Talk:Chinaman (racial term)/Archive 1

message: This article was created by splitting off content from Chinaman, and expanding upon it using sources already provided.  As this is a controversial topic, please provide references when adding new content.  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 03:45, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Since when was Chinaman considered slang?  Some may consider it offensive or even archaic, but I don't think it's ever been considered slang. ElderStatesman 16:25, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: What should it be named in the parenthesis of the article name to differentiate it then?  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 17:45, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: How's Chinaman (ethnonym) which is the most accurate description?  It's definitely not slang, especially given its use in official and newspapering contexts.  Chinaman (person) might also work and be more along wiki naming guidelines.Skookum1 20:43, 21 March 2007 (UTC)

text: The -man suffix is a standard Anglo-Saxon/Germanic, as in "alderman" and "yeoman" or any of the Germanic-language derivations (in most of them -man is neutral in gender, or inclusive of all genders).  One of the stock denunciations of Chinaman (ref. UseNet groups, repeatedly) is that the formation China+man is allegedly inherently derisive vs Frenchman and Englishman, because that formation should theoretically (allegedly) be "Chinese-man"...but it's fairly easy to see the pidgin alteration of that from "Chinee-man" via shortening of the vowel to "China-man", if pidgin is the origin of the term; its origins are very vague, though, as to whether it was of Chinese creation or, as is also possible, from maritime/sailor English.Skookum1 21:00, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Article created

message: I found some last night and will post them here later, with cites, as examples of ways in which the word was used without being deliberately derisive, even though latter-day readers may sniff their noses at such usages; at the very worst they're ignorant, not malignant.  Whatever; if there's a better place for such examples than here, let me know (WikiSource maybe?), but the format I'm thinking is to provide the  element on the page, including the (short) quotation in each case; or the quotation could be here?  Seems like it's better to have it within the references....wish I hadn't taken certain history books back to the library (avoiding overdue fines) but I could always get them out again, and have others here anyway.....here's the first example:
:"The famous gold rush of 1875 to 85 when the Chinamen took out millions out of the bed of the Cayoosh showed no impresion on the records of St. Mary's.  The Indians and the Europeans are mingled with the life of the church during the entire period of 75 years, but the yellow man was not a Christian, not a mixer, not a spender.  He took the gold from the placer claims, but he left none of it behind.  Nor did he seem to come in contact with any part of the history of the church.  His success, however, encouraged the development of the district, and prospectors fled to the hills to find wher the gold in Cayoosh came from" - Extracts from St. Mary's Parish Register, undated pamphlet , edited and compiled by Margaret Lally "Ma" Murray, Bridge River-Lillooet Publishing, Lillooet BC., quote in Short Portage to Lillooet, Irene Edwards, self-publ. 1976, pp. 195-196.
Now, you'd think that was a negative account, especially with the equally-casual use of "yellow man", but in those days both terms were still used very casually and without malicious/condemnatory intent; Murray was herself extremely pro-Chinese and held them in high regard (and not just because many were advertising customers in her paper), although she did have a never-extinguished hostility towards the Japanese - because of what she had seen them to do the Chinese during the bombing of Shanghai (see her article).  Anyway, there are other usages of "Chinaman" in Edwards' book which I'll dig out; this one I remarked on as the first that jumped out at me since the article split, and it's a good example of "casual" use despite the "critical" context; Murray in other passages extols the Chinese for their hard work, thrift, ingenuity, and so on, so even if she uses a word some nowfind offensive, she didn't use it that way; and her Chinese readership didn't take it that way (in the '30s most of Lillooet's merchant community were Chinese; the Murrays raised tens of thousands of dollars from the local Chinese population for Chinese relief after their return from China and their very narrow escape from Shanghai.Skookum1 21:00, 21 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Examples of non-offensive use

