Digital BW, The Print

Andy Biggs wrote:

>Steve-
>
>You are reading my email incorrectly. I should have been clearer. I am
>saying that Rick is from Japanese decent, and I was pointing out that *he*
>was offended. As so was I.
>
>
>  
>
Not only were you, I was as well...  I was actually speechless.

In fact, as an American of VERY mixed heritage,  I was appalled and 
still remain so at the lack of awareness by some here of the pejorative 
history the term carries with it..  As Rick notes, it was used as a 
racial insult at a time when America was taking people from their homes 
and livelihoods, putting her own citizens in concentration camps 
(internment camps), taking away land and property that was NEVER 
returned, and only because their land of origin happened to be Japan. 
 Even the US Supreme Court (in the Korematsu case) said that Japanese 
Americans were so different as to merit differential treatment of this 
kind..  (After the war they reversed themselves, and the US has paid 
some few elderly survivors of the camps reparations of a sort.) Germans 
and Italians were not similarly treated, but many here would certainly 
be sensitive to emotionally laden terms being used to describe people of 
those ethnicities..

As for friends, I have never accepted friends from Japan using the term 
"Gaijin" either, as it has much of the same emotional burden..

Please don't use that term again..
Keith

 

"Just some guy," and caretaker of the Multiverse's largest EPSON printer 
User Community (highly recommended by Vogon Poets and MegaDodo 
Publications), at:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/EPSONx7x_Printers/
 
"For the rest of you out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together 
guys"

 




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