To ask someone from an ethnic minority......

[SuedeEffectPochette]

......what is pc these days? My inlaws persistently say things like "do you remember that coloured girl......?" and this makes me cringe and I have to tell them that it isn't on to use this phrase any more. I know in America saying "black" is also offensive. So please can someone tell me what is the least offensive way to refer to someone's race (if indeed it is necessary to do that - but sometimes it is)......
And what about people from the Indian subcontinent - will I be causing offence to describe you as "Indian" as you may be Pakistani etc...... I am just ensuring that I don't accidentally cause offence and turn into my in laws!

My parents are from the Indian subcontinent and I always describe myself as Asian, and when I was working before dc many of the clients/customers referred to.me as the 'Asian lady' which didnt bother me at all. I dont go into the Indian/pakistani/bangladeshi details as its nobodys business really, unless someone important. Not the man on the bus for example!

One funny conversation recently went like this,

'So hoppin...where are you from?'
'Well my parents aree from south east Asia, but I was born here'
'No but where are you from?'
Me with blank face
'Its just you have a northern accent'
'Ohhh...' [Grin]

So that conversation can sometimes be totally innocent. That was me overthinking things!

I have to say it gets right on my tits when I hear young black boys calling each other ni**ers, or Asians using the word 'paki' but then get aggessive if somebody from a diiferent ethnicity uses it. its not a very good example to set for others is it?

I am sure I have said this before on MN: I am mixed-race English/Irish/south European/Asian. I have a white face. But my brother's skin tone is a little different from mine, and indeed at school he was called 'Paki' and took a few punches because of that.

I am also quite old (52), so I remember the time in the late 1960s/early1970s when it was acceptable to call people 'coloured'. However, that time has long passed. Please, can we call people today what they want to be called?

Your not 'allowed' to use coloured. Drives me nuts, in a rural area like this we don't have many ethnic minority people from other than eastern Europe and almost no one of African heritage.

They are not black, it's just just stupid. I couldn't call DDs Thai friend black. Fortunately I know her name and where she's from.

Unlike the nasty big brats at school who asked if she came from Mars, I wish she wasn't so nice and had dropped them in it (Y9s so not an accident )

Startail

The first two paragraphs are mostly ill thought out nonsense. What is so hard about referring to people in a polite and respectful way they are comfortable with?

1. Why use a stupid and outdated term like 'coloured' we are all 'coloured' having white skin isn't absence of colour. It is a useless term as if the only two categories of people are white and non-white.

2. Obviously very few people described as 'black' have black skin, just as 'white' people actually have pink skin.

3. Your daughter's friend is of Asian, or South East Asian origin not 'black'. But why you would want or need to refer to her by anything than her name is beyond me.

4. What does living in a rural area with few minorities have to do with anything? I don't have any people with a disability in my social circle, but I don't go around referring to people with disabilities as cripples or spastics.

?Black? is definitely not offensive in the US, quite the opposite. Its use arose during the civil rights movement through a concerted effort to replace ?negro? and ?colored.? Polls indicate that most black people in the US have no preference between ?black? and ?African American,? and the media in the US use both.

Using "Negro" or "colored" in the US would signal to the listener a pre-civil rights era sensibility, which would not be a good thing, especially in the South where I live.

Something I don't get is why the term 'Asian' in the UK apparently only covers people whose family originated in India/Pakistan/Bangladesh. Then there is usually another box for 'Chinese', but what about anyone from Vietnam, Korea, Japan, etc? Also people from countries like Saudi Arabia, wouldn't that be in Asia? Anyway China was in Asia, last time I looked on the map! (Asia being a big place).

Its funny because in the US I understand things are the other way around and 'Asian' would be taken to mean someone from East Asia, what some would call 'Oriental' although I believe that is now considered offensive.

Just goes to show how badly thought out these tick boxes on forms are.

"Please, can we call people today what they want to be called?"

Judging from the posts on this thread there are too many variations to use a blanket term that is acceptable to everyone.

I am white British, but probably have more foreign blood in me than people of Asian or African origin whose family have been here for several generations.

I am saddened by the ignorance that so many of you still encounter today.

I don't get that either Nadia. As an American, it would never occur to me to call someone from India, Asian. They are Indian, are they not? Someone Asian is from China or Japan, in my American head.

I have no idea if that is PC or not. It's just the way I was taught.

I think we use the blanket term Asian for people from the Indian subcontinent to avoid causing offence. Pakistan and Bangladesh were once part of India so unless you actually know their background you could easily offend a Pakistani by assuming they are Indian and vice versa.

You are correct that Chinese and Japanese are also Asian and, correct me if I am wrong here, but I think we have a much higher proportion of people from the Indian subcontinent living in the UK than Chinese and Japanese.

Just wanted to say black is not offensive.

Also wanted to say "coloured" is how mixed race people describe themselves in southern Africa eg Cae coloured. However I would not use it here (the West) referring to black people due to slavery lnks / connotations etc.

I'm probably over-thinking, but referring to people as African/Asian/British whatever is just leading to more confusion as people move around the globe.

I have a white South African friend. He and his wife are African, born in South Africa. Their children are white British. Had he emigrated to the United States his children would have been white American, though in reality could have more claim to African American than black Americans whose family have been in the States for several generations. As all of us came from Africa anyway, aren't we all African Americans? I'm also confused when really white-skinned Americans describe themselves as black because their Great Grandma was black and their Grandad was Hispanic. It is all too confusing.

I will be so glad when we live in a world where skin colour is unimportant.

