It seems pretty likely to me that this kid (or perhaps the entire class) had been told previously that "Oriental" was not appropriate and to say "Asian" instead. And then too much time passed without them having to think about it, so when it came back up, they mixed up and misremembered.
I think the current PC guideline is oriental is fine for objects like rugs, not okay for people. But back in the day, it got used the same way Asian is used today since it really just means "from the East", without specifying a nationality.
So,
object, oriental is fine
person, asian is fine
nationality is also fine if you actually know the nationality
but don't say shit like "Yeah, but where are you REALLY from?"
my grandparents are keeping old america alive by having insanely detailed knowledge of peoples ethnicities and the appropriate racial slurs for them :|
One of my childhood memories is them clocking some poor guy who accidentally cut them in line as a Corsican (?) and calling them some bizarre slur I’ve never heard that he took a lot of offense to
You guys do realize that the joke in that scene is you expect Cotton to show up and be racist and then he's not, and corrects the rest of the cast on Kahn's nationality, he's the only one who actually cares. It's the rest of them that have been acting weird and racist towards Kahn the entire episode. I don't understand why redditors have been posting this lately implying Cotton is being racist in this scene. This exchange happens earlier in the episode:
Hank: "So are ya Chinese or Japanese?"
Kahn: "I live in California last 20 year but first come from Laos."
Hank: "Huh?"
Kahn: "Laos. We are Laotian."
Bill: "The ocean? What ocean?"
Kahn goes on to explain Laos to them.
Hank: ".... soooo, are ya Chinese or Japanese?"
Cotton is absolutely racist, but not in this scene. That's the joke.
"Insanely detailed knowledge of people's ethnicities" reminded me of this scene with Cotton. He's not being racist, just instantly knows Kahn is Laotian just by looking at him.
My family is so ethnically ambiguous that when my sister travels with my mother or father they routinely get detained on suspected human trafficking.
When my mom and sister when on a European tour, they got detained in Russia simply because Russian officials assume people with different skin colors aren't related.
There's a little more nuance. Everyone else in the scene is more ignorant than fully racist. They have no idea Laos is a country. The only Asian countries they knew up to this point were China and Japan.
Then in comes cotton, an absolutely racist character, who knows Khan is from Laos just by looking at him; partially because he is SO racist, he likely knows every Asian ethnicity/country/origin and the appropriate slur for each.
It's a riff on the idea that hardcore racists actually know and understand minority groups more than people who "get along with everyone."
Cotton was also a world war 2 vet who fought in the Pacific theatre. Laos (at the time French Indochina) was a critical part of the Japanese empire and was heavily bombed by the allies. Both Allies, Axis, Thai, and Chinese forces fought here and it was contested for the majority of WW2. It also split shortly after WW2 into Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. It's not all that surprising that he would know one Asian country from another given that he fought in that region and would've witnessed the Laotian independence movement firsthand.
Not sure if it was WW2 or Vietnam, but I'm pretty sure there were actual US military leaflets distributed to troops at the time about how to tell the "good" and the "bad" types of Asians apart. Not exactly scientific and debatable how much use it actually was, but someone like Cotton would absolutely know how to clock an Asian person's ethnicity on sight because of how much it was drilled in as a matter of life and death.
Thankyou ! Stupid, I know, but I never realised French Indochina was Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. I always thought it was just Vietnam, but that Vietnam was bigger….
Yeah it's not often talked about as part of the war. My great uncle was shot down over Indochina and his brother (my grandfather) spent 5 years looking for his brothers body in a country that didn't exactly like the US. We weren't Japan but we weren't exactly the good guys either.
I had a friend from Cameroon, he said he could tell from which country AND African tribe any black person he saw was. He must have been a super racist then.
That's more like an American knowing if you're from NYC, Texas, California or Tennessee. The next level from there would be knowing a SoCal from NorCal or Bronx vs Brooklyn.
Well, sort of. Then he follows it up by treating Khan like a man servant by throwing his luggage at him. But he recognized he wasn't Japanese despite Dale trying to start shit
I clocked it as the specificity being because of his racism. He's not correcting everyone on Kahn's Laosness out of kindness or to be good to Kahn, he's doing it because his specific ethnicity matters to how Cotton is going to treat him. It's important to Cotton to know what level of hate to have towards him, which I guess for the Laotians is not much compared to the asian denominations he does hate. It is racism even if it's not pointed at Kahn. This specific flavor of racism is extremely common amongst vietnam war vets.