message: This in the wake of the one edit comment "POV phrasing" - it's incredible that even in that first sentence you have tried to skew the POV concerning this word; in fact, I'd venture that you are unable to step outside your POV to write in an objective-language fashion; it's like in each phrase you need to underscore the condemnation of this word that you so ardently feel (and which is so inappropriate).  Focusing on negativity is a feature of ethno-biased writers; objectivity is rarely a strong suit when ethnic-agenda tub-thumping is at stake; the point is that the language you have written this new article with is even more POV than the phrasing at the DAB page which began this latest round of controversy.  You just can't admit that the other side even exists, or has a right to, do you?  I'll be ready for "good faith" in your case when I see you write something that doesn't have your usual POV=flavoured "objectivity" running and when you've written something conscionable and non-condemnatory about uses like the comedian, the Murray quote, the census and marraige records usages, etc.  But no, all you want to do is focus on the controversy in the media, as if that were all there were to know about this word.  Try rewriting that first paragraph without the POV tone that's so obvious; of course you won't, or can't.Skookum1 01:15, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Provide sources for your additions.  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 01:30, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: De-POVize yourself and your content-additions, and consider trying to write something about the cited material on non-offensive usages I've already provided; or perhaps you don't regard the US Census as a valid source?Skookum1 01:33, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Provide a source.  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 01:35, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Pffft.  Now I know you need a pair of those glasses ;-|  Or did you just not bother to read this, which contains the genealogy.com refs to the US census files. Oh, and Ma Murray, she's cited right above me on this same page.  What's your problem?  Something in your eye?  A little POV maybe?Skookum1 01:38, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Like I said, existence of usage does not imply that it's inoffensive.  Nothing you've provided say that the term is not offensive.  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 01:46, 22 March 2007 (UTC)

text: Skookum1, whether someone needs glasses should not be part of a discussion on Wikipedia. Even if HongQiGong is a vandal, this kind of talk would still be considered a personal attack. Now my patience is wearing thin; please don't force anyone to block you. Thank you. Xiner (talk, email) 01:53, 22 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Asking for evidence, then refusing to consider it, is the real issue here; obstinacy as a tool-by-frustration of the cite-happy who can't admit cites they don't want to admit have any validity, but do.  Mere name-calling pales by comparison to the disingenous passive-aggressive "if editing Wikipedia frustrates you, take a break" comment elsewhere, which is clearly patronizing in tone, especially coming from an editor who specializes in being frustrating and pretending to civility while meaning anything but; and insisting that other POVs are irrelevant, or somehow morally suspect or whatever...Is this an attack?  No, it's said in my defense, as soft-spoken attacks are still attacks, and pretending that they're not simply because they're in "uncolourful language" doesn't make them any less so.  The fact is that there's material/cites here that are being resisted/dismissed by people who don't want to read them, don't want to admit they mean what they mean, and are contemptuous towards those who disagree of them; yes, you see contempt in my previous comments; but they're response-in-kind, just said in more direct language than the attacks/unwarranted frustrating attitudes which engendered them.  I don't find Wikipedia frustrating; I find Hong Qi Gong wilfully frustrating.Skookum1 19:03, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Skookum, this particular issue is not a content dispute, but it is an issue of your incivility and your personal attacks.  We are expected to discuss and disagree without attacking each other.  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 19:34, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: POV phrasing

message: User:4.236.111.148 has only three edits in the whole of Wikipedia, all yesterday, all undermining this article and restoring it to HQG's preffered only-abusive POV.  HQG is supposedly in HK and this IP address is in NYC, supposedly, but I'd still venture given the changes that it's at least a meat puppet account.  If HQG wants to prove it's not him he could take part in patrolling further POV edits by such accounts, as one way to avoid guilt by association, though.  That it might be just someone whose only interet was in looking up and "fixing" this entry is possible, but unlikely.  What it does demonstrate to me that in the absence of logic, the restoration of illogic and untruth is sometime most comfortably achieved by people who can't or won't show their faces.Skookum1 17:27, 23 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I found this page on recent page patrol the other day and have been lurking until now. Skookum, you cannot revert legitimate edits even if I'm a meatpuppet, especially when I've discussed it on this talk page and you haven't. And I'm not friend of anyone. My edits are not like HG's at all so your charge of vandalism is definitely not AGF. Thank you very much. 4.236.111.46 18:39, 23 March 2007 (UTC)

