Originally Posted by
smark21
But it is Eurocentric to refer to Asia as the Far East or the orient. Far East of what? Only if one regards Europe as the center of the world with the Americas as the West and Asia as the East. People in Asia may look at it differently--Europe is the West and the Americas are the "far East". Also, and this is something I remember the woman in college telling me, to describe all cultures in Asia as "orient" or "oriental" is to disregard the differences in the various cultures, whether they be Thai, Chinese, Mongolian, etc. They can't be lumped into one group, just as there are differences between Germans, French, etc. This harkens to a point I made earlier in this thread--racism, ethnocentrism, and racial supremeacy are so woven into all aspects of our culture that we accept certain concepts without thinking about them, they just seem natural. Sometimes time marches on and we can look back and see they are offensive, prejudiced, bigoted, racist, what have you. As in the case of Blackface and minstrel songs. But people being people, who want to think of themselves as good and well intentioned, will understandably get defensive when something they may have enjoyed or cherished or accepted as the "natural" way of doing things represents, directly or indirectly, something ugly and dehumanizing. Rock a Bye Your Baby with a Dixie Melody isn't a directly racist song, but the lyrics tell a story of a person who wants their "mammy" [[or mommy in sanitized versions) to sing them the old minstrel songs that sentimentalized plantation and slavery life and take them back to the days of childhood.