Racial Discrimination in Language

Discrimination happens when someone is treated worse ('less favourably' in legal terms) than another person in the same situation because of of his/her race, sex religion or belief, disability, age, sexual orientation. Here I will discuss racial discrimination language phenomenon.

Racial discrimination is universal. There are always some stereotyped words to describe different groups of people. In this article, I discuss these words used by different community and in different languages, and discuss the phenomenon academically, either in linguistic or culture, nothing in my mind implies anything to do with racism. If anything inappropriate, please tell me in the comments.

In Canada and the United States, native Indians are "apples" (red outside, white inside); blacks are "Oreo cookies" (black and white); and Chinese are "bananas."

These metaphors assume, both rightly and wrongly, that the culture in America has been primarily Anglo-white.

British born Chinese are called BBC, and America born Chinese are called ABC, they are all "bananas", because they have a yellow face and white heart. Wayson Choy who himself is a "banana" claimed: "I am a banana and proud of it." He rediscovered the Chinatown history and culture after his parents' death, and wrote a book, The Jade Peony. In this books, he tried to recreate his past, to explore the beginnings of the conflicts and struggle between being Chinese and being North American, and discovered a truth: these "between world" struggles are universal.

(http://www.geocities.com/dhlphenuse/banana.html)

Within Chinese community, especially in Hongkong and Macau, Chinese call White people gweilo, that means literally "ghost man" and arose as a comment on the pale complexion of white foreigners, which was seen as being ghost-like. This pejorative term commonly used by Cantonese speakers to refer to white people, mainly in speech. Some claim that its use can be neutral. An alternative neutral term is Xiren (Xi: western, ren: people).

Prior to the 1980s the term was commonly prefixed with sei, jyutping: sei2, meaning death or damnation, to make sei gweilo meaning "damned ghost man" or "damned gweilo.

There are different words for different sex and age accordingly, young male white person is called gwei tsai; a young female white is called gweimei, which literally means ghost sister, and very lovely; as for middle-aged or old married female they has a name gwei p'o, which mean ghost granny.

They also has a prefix for black and white people generally, that is black ghost and white ghost respectively.

Japanese Devils (or Riben Guizi ) is a term used by Chinese, Korean and other Asian nation who were suffered from the Japanese invasion in WWII. Nowadays Chinese still use this word to refer to Japanese in daily life. There is another word little Japan (Xiao Ri Ben) to describe their small build in body and small territory of Japan.

Racial discrimination happens inside one race, too. We may call that self-racial-discrimination. Chinese government made a policy last year that all oversea Chinese come back to visit China have to do blood test for HIV, but non-Chinese or Chinese with a foreign passport may exempt from this test. All oversea Chinese are very angry with this policy and damned this policy as self racial discrimination. This may something or nothing to do self esteem racially.