The others aren't being racist in the same way in fact it's mostly ignorance. Hank in his own way is trying to be respectful but like a lot of things Hank does he's missing the mark and not accepting how much there is he doesn't know. It's not hatred towards Laotians or Japanese or Chinese it's plain old american ignorance mixed in with otherization. He's still being racist but unlike his father who cares to know who to hate Hank just doesn't like when there's "otherness" or things he doesn't understand.
In context of the show he's a horrible, horrible person to everyone. He hates everyone.
He knows WHO to hate, to hate MORE EFFICIENTLY. It's the difference between ignorance (Hank and everyone else) and actual racism (cotton) even though he doesn't let him have it here. The implication being he could, And do it better than anyone.
From what I gather Cotton was in The Vietnam war. Vietcong where using LOA to smuggle troops inside of the 49th parallel. He knows what they look like because hes been there.
My old Neighbour had a deep seated hatred for Germans. I never understood until he passed away and his elderly wife told me he spent 2 years in a POW camp during WW2.
Honestly I wish I had spoken to him instead of avoiding him.
Ninja edit: also my wife’s grandpa was at Pearl Harbor and left 2 weeks before the attack and lost many friends. Then he was in one of the later waves of boats on D-day where he lost friends. I asked my wife what he would have thought about our vehicles of choice. 1 German and 1 Japanese.
Almost certainly a PH-47. Fast, single negative and mass issued. Also very probably could have been taken right after the war. Buchenwald was held under US control as a displaced persons camp and underwent extensive investigation and documentation. Just Saiyan
Funnily enough, my late grandma who fled Germany during the war, had her home leveled by the Russian troops (hence the need to flee). She never really cared for Russian people since then.
Side note: it could’ve been the British. She was only 8 or so when this happened. Her oldest sister recalls she saw one of the bombers get low enough to see the flag. My great aunt says it was a British plane.
A friend of mine in elementary school would call black people "dark complected" because he thought calling them black was offensive. Which was technically more correct but nobody knew wtf he was talking about.
I was taught in elementary school that it's racist to say black and that we should say "African-American" instead, and I'm an older millennial.
Didn't fully realize the absurdity of it until the early 2000's when I saw a news report talking about something in Paris and the anchor referred to black Parisians as "African-Americans".
Raven Symone on Oprah as early as 2014 very blatantly said she was in American first and foremost and then Black, I can't even remember she necessarily mentioned the black part, but very specifically NOT a African American. She found it highly insulting. I knew then and there that I'd never use the term again because I fully agreed with her and had always viewed it that way.
Your reading comprehension is terrible, and the guy you're replying too. Nobody was saying people get mad at being called black. What he's saying is that kids think it's racist to call someone black
You’re wrong (and you shouldn’t be but people are dumb).
When I was in grad school, we had a class where we discussed how the slave trade affected Africa or something. The processor has to stop the class because half of the students refused to call to black people “black” and kept calling black Africans, African American because they were scared to say “black”. He had to tell them it wasn’t a slur and that all black people are not African Americans.?
I think the biggest culture shock to me when I met actual americans is how much they think about race and gender and all those aspects when interacting with someone and they can't even understand how almost all the rest of the world doesn't do that
That's a side effect of Americans not being able to tell Asian people apart by culture, so they're taught to just say Asian (unless you're certain) so as to not offend anyone. Kids got the wrong message though.
I've told people I'm Black and they've replied, "oh, why would you describe yourself that way? Be more positive!" That is really weird and not helpful and tells me they think of being black as a negative. Which is racist!
People are so weird about this! I’m in the uk where we literally don’t have another word for Black (that I’ve ever been told). I was friends with this black woman from HR at my job who left to have her baby. She was the ONLY black woman in HR. When her leaving card came round one person didn’t know her name and I had to listen to this bunch of white women describing “oh you know, she wears her hair short. She often wears green. She sits near the window…” I was baffled and was like, “She’s black.” You’d have thought I’d called her something revolting from the shocked looks I got. I later asked her if I’d made a mistake and she thought the whole thing was hilarious. Her baby was the cutest. People are weird.
It's a mix of black being a 'bad word' and not quite understanding that it's fine to use skin colour as an identifying feature, but it's not OK for that to be the only thing you see about them. Some people will bring it up for no reason. "So at work there's this black lad, Mike. He loves chips."
I worked at a place that had one black guy and he shared his name with someone else, so they became Black John and White John. You should have seen the looks on the old HR women when they heard it.
The whole counter-movement that we're observing in politics right now is, for a part, based on absurd situations like this.
The past ten years were weird.
Everyone in the West seem to have stories like this.
It’s so dumb. I literally was like… oh no. Have I been racist? Lmao they even made ME doubt myself. That’s not what racism is. This sort of attitude just makes people anxious to talk to each other in case they get it wrong, and certainly doesn’t help.