text: Except that the version you've locked in is the latest even-more-POV one than the version originally established by HQG.  Yes, one POV is the other NPOV (that's the whole point) so the locked version should be at least somewhere in between the two, not firmly entrenched on the one, even harder, side.Skookum1 00:52, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm sorry about that. I'd handed out 3RR warnings to both parties, left, and upon my return nothing had improved. The protection policy dictates that I cannot get involved in the content dispute, so if I'd tried to please anyone by modifying the article before protecting it, I'd have committed a cardinal sin. Xiner (talk, email) 03:19, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: IP Address vandal

message: I'd like to point out that there is an articled called "Evolution (term)" on Wikipedia, and it's probably a good model to follow here. But please don't let this distract you from the more important issue at hand. Xiner (talk, email) 20:42, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you mean we should rename the article to "Chinaman (term)"?  Or is there a discussion you can point me to for a better idea of how to name an article like this?  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 20:43, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, articles about words are often titled as "... (term)". Now, there is Evolution (term) and Evolution (philosophy), just like there's Chinaman (term) and Chinaman (cricket). At least I see a parallel there. Xiner (talk, email) 20:51, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

text: An ethnonym (Gk. έθνος ethnos, 'tribe', + όνομα onoma, 'name') is the name of an ethnic group, whether that name has been assigned by another group (ie. an exonym), or self-assigned (ie. an autonym). For example, the ethnically dominant group in Germany are the Germans, an exonym carried into English from Latin; the Germans refer to themselves by the autonym "Deutsch".
Note the phrase "whether that name has been assigned by another group (ie. an exonym), or self-assigned", or self-assigned (ie. an autonym)" means that "ethnonym" is perfectly acceptable here, despite HGQ's complaint that Chinaman is not a "proper" name for a people; doesn't matter, it's still an ethnonym, and the jury is out as to where its origins point to, exonym or autonym (somewhere in between, I'd say).  So Chinaman (ethnonym) which I originally proposed but which was summarily dismissed without valid reason (esp. ironic when by someone who likes to use definitions), remains viable; Chinaman (person) may also have some antecedents elsewhere in Wikipedia.  Myself I think the easier thing to do here would have been to keep what is now the Disambiguation page as the main article, with the Disambiguatino page properly titled as Chinaman (disambiguation) as it should have been from the start, once this article was split off.  There's no need for anything in parantheses on this article if the DAB page is relocated.Skookum1 20:53, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

text: According to Dictionary.com, "ethnonym" is the proper name of an ethnic group.  Also, this seems to be somewhat of a new term, as I can't find it on some other online dictionaries, and it's also not in my Oxford dictionary.  I'm not sure why you object to "racial term" when "ethnonym" is acceptable to you.  I used Sambo (racial term) as a precedent.  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 21:00, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

text: Sambo has three meanings: martial art, race, and slang for sandwich. Skookum1's suggestion seems to avoid the question altogether, and it doesn't violate WP:MOS because the term "Chinaman" most frequently refers to the racial usage anyway. Xiner (talk, email) 21:13, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

text: To the ethnic usage; the presumption that it's a "racial usage" implies that its usage is POV; that's not its primary use, but its primary criticism.  It was so much the standard ethnic term, without negative connotations, that it was accepted into other languages, and also had sufficiently a non-negative sense that it could be used to refer to a a political senior/mentor.  The position that it is a "racial term" is in and of itself POV, given the weight of counter-evidence and the facts of its primary use (not the facts of the criticisms/condemnations of that usage).Skookum1 21:19, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm not sure how "racial term" implies POV usage any more than "ethnonym" does, in that I don't think it implies POV usage at all.  But I agree that we can rename this article to the "main" article and rename the DAB page with (disambiguous).  Hong Qi Gong (Talk - Contribs) 21:26, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Title of the article 

