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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How about I just love her beautiful eyes?  Doesn't have to use an ethnicity.

Your mom is racist and wants to be racist, she sees herself as a nice good racist, she's not being negative, she's being complimentary!  So you should just accept it.

No.  My daughter is not Chinese and just has beautiful eyes, that is all that needs to be said.[/quote]

OP here. This! "she's not being negative, she's being complimentary!  So you should just accept it."
This is basically what she says. "But I'm saying they're beautiful!" I say, "Okay, but look, she has Asian American classmates and I do not want her learning this phrase as a descriptor for any kind of eyes," and I tried to give examples as to how you're stereotyping a certain feature and you could be saying this to someone who's Vietnamese whose parents fought the Chinese, and you're just grouping them all together, not to mention my DH and children are not even Asian!!!! So there's just pointing out their racial differences but not even in an accurate way!!
She's sooo offended I talk to her like that. Oh man.. It's sad. I wish she would care enough to try to empathize and maybe learn.[/quote]
I see why you find Chinese eyes offensive when it’s not accurate but I’m having trouble understanding the problem with almond shaped eyes. As a black person, I do have trouble when white people twist themselves into pretzels to prove they are not racist by being completely race-neutral and afraid to mention race at all. As if, acknowledging that I’m black is racist because they are “color blind,” so didn’t really notice. It’s not racist to acknowledge that race exists, that people have different features, you know? It’s not an insult; I’m not ashamed of it! [/quote]

This explains about almond eyes: it's a white man's ecoticism of a characteristic they generalize of a whole race: https://laurenandvanessa.com/how-to-describe-asian-eyes/

In regards to the "colorblind" thing, that's how my parents claim to be. I'll mention although I wasn't planning to, that my husband is a black man. My parents can't even say he's a black man. It's really weird. They think accepting that they are white is separating or dividing us. Instead they just avoid all talk of race and act like racism is not an issue. But then they say things like Chinese eyes and once again say it has nothing to do with race and/or it's just a comment on physical characteristics, but they still cannot accept they might need to be a bit more sensitive...[/quote]

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