “eastern”—is that it identifies Asian countries and peoples in terms of their location relative to Europe. However, this objection is not generally made of other Eurocentric terms such as Near and Middle Eastern. The real problem with Oriental is more likely its connotations stemming from an earlier era when Europeans viewed the regions east of the Mediterranean as exotic lands full of romance and intrigue, the home of despotic empires and inscrutable customs. At the least these associations can give Oriental a dated feel, and as a noun in contemporary contexts (as in the first Oriental to be elected from the district) it is now widely taken to be offensive. However, Oriental should not be thought of as an ethnic slur to be avoided in all situations. As with Asiatic, its use other than as an ethnonym, in phrases such as Oriental cuisine or Oriental medicine, is not usually considered objectionable.http://www.answers.com/topic/oriental
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 48
newbie
|
|
newbie
Joined: Sep 2000
Posts: 48 |
I can't help but wonder whether the attorney wouldn't have done the same thing had the witness said 'drunk Asian.'
|
|
|
|
|
Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 500
addict
|
|
addict
Joined: Mar 2005
Posts: 500 |
if the witness had said "drunk Asian"
Yes, I wonder, too. I would consider the main objection to "Oriental" to be that it is too general. To say someone is an "Oriental" conveys about the same amount of information as saying he or she is "North American"; at least, I think so.
I think some of these things are fashion, too - "Black" used to be OK, so did "Negro"; in fact, I recall conversations with, um, black students who said that's what they preferred. I think it has a lot to do also with who's saying it and how.
A Caucasian friend of mine who adopted a mediaeval Japanese persona in our recreationist group always referred to himself as an "Ornamental".
|
|
|
|
Forums16
Topics13,913
Posts229,580
Members9,187
| |
Most Online3,341
Dec 9th, 2011
|
|
|
0 members (),
941
guests, and
0
robots. |
|
Key:
Admin,
Global Mod,
Mod
|
|
|
|
