4 ms·
> I'm half Asian, and half "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket). Do you
by white-flame 6y ago
> I'm half Asian, and half "white" (which is weird in itself because it's technically a bunch of different races bundled into one light skinned bucket).
Do you see the term "Asian" as having the same weirdness? It's even more geographically & ethnically overbroad than the word it replaced, as well as compared to 'white/european/caucasian'.
To my recollection, a big part of the reason the former term was shunned is because it verbally homogenized distinct ethnicities from south-east asia that would prefer to identify distinctly... only to now double down in literally including the entirety of the largest continent in the world! (which I guess just returns to the more historical use of the former term, but whatever) :)
- nataz 6y agoValid point. Weird in its own way. White is a skin tone, Asian is a geographic location. Defending either definition would be an exercise in absurdity and I'm not even going to try.
- eli_gottlieb 6y ago>Weird in its own way. White is a skin tone, Asian is a geographic location. Asian is also a skin tone: the Middle East is in Asia, but counts as White for the US Census.
- white-flame 6y agoYep. All of it is just emergent shorthand, and none of it makes literal sense. :) If we had some specifically correct terminology, it would likely be quite a mouthful, either including genetic terminology or some mix of geography and time period, but both of those would probably still be insufficient. Race basically doesn't really exist in any clean delineation.
- retox 6y ago>Do you see the term "Asian" as having the same weirdness? It's even more geographically & ethnically overbroad than the word it replaced This was the point I was ham-handedly trying to make earlier; White is broad, European is broader but neither are as broad as Asian in terms of population or even geographically.