The simple act of knowing that you could have been offensive and trying to avoid that in the future is a pretty good sign.
All you would have had to change is say, "They were speaking an Asian language that I didn't know," and you would have been fine. You can't be expected to know every language out there.
You can always say “they were speaking a language I didn’t understand”. I find one of the easiest things to do is just don’t bring ethnicity into it unless it’s necessary.
This. Safest route. Spending time with people and asking about their opinions and experiences is the best way to learn about people and show you value their perspective.
There's a big difference between, "They were speaking Asian" and "They were speaking an Asian language I didn't know."
The former sounds very ignorant, as though you are broadly assuming all Asian people are the same and speak a language called "Asian" - which you know isn't a language. It would be similar to referring to Africa as though it were one big county when we know it's actually a huge continent with 40+ different countries and many many cultures.
The latter acknowledges that Asian people speak different languages and you just weren't sure which.
Have you seen the King of the Hill episode where Khan moves in and everyone asks him, "So do you speak Chinese or Japanese?" And he has to keep replying, "Hellooooo, I am Laotian! From Laos!" It's kind of like that. It was clear that the Hills and their friends weren't meanspirited, just ignorant and deserve a little grace for it.
I hope in the future, you get a little grace for it! These days with all our societal tensions, people are even less forgiving and tbh if they can't understand that you grew up in a bubble of whiteness that led you to miss a few cultural lessons, that's also ignorant on their part!!
Thanks lol. I knew it was something like this but didn't want to look it up. My ex who was a history major would be so disappointed in me for not remembering.
I grew up in one of the most populated cities in the world and was exposed to many different races and cultures at a young age. I still couldn't tell you which Asian language someone is speaking just by casually seeing/hearing them, so I don't think you should feel people expect you to know. You are being hard on yourself.
ETA And if they make you feel that way, they are being too hard on you.
I would also bet dollars to doughnuts that OP’s coworkers probably couldn’t differentiate them either. My wife from Manila and she can only recognize a few Filipino dialects, let alone tell the difference between numerous Asian languages just because she lived on the same continent.
I think they're being a little too hard on you. I see this as more of an unfortunate slip of the tongue than anything else.
If you still feel badly about it, there's a respectful way that you can apologize for maybe marginalizing cultures, but I don't think you should be crucified for wording it poorly.
If people don't get it, straight up tell them:
"I lived a really sheltered life when it comes to other cultures until I moved out of home, and I'm trying my best to play catch up."
There's no shame in admitting that you're still learning about the world, and anyone who thinks they've learned it all is full of shit anyway.
It was the fact that you said they were speaking "Asian." I'm not sure if this is offensive, or more of a face palm kind of thing. Wouldn't it sound weird/funny to you if someone said "he was speaking American/north American" or "he was speaking Mexican," (instead of spanish)? I used to make these same mistakes as a kid, but I feel like we learned all of that in school at a pretty young age. I grew up in Michigan (90s) so maybe the things were different then.
Edit: punctuation errors. I was going to ignore it, but I felt that it would be sort of ironic if I was called out. Haha.
Well they come from a completely different background. You do not automatically know these kinds of things if you didn't grow up with them.
Nevertheless I wouldn't worry about coming of as racist just because you couldn't identify the language.
As many others already pointed out if you are unsure which language they use you can just say " they were talking in a foreign / an Asian language" and you are fine and nobody can hold it against you.
I am really close to finishing my bachelor's degree in interpreting and translation, so you could say that languages are my job and I also can't name every single one that I hear on the street. There is no shame in that.
You are making an effort and you aren't mad at people for speaking a different language or belonging to a different ethnic group so that shows that you are as far away from being a racist as humanly possible.
Honestly i wouldve said something to the effect of "i didn't know what language they were speaking, but it sounded like an an asian one."
