‘Negro,’ ‘Oriental’ and ‘Indian’ to Be Scrubbed from All Federal Laws | Hacker News Reader

‘Negro,’ ‘Oriental’ and ‘Indian’ to Be Scrubbed from All Federal Laws

theroot.com

7 pointsAJAlabs13 comments

I hope a record is kept of the changes, I bet they'd be really interesting from a historical perspective.

I absolutely agree. I'll be keeping an eye on the progress of this.

Can somebody help me understand why "Oriental" is considered so offensive? It seems about as offensive to me as calling Europe, etc. "the West". Perhaps it's just guilty by association with colonialism and outmoded racial attitudes?

Isn't it kinda offensive to lump every east Asian group together?

OK, maybe it's not offensive. Isn't it odd that US laws target Orientals? What is an Oriental? Are sub-continental Indians oriental, are Australian aboriginals, do we care about natives of eastern Russia?

> Perhaps it's just guilty by association with colonialism and outmoded racial attitudes?

That's the main reason "Negro" (which was, for a time, favored, even among the population the label was used for) and "Indian" are considered offensive in many uses today by the groups they have been used to refer to ("Indian" has some additional issues.)

Headline (and article) are wildly inaccurate. The bill in question [0] amends exactly two federal laws (one section of each), not "all federal laws", to change the use of terms for racial/ethnic groups: the "Department of Energy Organization Act" and the "Local Public Works Capital Development and Investment Act of 1976".

That's it.

[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/114th-congress/house-bill/4238...

replaces "Oriental" with "Asian American", what if the law isn't in reference to American persons?

when only Asian Americans are eligible for a visa Congress is going to git blame obama

I was wondering about that with "Indian," too. If people slip up and replace "Indian" (from India) with "Native American," that's a completely different meaning.

Nearly none of these belong in the law, no matter what word you use.

The one exception is that we need to way to refer to tribal lands, tribal law, tribe membership, and similar. I think "tribe" and "tribal" are normally the best terms for this. In some cases, "North American Aboriginal" or "Hawaiian Aboriginal" would be more appropriate.

How is this done? I've heard so much about how intractably large the current body of law is. Can you really just grep through the legal database like that? Can I grep through the legal database?

I can think of many other changes we should make, if it's that easy.

> How is this done?

Its not: the headline (and source article) are inaccurate (and the article the source article is based on does not make the claim that all federal laws or affected, it seems to be one minor media outlet misreading a report in a different minor media outlet, and not bothering actually reviewing the readily-available official documents.) The bill at issue changes language in two specific federal laws, it does not do so for "all federal laws".

A lot of it is here:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text

Of course the hard part isn't looking for things to change.

It would be interesting to see the usage of 'Negro' and 'Oriental' etc in the Statutes at Large attributable to each political party over the years.

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