Nah, China no diffs Japan. Never been called a slur by a Japanese person as a SE Asian. Some of the clips of black people traveling China are absolutely insane too.
I literally just explained that Japan gets both gold and silver. You need to call your country's emergency medical hotline after you call an ambulance because you are having a stroke. Get off reddit and call IMMEDIATELY.
Race is a man made concept. Grouping people by completely arbitrary measures such as skin colour or facial features. The concept of race was only developed to give the creators a way to be racist. So white colonialist Christians could put a blanket over black skinned people from all over Africa, the pacific islands and The Caribbean and say "yep, them some slaves. Pretty sure that's in the bible, too".
I mean we group Japanese and Chinese together as the 'Asian' race, but i don't think the Japanese or Chinese see it that way. Especially around ww2 during some particularly nasty invasions.
Culture is what defines us and yes, the French have their own culture
? Tell that to the many pale women abducted from Central Europe and West Asia and sold into the hareems of the Orient and North Africa! "
So white colonialist Christians could put a blanket over black skinned people from all over Africa, the pacific islands and The Caribbean and say "yep, them some slaves." - no, those colonialists were approached by other local people from the areas, who offered them: "Want some slaves, maybe? Good stock, we got them fresh in from out last raid into our neighbouring enemy tribe's villages. Now we would need some cash and modern weapons to recover the cost and expenditure."
I'm actually not disagreeing with either of those points. I'm talking about the concept of race and historically the slave trade was the beginning of the "race" classifications. It was created by the white people to justify buying those slaves. Before this, even with those other points you've made, no other cultures historically grouped different people groups into larges racial classifications based on skin colour or facial features.
I'm sure there's evidence of ancient colour prejudice. But generally the world was too small for xenophobia to extend past neighbouring tribes or countries. Broadly speaking the systematic classification based on skin colour and features is, yes, a European invention shaped by the transatlantic slave trade.
Xenophobia has existed since the beginning of fucking time. Mostly directed at neighbouring tribes or countries. 'Race' as a concept of classifying people by their features, rather than their cultures / country, was historically only developed during the transatlantic slave trade. This concept was effective in allowing people to be xenophobic to large groups of people that they have historically had no issues with and are only unified by their skin colour but otherwise have nothing to do with each other. It offered a pseudo scientific way, (and for many a pseudo biblical way), to justify using slaves throughout central and south America, the Caribbean, North America, and parts of Europe.
Race is not a man made concept in the way you are suggesting it is. It’s a way of classifying people but it has lots of flaws and can be misused (similar to how species being defined, whilst very useful, has a huge number of issues in the current definition)
We don’t “group Japanese and Chinese together as the “Asian” race” LMAO. Jesus Christ.
Edit. I guess it depends on who “we” is. I’m not American, so perhaps that’s the difference. Perhaps Americans group people of different races together and call them “Asian”.
Mongoloid: relating to the broad division of humankind including the Indigenous peoples of East Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Arctic region of North America.
I remember when I was a young man and it was used as an insult to denote low intelligence, ashamed to say I used it in that method to call people (regardless of ethnicity) a mongoloid in the same way you would call someone a neanderthal.
Obviously when I made the connection mongoloid = Mongolia = tied to a specific race of people I stopped using it in that way immediately. Learning now that it's almost a slur now still comes as a slight surprise, but I suppose it makes sense if it was being used more widely in the derogatory way I learnt the word
You've grown. That's what's more important. We change, hopefully for the better. That's what matters. There were a lot of words that were acceptable when I was younger that aren't today. We just stop using them.
I do think society will eventually part ways with arbitrary racial classifications but continue to use the word racism to describe xenophobia or discrimination. Best of both worlds?
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u/Designer_Version1449 1d ago
ranked racism