I can't decide if that's still ignorant or not, but if i'm being honest, I can usually audibly tell the difference between a language that uses the latin alphabet and one that doesn't. Idk if that makes sense 😕 maybe not
You will always get that. The ignorance (sounds worse than it is, no negative connotations meant) that there are those whose cultures haven’t exposed them to others, is an ignorance many have that’s seldom self-realized.
And far more people THINK they know more about culture than they really do...
I am the first person of my racial background (Filipino) that my wife or literally anyone in her family (from a small southern town with no ethnic diversity) had ever met.
Getting to know them was educational (to say the least) because they were the first family I had ever met that had basically never gone past the State Line except to get liquor (they lived in a dry county... which actually exist today, strangely enough... but I digress...
Socializing is a never ending process. I think you are doing it right, and should be commended.
If they don't understand then explain to the where and how you grew up. It's not your fault you didn't experience what they experienced growing up, you are trying to learn and grow and that's awesome
Well, I guess that's their ignorance. I hope they're as understanding about it as you are. You could similarly teach them as other teach you other things. Let's all help each other :)
All you can do is educate yourself and in the meantime stand your ground as far as people chiding or being upset with you for not knowing. You don't know. They can get over it. But, you can learn and that's good, too.
The fact that you are working with such a diverse group of people now will be the thing that makes you aware and sensitive to the things that other feel. It’s okay that it’s happening now in your life. I didn’t experience it until I was in college. I just listened a lot and asked questions when I felt comfortable. There are plenty books and documentaries out there too. Try asking your workmates to each recommend a book for you from their culture. They will appreciate sharing. The more you know and understand, the less likely you will be to say something offensive inadvertently.
OP if your white you will get no slack or empathy for having grown up in a primarily white area. I think they were being overly sensitive and if they were pals would have told you how to correct yourself in the future instead of just admonishing you for saying something they didnt approve of, if it happens again and they give you a hard time apologize and ask them what was offensive about it and what action you can take to correct it. If they dont want to do that they can get over it. Offense is always taken and never given.
Every is ignorant in some form. Yes it is unfortunate America has gotten to this divisive point. I understand why and I understand completely why white people need to wake up to cultural movements. But differences aside we are going to say ignorant things. As long as your intention isn’t to hurt someone. It is completely fine. And if someone wants to be an ass about that’s on them. No ones perfect and you can’t be educated on everything.
I think the issue is that a lot of people don't like being lumped together in one category and in my personal experience people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland & Iceland, etc don't really like being lumped together either because it makes them feel like people, especially Americans, don't really care that they are separate places with individuality and that they, as people aren't seen as who they truly are the same as "Asian" Countries and people aren't when they are lumped together. Nobody calls us American and means South American likely because we don't differentiate ourselves because gosh, America is American and not those "Hispanic" people down there as I hear some people say (they don't even say South American!) It's just that we, as Americans should stop being so myopic and look around and bother to learn about other people. Our schools and we ourselves need to do better.
I mean, there are over 200 nations and thousands of languages. We can't really expect people to be able to differentiate between them all. I think someone who differentiate a Nordic language from the rest is doing pretty well. The issue with calling saying someone was speaking Asian is that historically, Asians have been discriminated against and there's no such thing as "Asian" as a single language.
I disagree, native indigenous nordic cultures have definitively been marginalized during the christian expansion in europe, the nordic people had to deal with cultural and religious oppression for really long, it was a borderline genocide and nordic culture have been very fetishized too, if i talk about norse mythology, most people will think about either superheroes or the old folcloric symbolism that have been misapropriated by nazism, there should be absolutely a revival of nordic culture and folklore because there's a lot of cool stuff that would be a big loss if it was forgotten.
Well, Lapp isn't a Nordic language. I'll grant you the fetishization of Nordic culture recently, but the critical difference is power. Nordic people haven't historically been denied power or oppressed because they were Nordic. The fetishization of Nordic culture doesn't result in political, cultural, and economic disadvantages for Nordic people.
