Thinking a race of people are deliberately confusing and unintelligible isn't racism?
I said minor nitpick. No I don't think "it's greek to me" holds the same prejudice at all. Perhaps closer to saying "excuse my French" after swearing (also cringe worthy).
So we're left with just the fact that some anonymous wikipedia contributer says that this explanation of racist 19th century Britons has been proposed. By who? Based on what? Apparently not much. A different source I found points out that the earliest known use of the phrase in print is from March, 1964 [1]. Before that, it was known as "Russian Scandal" or "Russian Gossip". So it could hardly be the result 19th century attitudes towards the Chinese. If you're aware of any contradicting evidence, I'm happy to hear it.
Frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if someone came up with the racism explanation based on simply hearing the phrase and backsolving from their gut feeling that it was obviously due to racism. Then someone put it in a Wikipedia article without checking and now you're singling out that quote as an authority that vindicates your own initial gut feeling.
[0] https://archive.org/details/chinesewhispersw0000chub/page/18...
[1] https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/chinese-whispers.html
If "chinese whispers" has racist tones, surely implying a language is nearly unintelligible must be the same.
Chinese whispers the name of a game that information is lost/changed/confused (aka Telephone) as so helpfully pointed out above comes from the idea that Chinese are deliberately confusing and unintelligible.
I was merely pointing it out to raise awareness... and tried to do so without crediting any malice to the OP.
"He gave a speech in Greek."
"What did he say?"
"It was all Greek to me."
My personal experience, they find it insulting. Regardless of the platitudes or wikipedia links you offer. Again, I was trying to raise awareness. My apologises for deriding the overall thread of discussion.
I would certainly be willing to do that, and the Chinese group in turn could mention some of their local analogues (because expressions depicting a foreign nation as unintelligible are found all over the world) that they don’t see as a problem – Chinese speakers are generally less concerned about ethnic sensitivities than the English-speaking world.
There is little prejudice in many of these expressions today. Certainly there may have been prejudice when the term was first coined, but the expressions then became lexicalized and speakers are not even consciously aware of them. To claim that they represent prejudice today is to fall into the etymological fallacy.