message: Well, since the citation-happy just had to remove yet another inoffensive usage from the Dab page, without bothering to search for it, I did the easy thing and googled; and look what I came up with in addition to the listing of catolgue entries for "Chinaman figurines" now on Talk:Chinaman:
*Chinaman titles at amazon.com - nothing about figurines that I can see, but including:
** Chicken Coop Chinaman by Frank Chin
**The Real Chinaman by Chester Holcombe (1895)
**Freaks of Da Industry (CD), by the Chinaman All-Stars
** engraving/Stereoview (S): Chinaman drying fish on the shore at Shaukiwan China (1902)
*French-language graphic novel/comic book named "The Chinaman" (a duster). 
I imagine that those who need to will paint the usage "Chinaman figurine" is "racial" or even "racist"; clearly it's not, and it's yet another example of the non-offensive uses the offensive-use only camp wants to deny exist.  Deny exist to the point of deleting mention of them, rather than looking them up.Skookum1 21:54, 24 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Sub-note on the now-validated Chinaman (figurine) article; this may already have some kind of mention on Chinoiserie, since Chinaman figurines were a big part of the emulation of Chinese culture and arts in the West that the whole porcelain industry is all about, and which was central to chinoiserie; not just the big vases and tableware, but the little figurines were meant as cultural compliment, they're often very humanistic in nature, and nothing derisive about them.  Yet they are called "chinamen" and "chinaman figurines" without malicious intent, as are, when discussed, images of Chinese people when portrayed on the tableware, vases or in statuary etc (cf. most editions of the Antiques Roadshow, where you'll still here some of their antiques analysts use the term very casually, and again without ill-intent.).Skookum1 22:17, 24 March 2007 (UTC)

text: Skookum1, you have a habit of discounting every voice that says the word is racist now for intellectualism, elitism, or whatever. 4.236.111.213 02:00, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: No, I'm just really good at finding all the references that aren't racist and which like other people here (Zeus, Keefer) I knew existed (and which in fact are all over the internet for people who go looking without their ethno-ideological blinkers on anyway).  Your denial that such usages exist is shoved back in your face (see above); if you want to pronounce it "elitist" and "intellectual". those traits are the turf of political organizations and the academic cabals behind political-correct "neutralization" of languages.  They can rewrite the present, and try to rewrite the future, but try as much as they like they can't rewrite the past.  They can object if somebody comes up with a cite for it, though, but they can't get that cite erased, no matter how much it disproves their ongoing and widely-promoted LIE that this word is always racist.  That may not be HQG's position, but it's certainly yours, oh nameless-I'm-too-good-to-have-a-user-name person.Skookum1 19:07, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: chinaman figurine usage

message: :I'd like to hear what others think about the sources. And Skookum1, what's your proposal for the lead? Xiner (talk, email) 15:53, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Later today.Skookum1 18:35, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, in the morning, then...it's been a long day...(it was actually sunny here! - - after 23 or 24 days of rain in March so far....ack!).Skookum1 06:52, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

text: My sources are in there as well, and I'll continue to add to them as I find time and more relevant material.--Keefer4 00:06, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Be interesting to see this and maybe compare it to CP, Reuters, etc.Skookum1 06:52, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Skookum1's and keefer4's sources

message: By the way, they've definitely put the word back into the Seinfeld reruns. I noticed the word (before I found this article) because AFAICR I hadn't encountered it before, and thought it was odd. Xiner (talk, email) 04:00, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Seinfeld episode 

