Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "" video.

Yep, same goes for white folks, the only white ethnicity we get to choose from is Latino or not Latino. None of the other options are even available and it's really awkward for those of us that comes from groups of white people that were previously ethnically cleansed. What white people do really confuses me, but the option I"m supposed to choose is white or possibly caucasian, selecting other is correct, but the instructions usually imply that that's a bipoc thing, but there's a bunch of white ethnicities that aren't bipoc. The whole thing is needlessly complicated and arguably it would be better to just let people put down whatever they like and then run AI over it to figure out how to classify the responses.
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@59Gretsch Nonsense, that term hasn't been used in a non-racist sense to refer to people in decades probably more than 50 years. Anybody still using it to refer to people is racist.
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TBH, using terms like Blacks and Whites just has a real Jim Crow sort of a feel to it, even though during the Jim Crow era, the term was Colored. Any term that is used is going to be kind of reductive, but I do think that there are degrees. It's not terribly consistent either, like ADDers is pretty much the normal way for people with ADHD to refer to each other. But, autistics seems like something I would have to see a lot of other people using in order to think that it's OK. Both refer to neurodevelopmental conditions that impact on most of who the people are in a way that skin color really doesn't. There certainly are ways of setting up society where skin color doesn't really matter much, but the way the brain is wired is always going to impact things a lot.
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@ And honestly, outside of that context, it's probably best not to unless there's a reason to do so.
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It's consistent with the whole hyphenated American thing. Italian-American, Irish-American, Chinese-American. I think where African American is kind of odd is that it's being used to refer to people who in many cases were robbed of their connection back to something more specific in Africa. It also doesn't refer to other black groups like Afro-Cubans. It also adds a bit of an awkwardness in that you can't just assume that a black person in American is African American. I've got a coworker that's in the US from Africa on a visa and he's pretty clearly not African American. He has at least been to America, so it's slightly less completely wrong to refer to him as African American, but it's pretty completely wrong.
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Oriental is no longer used because we don't use the term Oriental to refer to people. The fact that we don't use the term Occidental to refer to Europeans probably wouldn't help the case of anybody that wants to bring the term back into common use by people that aren't racist.
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@DarkTug I used to live in China, and I'm not really sure what having the name "oriental" slapped on a building has to do with anything as people in the US can do that, and we do still have oriental rugs available under that name. It's the use of the name to refer to people that's not permissible in polite society.
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@DarkTug That's just not the term used in English to refer to people from that part of the world. And they wouldn't care, because it's not a Thai, Chinese or generally Asian word of any language.
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@Laotzu.Goldbug I suppose, but India is on a different subcontinent and the only other major group on the continent not commonly included would be Russians. So, there really isn't much ambiguity.
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There are so many issues with the way that that is handled right now. I don't expect that it's likely to ever be preferred to use person first language with that because the traits impact on just about every part of the person in a way that you're not really able to separate the condition from the person in any sort of a clean way the way that you might a person's skin color from their personhood. I go back and forth between referring to it as a condition and referring to it as a disorder just because it is rather unclear how to classify it. There certainly are aspects that are disordered and there are aspects that are just different.
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There's nothing wrong with being a hyphenated American. But, in terms of African-American is a bit of an odd choice considering how many can't trace their families back to specific regions or cultures due to the intentional severing of any connection back.
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@thaneros I'm sure that's what he was thinking, but it is a very ignorant read on the situation on his part. People hyphenate in many cases because they are part of a community that maintains some degree of connection back to the old country. There are some people that don't, and I wish they wouldn't hyphenate, but it's a bad parallel to make when the more meaningful levels of connection that normally are implied with the hyphenation were broken ages earlier on purpose to prevent slaves from having a sense of humanity.
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@windsurfer8824 They do, I just hardly ever hear people using those terms. I'm not sure if it's because I'm on the est Coast where most of those folks haven't been here long enough for a hyphen to really make much sense.
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The proper term is illegal alien. Any term that you use is going to be somewhat loaded, but if you're saying undocumented immigrant, that's a flat out lie. There's really not such of a thing in the US, there may be some places where they don't issue documents or care about people being registered as coming into the country, but that's not what's going on with the US. In the US, the closest to an "undocumented immigrant" would be the child of an illegal immigrant that's born away from a medical facility, but is a citizen by virtue of being born in the US, but lacks any documents to prove that.
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@adb_500 It's colored as in not white. It's arguably just a more offensive term that bipoc replaces.
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People were able to hijack the word woke because it was a very broad and ill-defined term. If it had a more specific definition, it wouldn't have been easy to subvert. There's only so much you can do with African American in terms of hijacking that. But woke refers to a pretty wide spectrum of perspectives and ideas.
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I think the only time you're likely to hear the term these days is in reference to "oriental rugs." It hasn't been considered acceptable to use the term in reference to people in decades and honestly, even the term Asian is probably only going to be something you'd use to describe somebody if you don't know a more specific word.
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That's something I've noticed, the terms often times change successively until one sticks. And usually that one is pretty goofy, but it was the one that was in use at the time when things were good enough for the community to not have a bunch of activism going on.
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I'm not surprised. People outside the US don't always realize that in a lot of cases, there are ethnic exclaves that can exist for a very long time. And having a way of reflecting which people still maintain some sort of connection to the old country versus those that haven't has been something that we've cared about. It's not really that important in most other countries as it doesn't typically happen to the extent that it does in the US. That being said, African American is in some ways a bit of an oddity there as up until relatively recently, it was mostly the descendants of slaves who had no connection of any sort back to Africa other than the vague sense that their ancestors were from some part of it that they couldn't identify. Most people hypenated Americans have the benefit of being able to at least name more specific nations as their place of origin.
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@denniszakowicz3273 It's less than ideal as a way of communicating that somebody is of European descent, but doesn't have any sort of actual connection back to the continent or any of the countries. I wish there'd be a better term as Caucasians are something else entirely.
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@ChuckNorrizzed White people are people of European descent that have lost any sort of connection back to a more specific part of Europe, so probably. I go back and forth on the thing, but since I'm a hyphenated American, it feels kind of presumptuous to tell them what they should call themselves.
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@jugulagu3397 Nobody else came across a large enough group of people to have any cause to do that before white folks did. All of those people had names for themselves and those around them, they were just more granular, there wasn't any need to conceive of entire races as even the people encountering enough groups to even care, were mostly the traders going back and forth along the silk road and they had little reason to come up with a system to cover people beyond the folks along that route.
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