Originally posted by: mugs
Originally posted by: dainthomas
Originally posted by: Foxery
Why are people referring to an Indian guy as Asian?
139 must be a typo; it's 130 years. Two others around 132-133 died earlier this year, in Japan and... I forget where. At the time, they were reported as the oldest known humans.
I believe India is on the Asian continent. I'll consult a globe to make sure.
It's silly... we're not allowed to use "oriental" to describe people anymore, because it's Eurocentric. For some reason we're still allowed to call rugs oriental; perhaps Europe really is the center of the rug-making world? I've never heard anyone brag about their European rug before, but that's the only logical explanation.
So now the group that we used to call orientals (southeast asians) have claimed the word "asian" for themselves. In their defense, we don't call Russians asian. But then what do we call the asians who live in southern asia, but not southeast Asia? Most Americans can't tell the difference between people from India, Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, whatever anyway (I have no idea what the people from the last three 'stans' look like, honestly), so we mostly just call them Indians. That's kind of stupid, because even if we can't tell the difference, we at least know they're not all the same. Desi isn't a well-known term here, so that's no good.
I usually try to be generic enough to not mis-classify a person (I don't assume nationality unless I know it), but specific enough so people know what I'm talking about (I usually refer to southeast asians as southeast asians, unless it can be assumed from the context).