message: In looking over the UBC and SFU "card catalogues" (as we used to call them, "old skool" when it was all manual, and university libraries were a sea of calm and quiet instead of a sea of cellphones and internet workgroup discussions...) there have come to light a number of papers/books of contemporary issue which either use "Chinaman" in the title or which have it as a keyword, indicating it's discussed in the text; some of these are novels like those by Frank Chin and D'Ono Kim, and there's the David Mamet collection of poetry Chinaman, which also has come to light.  It may be useful to have something like a "further reading" section (or otherwise titled, because of the nature of the content-links/cites) as obviously the "image of the Chinaman" is a theme in Chinese-American culture studies; i.e. used as a paradigm/stereotype to be overcome/addressed/or whatever; not sure what Mamet's context is but with him you never know by the title.  The idea is that, because it is part of current academic literary/academic discussion/usage, those are of interest to the article's content and provide (to me) a better counterbalance to the purely political positions of the organizational statements about the word, and accompanying news coverage of the name-change campaign et al. (which was controversial here, as I've asked Keefer4 to hopefully dig up a cite for :-), because many people felt that the placename usages were not derogatory and were historical, and it did come out whether in letters to the editor or what coverage of the potboiler/controversy there was that many people didn't see why the word was offensive, and also because the names were part of the heritage landscape; in the same era many "Siwash" placenames were also removed, but not all; depends on whether the local native people found it offensive or not).  There's enough titles alone to warrant such a section (see the Skookum1Resources page where Xiner moved my last night's citation posts to) but there also appears to be a book where it's enough of a theme in the discussion of the book/paper that libraries give it "chinaman" in its keywords listing.
This is a different set of materials than books or items which simply may use it in their texts, as with books/writings by Emily Carr, Bret Harte, Rudyard Kipling (?), [[Thomas Pynchon|Tom Pynchon (?), Tim Robbins (?), Kurt Vonnegut (I'm sure - Cat's Cradle and/orSlaughterhouse Five) and I can't see it NOT being in Joyce somewhere (along with everything else); makes me wonder what there might be in writings by other California authors, also, such as Saroyan, Steinbeck, Jeffers...and speaking of Jeffers a read through Walt Whitman will probably find something. Ezra Pound comes to mind also but I don't remember the verse, and I have no doubt it's in Graham Greene or, for that matter, Ian Fleming.  But those are all just "mentions"; the idea with them is they represent how current the word was in language, even literary language (whether literaturized as part of folk speech/idiom or just in the writer's general lexicon - e.g. as with Kipling and certainly others.  Fine; there's no way all those need to be listed, but a few of the "big name" fragments there are, from Twain to Carr to the Denny or other Seattle letter with the Christmas stuff; these would make a nice section showing "general usage" (whatever that would be titled, if titled as a section).Skookum1 23:16, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Biblliography section - current materials

message: Oxford's Dictionary of Etymology (1966) doesn't mention Chinaman but does say:
::"Chinese", pertaining to (native of) China. China, (Indian name) +ese. Earlier Chinnish and Chinian (16th century) were used; and in the 17th Century Chinenses (plural), Chinensian, Chinesian, Chino (Old Spanish), Chinois (French)...
:::1872 MEDHURST Foreigner in Far Cathay, "John Chinaman is a most temperate creature."Skookum1 23:16, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Just to note that almost seems an ironical usage, as John Chinaman is usually a harsh derisive, and rarely used in a complimentary fashion; either that or the writer is using it innocuously and/or out of its North American context of the time (being actually in the Orient and all, and there's still variation in meaning of English words from one side of the Pacific to the other).  "Chinnish" is interestingly "old" in flavour; the English/Anglo-Saxon equivalent of the Norw. kines ("Chinese") and kinesisk ("Chinese-ish", and pronounced "ch") and the Ger. Der Tschiniesischer (masc.) (sp?).Skookum1 23:20, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Oxford's Dictionary of Etymology (1966)

message: ::Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford 1954 says; The normal uses are: A Chinaman (rarely Chinese); three Chinamen (sometimes Chinese); 50,000 Chinese (sometimes Chinamen); the Chinese (rarely Chinamen). Chinee for Chinaman is a Back-Formation from Chinese pl, & being still felt to be irregular, is rare except as conscious slang, but common in such use.Skookum1 23:16, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: What's the date of our first cite for material condemning use of the word?  Seems other 1950s vintage (and probably 1960s vintage) could be consulted with different results than more recent ones, no?  It also seems that we may be able to establish a timeline up to which dictionaries did not say it was offensive, and a time from whence they did (which is probably after the first citation condemning use of the word, if that first citation can be found, given that of course not everything in the universe is online...well, not yet, anyway....).Skookum1 23:25, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I suspect it's probably in the 1970s or 1980s. I am doing a research project on 'chink' at the moment, and that word turned offensive in the 60s. I'd imagine that 'chinaman' took a little bit longer, as it is not as offensive as 'chink.' I can check this tomorrow when I get to the library.Zeus1234 00:04, 26 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English Usage, Oxford 1954