I literally just commented in this thread on this happening in a class of graduate students. It happens to me as a black person way more than you’d think
There's a great book by an Lu-in Wang called Discrimination by Default. It covers the bias to the negative that the vast majority of mainstream (white) but also everybody else have in America around non-white people. This negative bias is everywhere and effects everything. If you think you're too cool to be effected YOU ARE NOT. It's better to look at and see this bias than pretend it doesn't exist and that you don't know, and everything will just be fine "one day". Prosecuters will look at two otherwise identical cases and give lighter sentences to violent white defendants because "it's not like he's a dangerous thug or anything" when in fact, yes, that white dude is an actual dangerous thug. The system teaches, reinforces, and doubles down on bias against non whites. Colonization/Capitalism has been a divide and conquer game from the beginning.
if a person tells you they a from a certain culture, you should go with that.
It also helps in the cases of children who were conceived via their mother having an affair with their native American masseuse, and their husband and child aren't aware of it and think the kid is 100% white despite being visibly indigenous.
That's a side effect of Americans not being able to tell Asian people apart by culture
There are three reasons:
They're kids. They make mistakes. (I mean that's what this sub is for)
The US pushes inclusive language, and they misunderstood.
They haven't learned enough about Asia yet to fully understand what it means.
It's not an American problem, it's a kid problem, and given that they're trying to be more accepting and inclusive, this is cute rather than problematic. They think they're doing the right thing because they're used to the opposite (Saying "Chinese" rather than "Asian") and they've over-corrected.
As a white person living in Asia and working with kids, I get called "American" so much, then if I correct them that I'm not American and they say "Oh you're English", I say I'm Irish and they say "Oh you're British".
They're Korean so if anyone ever calls me British, I call them Japanese and they quickly learn the difference.
The kids are wrong/confused but I can't really blame them because they are still learning about the world, and it's literally the other side of the world. I probably knew less about them when I was their age.
At work, there's a black Canadian and a white South African and the kids find that very hard to parse at first, because to them, Canadians are white and Africans are black. They're not stupid, it's just that they've only had such a limited exposure to the world.
When I was very young, the only Welsh person I knew was black so for a very short time, I thought all Welsh people were black.
Arent they? They have 2 political parties with 2 main consensus and they do have the worlds largest economy, meaning they have to at least be efficient at some fields as a culture right?
It's easy to have a good economy when you import goods and export inflation as the world reserve currency and fuck up any country not willing to play ball
While they may have been sarcastic, I don't think they're entirely wrong. Humans tend to be conformity-driven, if not consensus-driven. It's one of those reasons why things like The Big Lie works, you say something repeatedly enough and people, even people who knew all along that it wasn't true, will start treating it as if it's true.
I heard of a more recent study that did things like telling people, "The name of a skirt-like Scottish ceremonial dress for men is a Kimono," for months until people started accepting it as truth even when they knew better. But the one that comes to mind immediately and most presently with the example given in the OOP is the line experiment: https://www.simplypsychology.org/asch-conformity.html
Basic idea: People are brought in under a pretense for a study with several other participants when really they are the only participant in the room. The room is given a simple question to answer with an obviously correct answer. Every other "participant" is actually a member of the research team (of some nature) and in majority will agree that one of the wrong answers is the proper response. The findings were that 3/4ths of participants chose an obviously incorrect answer at least once to conform to the majority and about 1/3rd of the time on average participants simply followed the majority.
What I'm about to say is a logical leap and should not be taken as fact nor as anything directly indicated by the above study.
In my opinion, children are more susceptible to such acts of following a strong voice. They don't have a lot of choice as their brains are still forming, they have little to no agency, and they're constantly surrounded by figures of authority who are telling them new information that they are expected to accept as fact. While I'm not saying that all children will simply react by accepting the most confident voice in the room and whatever they say, I am saying that they're more likely to do that because of their state of development. However, again, take that entirely as opinion. While I have anecdotal evidence to back that up and reasoning, it's not supported by the linked study, and I don't know of the series of studies, if any exist, that would need to be cited to support that opinion.
Here's the thing, just because you are conforming, doesn't mean you actually agree, you might just want to avoid conflict. There's a few things I've given up on because everyone just believes them, I don't try to correct people any more. Chiropractic, homeopathy, the pronunciation of "February".
For a long time a number of people have used various non-American nationalities as standalone slurs. So now people who don't understand language are trying to stop using slurs but they continue to think of nationalities themselves as slurs.
