He’s Coming to Terms With New Attitudes

In recent years we have refined the names we give to the various races, so that black has replaced Negro, Asian has replaced Oriental, and Latino has replaced Hispanic and other variations.

These changes reflect the contemporary unpopularity of racist attitudes; they are an attempt to call people what they want to be called, not what the once-dominant “white” race called them.

The new words, I would say, are not entirely successful, nor are the arguments against the old ones entirely without flaw. Like William Safire, I regret that Oriental has fallen into disfavor.

“As an adjective,” Safire wrote in “What’s the Good Word?,” “ Oriental has delicious overtones of mystery and spice, and I’ll continue to use it.”

A reader rebuked him, pointing out that Asians do not think of themselves as mysterious, and alleging that its use betrayed Safire’s “ethnocentrism.”

Another reader observed that Orient is also ethnocentric because it means “where the sun rises,” or the East. “Standing where?” he asks. “In Washington?”

But yet another reader pointed out that Asia itself is from a Semitic root meaning “rise,” as in “sunrise,” and thus has the same meaning as the Latin-based Orient . Besides, do we not refer to Europe and America historically as the West? West as seen from where? The important thing is that if Oriental offends Asians it must be discarded by all decent people. Like Safire, though, I will hate to see it go.

A more peculiar phenomenon than the decline of Oriental is the fairly recent adoption of the word Anglo for white or Caucasian.

Attorney Steven Gourley writes to complain about the use of Anglo as an adjective for “English speaking” or a noun meaning Caucasian. He encloses two clippings from The Times to document this use.

“A nglo is and always has been a pejorative used by Spanish-speaking inhabitants to describe English-speaking Caucasians,” he says. “It is not a flattering term. Certainly The Times would not, as a matter of policy, refer to Caucasians as honkies, Similarly, The Times would not refer to black people and Spanish-speaking people by some of the pejoratives which have been invented by bigoted Caucasians over the years. In short, it is unreasonable for The Times to refer to a vast segment of its readership using a pejorative popular among a certain ethnic group.

“In addition to being insulting,” he adds, “ Anglo is inaccurate. Anglo , of course, means English. Therefore its use to refer to Caucasians of French, Irish, Italian, German or other ancestry is simply not accurate.”

Gourley has certainly exposed a nerve. But his solution--evidently he prefers the long-since discredited Caucasian --is as bad as the problem. Caucasian was the invention of the German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenback (1752-1840), who divided mankind into five great families--Caucasian, Mongolian, Malayan, Ethiopian, and American (presumably American Indians.) It is as ridiculous to lump East Indians and Scots together as Caucasians--that is, the white race--as it is to call all Latinos American Indians.

It is equally ridiculous to call all Americans of European stock Anglos. The Times seems to have evolved a double-jointed style by which people of European stock are called Anglos when they are being compared (as in school enrollment statistics) with Latinos, blacks and Asians, but are called whites when they are being compared only with blacks.

If Anglo implies “English-speaking,” this seems to suggest that Asians and Latinos are not English-speaking, which is insulting and not true.

Evidently we find ourselves in this embarrassing predicament because of our wish to be fair and non-racist. We have deferred to blacks, we have deferred to Asians. But I am not sure that all Latinos embrace the term Latinos . Oddly, Chicanos had a brief ascendancy in the 1960s, but now is rarely heard.

No one denies that white is unsatisfactory. It retains an essence of white racism and superiority, suggesting lily white and pure white . Also, we whites are not white, any more than Asians are yellow (or, for that matter, than blacks are black.) The term white is at best an inadequate approximation (of pink, beige, gray?), but it’s the best we honkies have.

But Mr. Gourley is right. Anglo is inaccurate and pejorative, and as a Welshman, I resent it.