[quote name='epobirs']This is simply untrue. While archaic in some places, the term simply means anything originating from East of Europe as it was regarded a few centuries ago. Before the compass became a common item and made the magnetic North Pole the fixed point for navigation, most maps were drawn with East at the top, serving as the direction by which someone using the map placed themselves in relation to the rest of the world. Thus East aka the Orient, was the source for the other meaning of the word 'orient' in terms of fixing your position either geographically or psychologically.
So there is nothing inherently offensive about calling someone of an ethnicity tracing to the classic Orient an oriental. It is just people making up silly reasons to be offended. The worst offense is that it lumps a massive portion of the world and a myriad set of distinct (at least from their perspective) peoples under a blanket term.
You might as well get upset about the words 'man' and 'woman' because those divide the species into two group by gender. Yes, I know there are actual people that get incensed over those terms but this is why we have psychiatric medicine.[/quote]
First of all East of what? Why the US of A of course. It is considered offensive because it refers to things AND people of the East implying that the US is the center of the world which is both literally and metaphorically impossible. Its like getting upset because males are referred to as "men" and females are referred to as "persons other than men".
As for the chart its also offensive because for the last decade or more IQ has been seen as almost completely irrelevant to ones intelligence (lets post some phrenology charts while were at it) and the chart also says nothing about the education and test taking prep a person has been exposed to. It's not surprising that predominantly African Americans schools are considerably underfunded, over crowded, outdated, poor etc.
So there is nothing inherently offensive about calling someone of an ethnicity tracing to the classic Orient an oriental. It is just people making up silly reasons to be offended. The worst offense is that it lumps a massive portion of the world and a myriad set of distinct (at least from their perspective) peoples under a blanket term.
You might as well get upset about the words 'man' and 'woman' because those divide the species into two group by gender. Yes, I know there are actual people that get incensed over those terms but this is why we have psychiatric medicine.[/quote]
First of all East of what? Why the US of A of course. It is considered offensive because it refers to things AND people of the East implying that the US is the center of the world which is both literally and metaphorically impossible. Its like getting upset because males are referred to as "men" and females are referred to as "persons other than men".
As for the chart its also offensive because for the last decade or more IQ has been seen as almost completely irrelevant to ones intelligence (lets post some phrenology charts while were at it) and the chart also says nothing about the education and test taking prep a person has been exposed to. It's not surprising that predominantly African Americans schools are considerably underfunded, over crowded, outdated, poor etc.