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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Current usage from Wikipedia:

American English:
Some in the United States consider "Oriental" an antiquated, pejorative, and disparaging term. John Kuo Wei Tchen, director of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute at New York University, said the basic critique of the term developed in the 1970s. Tchen has said, "With the anti-war movement in the ’60s and early ’70s, many Asian Americans identified the term ‘'Oriental'’ with a Western process of racializing Asians as forever opposite ‘others’."[7] In a press release related to legislation aimed at removing the term "oriental" from official documents of the State of New York, Governor David Paterson said, "The word ‘oriental’ does not describe ethnic origin, background or even race; in fact, it has deep and demeaning historical roots".[8][/quote]

I guess John Kuo Wei Tchen is just too deep for me.  I would have thought, by that logic, calling Europeans Europeans would also make them "forever other" than Americans.  And it also does not denote ethnic origin, background or even race, since "European" covers a wide variety of all these as well.  I guess I can not go to "Europe", but have to go to Switzerland, Hungary, and Italy.   I guess "Africans" is also bad, since this is also a diverse group of ethnicities, backgrounds, and races.  Too bad, because "Oriental", "European", and "African" are convenient words. Also, I wish Paterson had said what these deep and demeaning historical roots are, so he could enlighten us.  I wish somebody would give me a concrete example of somebody who used the word in an obviously demeaning way. I get that "chinks" is a bad word.  I get that "nips" is a bad word.  I still don't get "Oriental".  Words with 4 syllables just don't make really demeaning curse words.  Oh well.  If only somebody would give me a concrete example of this being used in an insulting way, I could give up this obsession.  But I really feel annoyed that somebody tells me some word is bad and can only give weird reasons for this.  Why should I listen to such a person?  oh well!
[/quote]

Okay, I'll bite- got to use that humanities graduate degree for something! European and African are neutral terms because they are the actual names of the continents containing multiple countries. Asian would be the equivalent- the name of the continent containing the places OP's husband is going. Oriental, on the other hand, is derived from the Latin for 'eastern" and represents a European perspective because Asia is to the east of Europe. In academic circles Oriental became a loaded term after Edward Said's book Orientalism outlined the ways Europeans have constructed images of Asians for their own purposes. In academia it is considered more old-fashioned and out of touch than offensive.

Now you can legitimately argue that Europe and Africa are the names of those continents in English and so represent an outsider's view also, but the equivalent term would be Asia, not the Orient. [/quote]

I normally hear Far East and Near East, they are not names of continents but clearly represent the European view of where these places are, and I have never heard that these words are offensive[/quote]

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