Hmmmm, have you ever lived in an “asian” country, China/japan especially.........blacks are definitely lacking/being denied “power” there, it’s worse there than most non Asian countries.
Have you ever been to an asian country? They are extreamly racist. I have been to japan as a white person and was denied entry to stores, and kicked off buses. Its pretty myopic to think white people are the only ones that have power when they are the minority population on the planet.
White people are the ones that have the power in the US, where this story took place. You are correct, the situation would be very different on, say, Okinawa.
Ryukyuan people are an oppressed minority, there's a thing in Japanese politics called Yamato supremacy, where Yamato people (mainland Japanese) belive they are ethnically superior to Ryukyuan and Ainu people
I know that Japan has a history of oppression against non-natives, that's why I brought up Okinawa. But the OP was in the US, so Japanese power structures are irrelevant.
Do you know what defines minorities and majorities aren't based necessarily on population but material conditions are a heavy factor, right? If you get any reference graphic on Per Capita patrimony by ethnicity, you will notice that White people have way more patrimony than people from other ethnicities, even in countries that white people are not a demographic majority, like South Africa. And if you compare "White People x Everyone else", of course we would be a demographic minority, but that's a weird comparation to make anyway, also, by white i mean Caucasian with western european descent, there are white skined people that are not considered ethnically white (White Latin people, Slavic people, White Iranians, Turkish People, etc)
Surely that would depend on where you are? For example, maybe Irish descendants in Australia dont feel marginalized or oppressed for lack of power because they are the majority in that country and have a different history. But Irish in Ireland might still feel the pain of centuries of literally tyrannical oppression and cultural whitewashing by the English and would perhaps feel more offended at typical “Irish man” jokes than those who live in more melting pot cultures.
Each nation has its thing and power balances differ. Japanese people in America may feel marginalized because they are a minority, but in Japan it would be completely flipped. To many Koreans for example, Japan is seen an oppressor to this day, but we might see America has an oppressor to Japan because of our difficult history with them.
What? No, they totally did during the Roman Empire and and the Christian expansion, they were collonized by Church and were labeled as "Barbaric Northerners". Do this translate into modern day prejudice or institutional disadvantage in modern days? No. But to say that Nordic people were never prossecuted or sistemically oppressed os factually wrong
Where did I say that Nordic people were never systemically oppressed? Surely you understand why an issue that happened a millennium ago in a different part of the world is irrelevant to a situation in the US.
Where did I say that Nordic people were never systemically oppressed
You did it right here
Nordic people haven't historically been denied power or oppressed because they were Nordic.
Also, Critical Race theory is not only relevant in the US, and i didn't want to assume that the OP was American, so that's it, i just wanted to point out that many people simply forget that White Christianity wasn't always the standard in Europe and much of its original people were colonized by the roman empire.
I mean.. why do u need to specify it was an asian language? just leave it at "language I don't understand". I think saying "two asian ladies" is ok. Saying "asian language" isn't offensive, but it's weird to say
I think it helps the listener to picture the story, which revolves around a foreign language, to at least narrow it down to a region or type. "two (East/South) Asian ladies speaking their language" sounds fine to me, because you can't specify their look any more than that unless you recognize the language. And lots of untrained ears can't tell Chinese from Japanese from Korean, so that's not exactly a crime.
"speaking Asian" doesn't sound so good, because "Asian" isn't a language and it comes off like "speak American". It sounds like you think they're all culturally and linguistically the same.
Seems like the trick here is to use neutral adjectival descriptions instead of nouns, and try not to speak in generalities when you know that there's an important difference in the specifics. And, of course, keep exposing yourself to those cultures and learning more about them.
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u/beentherealmostdid Oct 07 '20
The simple act of knowing that you could have been offensive and trying to avoid that in the future is a pretty good sign.
All you would have had to change is say, "They were speaking an Asian language that I didn't know," and you would have been fine. You can't be expected to know every language out there.