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the political correct police. We also have the righteous police and the grammar police. They always act like that. Just ignore them. They are always looking for something to slam, and seem to have a hard time understanding the point of a post. Hard to understand on such a left sight, but that is the way it is, it would seem.
welcome to DU. 
...ancient Christians used to have east at the top of a map. Since the Garden of Eden was supposedly in the east, that's how they made their maps.
Probably it was due to the "orientation" of the maps! 
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Got pretty vicious and selfrighteous in here. And I don't THINK a single one of those folks was Asian. Interesting.
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Sorry I stopped in.
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The people of the Philippines are a mix of Spanish and Asians. I think they could be Pacific Islanders too, thought when I think of that, I think of people like in Tahiti or Tonga, Samoa. They also refer to themselves as Pinoy/Pinay. Most of my friends from there refer to themselves as Asian.
I think of my dear nieces as Asian-Americans (but they are just my nieces, really 
). It just struck me as rather archaic to hear references to the "Oriental gymnasts" on television.
A friend of mine (who happens to be Filipino) uses the term "Ornamental" in response to someone referring to Asians as Orientals. It seems to make the point in a humorous way (at least coming from him).
-JB
I don't think of either as "racist", though "oriental" is a term that was used at a time when racism was "normal" among Westerners... so it does carry some of those connotations by association.
It might be useful to remember that in books like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein "oriental" applied equally to countries like Iran (referred to as Persia, of course) as to countries like China.
I, personally, don't take the term itself as being pejorative (and yes, I am of Iranian descent, and thus, by Victorian terminology, "oriental"
, but I do acknowledge the fact that the word exists "arm-in-arm" with a history of imperialism/colonialism/racism. If you want to be offended by the word, knock yourself out. I think it is far more productive, however, to acknowledge that it is just an anachronistic word employed by anachronistic-leaning people who may-not-mean-ill by it's use (though, it might be of great use as a "code-word" for racists who want to return to the "good old days" when racism was acceptable... so it's use is always to be watched for attempts at revival for such interests).
In other words, it's all in the context. Sometimes ignorance is just ignorance. Not always though, I'll grant you.
On the other hand, I don't accept the idea that Asian is people and Oriental is things... a distinction which I've heard made in a retail environment.
That is an argument that sweeps the racist history of the use of the word under the proverbial oriental-carpet. Oriental is for both people and things, if you think it is still 1913... but Asian is more appropriate if you are willing to embrace the current framing of the world... where the East is not merely an inscrutable mystery of greater-than-European-capacity-for-imagining/understanding... the sad truth is that many are still too ideationally lazy to accept that fact, and I accept the use of "oriental" by the intellectually lazy just as I accept the existence of "American Idol" as a result of the same vein of intellectual laziness.
Age, of course, can be a mitigating factor, just as it can be for the use of the word "colored"... In my opinion anyway...
that coincide with the post-bellum Jim Crow era and that whites used during a time of massive white privilege. When I hear someone here (usually of an older generation) refer to "Orientals" (whether disparagingly or matter-of-factly), it sounds to my ears like that kind of anachronism and produces the same effect on me of fingernails scraping down a chalkboard.
Your explanation is the best I've read on this thread.
I prefer Persian carpets to Oriental rugs, but that's just me
called cretans? (j/k) 
**The ancient peoples of Crete were known as the Minoans, after Minos, perhaps the most well-known king of Crete.
Minos is notable for his part in the myth of the Minotaur, or Bull of Minos. According to the legend, as a result of his displeasing the gods (specifically, Poseidon), his wife became enamored with a beautiful white bull, with which she conceived the Minotaur. Not one to be undermined so easily, Minos had a labyrinth built around his wife's half-human progeny, to which he would send 10 Athenian men and women every few years.
Read more: http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_are_the_ancient_people_that_originally_lived_on_the_island_of_Crete#ixzz225ArgTPK
What do we properly call people from Crete? Cretins? Cretions? Creters? Creatians? Cretagoners?
Apparently its Cretans. I can live with that....Certainly better than the alternatives....except maybe for Minoans...
Faulkner sent The Sound and the Fury to his mother to read before it was published. She wrote back, "I liked it Bill," she wrote back, 'but that first chapter sounds like it was written by an idiot!"
Which is kind of weird, because those features shade off into other groups -- i.e. various native americans, aleuts, etc. probably because it's actually a genetic & cultural continuum.
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