Leading Quebec politician Andre Boisclair is in trouble because he said that a lot of the students at Harvard had "les yeux brides" - slanting eyes. Apparently French-speakers had no problems with that expression but Anglophone Canadians have been huffing and puffing about it.
If you can describe someone by such a physical characteristic as their skin-color, why can you not describe them by their eye shape? It is after all their eye-shape rather than their skin color that differentiates Asians from Caucasians.
The Duke of Edinburgh once used the expression "slitty eyes" to refer to Asians and that produced a bit of tutt-tutting too.
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1 comment:
Eh, I dunno JR.
There can be plenty of things that are technically true but still offensive to say. An easy example: there might be a disproportionate amount of Jews who are lawyers or bankers. All things being equal, a politician who described a law school as "filled with Jews" would still come under fire - and quite rightly.
The question is whether this statement meant as an innocent description or as a genuine insult. And unfortunately, whether it's an accurate description or not tells us very little in that regard.
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