How do you know if someone is Indian though? Or Pakistani, Or Bangladeshi, or from Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka etc, but with Indian/PAkistani/ Bangladeshi heritage?

You don't, which is why Asian is correct, since all of the above are in Asia.

Malkie, good to see am not the only one. I don't like being called black even though am blue black. PC says its not wise to sing baa baa black ship anymore or say blackboard as you risk offending people but insists on calling the same people black?

How many times? This 'PC says' stuff is ALL A COMPLETE MYTH. I am not offended by 'Baa baa black sheep' (I sing it regularly) and I don't know a single black or Asian person who would be. And frankly, only a complete fool would ever claim otherwise.

And you don't have to be called black. The whole emphasis now is that people are free to define themselves. So if there is a description you prefer, ask people to use it.

I hate 'coloured'. Not just because it posits 'white' as the norm, but also because it is effectively a euphemism, stemming from a time when the overwhelming consensus was that being anything other than white European was inferior. Polite people found oblique, mealy-mouthed ways to refer to people like me-didn't want to refer too bluntly to unfortunate racial origins. But being black (or anything else) is not embarrassing, inferior or any kind of misfortune, so we can all happily be direct about it.

I will be so glad when we live in a world where skin colour is unimportant.

Yes, absolutely.

Apart from that, everything that Eldritch just said.

Well you learn something new everyday...and even though someone did post that they would not object to being called "coloured" I won't use that term again after reading this thread. I'm actually quite at any offence I may have caused people in the past now....

Have often wondered how the term "black" came about. Like "white", it's not accurate.

Just musing

Yes I don't get the British way of calling Asians people from India/Pakistan and those who look like the Chinese (even though they may be Japanese, Korean, Singaporean, Vietnamese....) Chinese.

My kids are mixed race - white British and one of the above mentioned 'Chinese'. I never know what to class them on forms! Because surely 'mixed' covers every possible combination!!?

And interestingly enough when I first met my in laws, they just assumed I was British (I sound British, they live near big cities where there are lots of similarly colored people like me...)! They only realized that I was forrin when they wondered why they've not met my parents till the day before the wedding....

I find this 'black' description puzzling.
I know that in the US it's a normal, accepted term. President Obama is described as black, and many people said how wonderful it was that a black person became President. Good for him.
But, he had one 'black' parent and one 'white' parent, so it seems to me that he is just as much 'white' and he is 'black'. So shouldn't he be described as 'mixed race' rather than 'black?

yy Sallying. It is puzzling

"Yes I don't get the British way of calling Asians people from India/Pakistan and those who look like the Chinese (even though they may be Japanese, Korean, Singaporean, Vietnamese....) Chinese"

Probably because many people genuinely can't tell the difference?

We have an Indian friend who is a Tamil. They are Tamil in Sri Lanka as well. So how would someone know how to differentiate between an Indian Tamil and one from Sri Lanka?

Sorry I didn't mean how can you not tell the difference? I meant given that that whole continent is Asia, it's more correct to refer to all as Asians rather than the Indian/Pakistani/Bangladeshi people as Asian and those Japanese/Chinese/Koreans as Chinese. Because they aren't.

I think it is simply a descriptive term to differentiate between people of Chinese looking origin and people of Indian sub continent looking origin.

Or maybe I am being naive.

I grew up in Australia. Most oriental people were referred to as "Asian". So what a UK born person might call Asian is very different; we would say "Indian". But actually that's not always right - it could be Pakistan etc, so actually "oriental" and "Asian" is probably better...

We never said coloured.

We didn't have many "black" people (African/Afro-Caribbean and other black people) at that time but if we did we would call them black, not coloured. This was in the 80's/90's

We had a name which was also adopted by those people for certain European races of a Mediterranean origin...but it is not considered acceptable here. It was used out in the open, not in a derogatory way.

By Asian people we were called "skips".

I didn't find this offensive (skippy the bush kangaroo? dunno... )

About the most racist I heard was "its spot the aussie round here!" in a predominantly Asian area.

There are separate issues regarding the treatment of our indigenous people, the Aborigines, and people can get quite divided about the way forward...this has cast Australian people as racist at times, possibly rightly so.

my DH is half african (west) and half bajan (so essentially mixed race himself at face value if you ignore slavery from West Africa to the caribbean), but was born in England. He classes his ethnicity on forms as afro caribbean and doesn't mind being called black.

I'm white and born in England. Our DD is mixed race. On forms we put her down as black-mixed or white - mixed caribbean.

I must admit I really dislike it when people call DD half caste. We don't live in a caste system, so how can be half of something that is non existant?

When DD noticed that she doesn't look quite like DH or I and she was asking about colour I explained that DH is called Black and I'm called White and she is mixed (half mummy and half daddy), but in real life DH is Dark Brown, I'm Pinkish and freckly and DD is light brown.

I won't mind if DD denotes herself as white, black, mixed or other when she's older. Afterall, aren't we all just individual anyway?

Oh and with regards being called black or not being able to sing baa baa black sheep. We went to see DH family at the weekend. His brother has a 'white' partner also (in fact all his sibling are in mixed white/black relationships) and in their living room they had a golly wog and when DD asked me what it was I said a golly wog and the world did not stop, there was no sharp intake of breath, because when I was a child it was called a golly wog. It turned out that it was his brothers when he was a boy and it was a Robinsons golly wog that you saved for from the side of the jam.

DH does think that some black people have a bit of a chip on their shoulder about what to be called because he said, you generally know if what is said is meant offensively.