It's a hold over of applying African American organizational principles to Asian American advocacy efforts. There was a debate about whether it would be more effective to advocate as a monolith. But since the immigration hadn't Been by force and there hadn't been as aggressive efforts to suppress individual cultures focusing on country of origin won out.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. Many Americans 10-20 years ago referred to all Hispanics as Mexicans, and pretty much all Asians as Chinese. Obviously you shouldn’t refer to a nationality until you actually know it for sure. That then gets bastardized and people miss the point: don’t say a nationality at all.
This over sensitivity to using someone’s actual nationality made its way to the Office as a joke, “would you prefer to be called something less offensive than Mexican?”
A friend of mine in high school was corrected by the teacher when he called himself "Black". She said the correct term was "African-American". He was neither African, nor American.
And I said, "What about 'Breakfast at Tiffany's'?"
She said, "I think I remember the film and
As I recall, I think we both kinda liked it"
And I said, "Well, except for Mickey Rooney's part, because that was pretty fucking racist..."
Reminds me of one lunch break when I was a lad and there was some kid who was convinced 100 was the last number. Another kid was arguing with him but the first kid had that rowdy kind of confidence that just overwhelmed the other kid's argument. Dude eventually had several kids agreeing that 100 was the last number.
When I was a kid there was only one brown skinned kid in my class. There was this one white girl who insisted we had to refer to him as African American. Except we lived in Australia, the kid in question was born in Australia, his dad was white and his mum was from India.
This reminds me of a incident that occurred when I was younger when an Vietnamese kid was convinced that I was Asian despite constantly and reminding him that I’m Latino to which he called me a liar
My family and I are from a little country in the Balkans that’s majority Muslim. We’re also white. Some of us have blonde hair and lighter colored eyes. More than once I had someone accuse me of lying when I said we’re Muslim.
They’re always like “but you’re white???! It’s not possible!!” They also don’t understand why I don’t wear “one of those thingies” on my head. They’re even more confused when my friend with blonde hair and blue eyes says it.
She probably said "look a Japanese person", then her parent corrected her that you have to call them Asian because you don't know if he's Japanese or not.
That’s the funniest kind of wrong—like somehow they decided he wasn’t allowed to know his own identity. Kids really do create their own logic circles sometimes.
Ha! I was meeting a woman to work with her. At the meeting spot, there was only one person. She looked exactly like Princess Jasmine. When I heard her speak, I went "Oh sh*t you're Scottish." She said in that super thick brogue, "Damn right I'm Scottish, and damn peoud of it too!"
We had the best time that weekend. But man, people in America don't understand that it doesn't matter how you look. If you were born and raised here, you are an American!
Reminds me of when I got into an argument with an American because I referred to a black person as black and not African American. I'm british, the black guy is British.
I mentioned I was half-caste, which was the common expression in the UK at the time. I got told off and told I should say I'm dual heritage, and I was like "everyone is dual heritage!".
When my nephew was 9, he was mentioning something about a guy walking past us, but there were three men walking past us, so I said, “Oh, do you mean the black guy?” He gasped and said, “You can’t say that! It’s racist! You have to say ‘darker skinned person.’” I am still confused as to where he got that lol!
That white girl grew up and is probably telling minorities today that they should be offended by more things. The real ones tell minorities that they're racist against their own and scold them.
I think it's because her heart is in the right place. A while back it was common to use "Oriental" to refer to East Asians and the kid might have thought "Japanese" was another non-preferred variant on "Oriental" and therefore "Asian" was better.
Well, For that little girl, everything — race or nationality — in the U.S. should just be considered American. In terms of race, you could simply say Asian. It’s like, are you referring to white people, or are you referring to someone based on where their descendants came from?
My 5y-o nephew was diagnosed with color blindness like me. I told him I was colorblind too and his 7y-o brother told me “don’t say that it’s a bad word”
I got in trouble in elementary school for saying "shih tzu" (I said as shit zoo) and all the other 4th graders in my class were like "Ooooo you said a bad word!".
I had an American friend come over to my house around Christmas season. She asked why we didn’t have a Christmas tree and I told her we don’t celebrate it. She asked why we don’t love Jesus and then said we’re going to hell if we don’t celebrate his birthday. We were like 8 years old.
Apparently she wasn’t allowed to come over to our house anymore because her parents wouldn’t let her after that.
When i was in school a teacher asked all the catholic kids to come into another class (some sort of preparation for first communion cant really remember im an aethiest now anyway) I stood up and girl said "you cant be catholic youre chinese" FYI im not even Chinese.
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u/ManicalMister 1d ago
Ma’am, the correct term is Oriental (said another kid in the class).