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Comment by chronic7403 | Hacker News Reader

> In my experience, people in the United States often (incorrectly) short hand East Asia as Asia just like the people in the city of New York will often (correctly) short hand New York City as New York.

In my experience, the only demographic who complains about “Asia = east Asia” are people from South Asia, aka Indians/desis

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Ironically (for my generation in the UK at least) "Asian" meant "South Asian" and for a long time we didn't have a useful shorthand for "all parts of Asia"

Well, there are two things going on there:

1. "Asia" and "Asian" are different words, which mean different things.

2. There is a dialectal difference specific to "Asian" between England, where Pakistani immigrants are prominent, and the United States, where they aren't.

That might be a local thing, Hong Kong being a British colony means there's plenty of people in the UK for whom Asian means Chinese.

Asian to Brits definitely means South Asian(probably includes West Asians but I'm not sure about that). They were already bitching about this 30 years ago when the net was standardizing on American English where Asian means East Asian.

The term for East Asian was Oriental which is now considered racist/passé for some obscure reason.

It's not obscure. The reason is because a whole class of racist laws use the term. Nobody has seriously tried to reclaim the term, so it is stuck with the connotation it had developed a hundred years ago.

Genuinely curious which class of laws that would be.

I assume you mean in the US but the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act makes no mention of race and anti-miscegenation laws speak of Mongolians(presumably to mean people of East Asian ancestry in general).

I think Oriental in the US like the alternative Asiatic applied to all Asians from Istanbul to Vladivostok.

People from South Asia are not "aka Indians". There are other countries.

To add, thinking about that comment. It is quite offensive. It essentially comes down to "brown people are all the same". I assumed it was the result of ignorance rather than bigotry, but it being the only comment from a new account makes me think otherwise.

We aren't the only ones, but we are the loudest about it, because erasure sucks.

Don't get me started about Macedonia.

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