Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT: 2201-2205 (4-8 June 2012) Weekly Comic Discussion Thread
Yarin:
the cartoon was good to
Akima:
--- Quote from: Barmymoo on 06 Jun 2012, 14:58 ---This is kind of touching on some of the stuff that came up in the Discuss racism thread recently - why would we limit "Asian" to a certain collection of countries and not others?
--- End quote ---
Possibly precisely because Asia is so large, and the people born and living in Asia are so enormously diverse, that "Asian" meaning "a person from the Asian continent" is not a useful classifier. You could probably find someone in the 60% of the human race that lives in Asia who could easily be confused with a native of any other inhabited continent.
The division of continents is arbitrary and doesn't account for overlapping areas like the Middle East or Central Asia. An Egyptian or Algerian would be "African" in terms of geography, whereas an Iraqi or Saudi Arabian would be "Asian", a division that makes no sense culturally. Someone from Lebanon would have far more in common with an "African" Egyptian that with a "fellow Asian" Japanese person, and I think this is why nobody actually ever calls Lebanese people "Asian".
In people's minds, I think ethnic appearance trumps geography every time. In Australia, and I'm sure in the UK or USA too, it doesn't matter how many generations your racial-minority family has been living in the country, if you look different from the majority, your ethnic appearance will dominate people's perception and identification of you. I was born in China, but many of my "Asian" fellow-citizens were born in Australia, and it is our common ethnic appearance, not our diverse places of birth, that dominates people's perception of us as "Asian". By contrast, if he were not wearing the uniform of a general in the PLA, how many people would pick out Lin Hu as "Asian"?
The "one drop rule" seems still to be alive and well too, judging from the way in which Dichen Lachman is so often referred to on the internet simply as "Asian" rather than "Australian". A few years ago, I was shocked to read a forum posting questioning whether Joanne Missingham should be representing Australia in the 2008 World Mind Sports Games because she was "obviously Oriental"... :x
Method of Madness:
--- Quote from: Sorflakne on 06 Jun 2012, 15:06 ---I have a Korean friend who constantly reminds me that Russians, Indians, Iranians and Saudis aren't Asians. 'Asian' to her is only people from east and south Asia.
--- End quote ---
Why don't you ask her what* continent those countries are in? When she says "Asia", you reply with "exactly". I can't imagine she'd bring it up again after that.
(What ain't no continent I've ever heard of, DO THEY SPEAK ENGLISH IN WHAT? Ok, sorry about that.)
jwhouk:
I guess I'm showing my age by referring to them as co-eds (which isn't actually the case, since Smif is an all-girls college).
Yes, "co-ed" is a term for a student in a college where classes are made up of both male and female students. Colleges in the US were single-sex for a long time, for various factors (limited vocational opportunities for females, for one). The term was pretty much coined in the 1920's, after suffrage was granted to women. It's gone out of vogue, since most colleges are co-ed nowadays (with the exception, of course, of places like Smith College).
And "TG" is the term for Transgendered - in other words, a male-as-female or female-as-male. Jeph wondered in his tweets if an all-girls college would accept a male-to-female TG to matriculate as a student; I don't know if they would or wouldn't, personally.
cesariojpn:
--- Quote from: Method of Madness on 06 Jun 2012, 17:30 ---
--- Quote from: Sorflakne on 06 Jun 2012, 15:06 ---I have a Korean friend who constantly reminds me that Russians, Indians, Iranians and Saudis aren't Asians. 'Asian' to her is only people from east and south Asia.
--- End quote ---
Why don't you ask her what* continent those countries are in? When she says "Asia", you reply with "exactly". I can't imagine she'd bring it up again after that.
(What ain't no continent I've ever heard of, DO THEY SPEAK ENGLISH IN WHAT? Ok, sorry about that.)
--- End quote ---
Well, what do you expect? Many Asian cultures are ridiculously racist and bigoted (speaking as an Asian, I do have some prejudices; we're not all perfect anyway). Koreans take it to a....whole new level.
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