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Asian to Brits definitely means South Asian(probably includes West Asians but I'm not sure about that). They were already bitching about this 30 years ago when
by avadodin 2mo ago
Asian to Brits definitely means South Asian(probably includes West Asians but I'm not sure about that). They were already bitching about this 30 years ago when the net was standardizing on American English where Asian means East Asian.
The term for East Asian was Oriental which is now considered racist/passé for some obscure reason.
- Conan_Kudo 2mo agoIt's not obscure. The reason is because a whole class of racist laws use the term. Nobody has seriously tried to reclaim the term, so it is stuck with the connotation it had developed a hundred years ago.
- avadodin 2mo agoGenuinely curious which class of laws that would be. I assume you mean in the US but the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act makes no mention of race and anti-miscegenation laws speak of Mongolians(presumably to mean people of East Asian ancestry in general). I think Oriental in the US like the alternative Asiatic applied to all Asians from Istanbul to Vladivostok.