Political Correctness Can Be Offensive, Too

I wrote an article for the Toronto Romance Writers monthly newsletter--it got front page! It's also going to be syndicated to other RWA chapter newsletters, so this'll be interesting to see if it drives any traffic to dis here blog.

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Political Correctness Can Be Offensive, Too
by Vicki So

Asian.

Seems like an innocuous enough word, one likely drilled into you when PC-ism was supposed to help navigate the treacherously booby-trapped labyrinth of race and language.

As a Canadian-born Chinese woman, I can personally say Asian was preferable to the old term Oriental, which elicited the old European colonial ideas of an exotic race from a land far removed from civilized Western society. Asian was better, certainly, than Asiatic, yellow, or Chinaman.

Then I recently came across a passage in a book in which a police detective referred to the rise of “Asian gangs.” It was a jarring thing to read, not because the language was offensive, but because what I perceived to be hypersensitivity to racial issues actually made the sentence more offensive because the context had not been taken into consideration.

Many arguments abound about the use of different racial terms, and I’m not pushing any hard and fast rules for when certain terms will be construed as offensive. But I hope to provoke some thought next time you come across this issue in your writing.

Asia is the largest continent on the planet. While there are some different schools of thought among geographers regarding the physical limits of Asia, the general consensus in terms of political boundaries include Turkey to the west, Russia to the north, Japan to the east and East Timor to the south. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asia#Physical_geography)

That said, you wouldn’t likely refer to someone from Iraq, Yemen, Uzbekistan or Russia as Asian.

The colloquial use of the word Asian differs region to region as it encompasses different groups of people. According to the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, Third Edition, “In Britain, Asian is used to refer to people who come from (or whose parents came from) the Indian subcontinent, while in North America it is used to refer to people from the Far East.” Have a look at the Wikipedia entry on Asian people and you’ll see it gets even more nitty-gritty, especially when it comes down to census reports. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_people)

With so many variations on the term, using Asian as a descriptor can be tricky, especially if you’re coupling it with something that might give it a negative connotation. In the case above, being specific would have been preferable to using a broader brush. Context is key: after all, an educated police officer knows the difference between the Hong Kong Triads, the Japanese Yakuza, the Russian Mafia and the Tamil Tigers. And he wouldn’t likely call them “Caucasian gangs.”

You should also avoid absurdist ultra-PC-isms: Oriental Chicken Salad and Asian Chicken Salad are both acceptable, but I’m not convinced “Asian carpets,” “Asian Checkers” or “Asian Anime” will ever be accepted as the norm. And while you might waver at the use of Chinaman in your historical about San Francisco in the early 1900’s, remember that Asian wasn’t a term that was widely used until the 1990’s.

Simple rule: When it comes to race, context is key. Be specific when you’re not sure.


Vicki So is a PRO member of the RWA and a member of the Toronto Romance Writers. By day, she is a proofreader at a large romance publisher. By night, she writes fan fiction and romance novels. She owns no cats, dogs or horses, does not live on a farm, and prefers chips over chocolate. Her real-life hero is a big nerd, just like her, and that’s what keeps their spark alive. Follow her blog at tripetripeandmoretripe.blogspot.com.