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College student cries 'bias' after receiving hello in Japanese from worker at campus restaurant

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Naw, rude people and mindless/thoughtless people are a reality of life. I'm not a road rager. I just chalk it up to human nature. I go out of my way not to inconvenience people when driving and otherwise.

I have found the secret to driving in rush hour traffic: books on tape. Specifically, I have been checking out audio courses from our public library from The Great Courses Company, which puts college level courses on CD you can listen to in the car. It's hard to get too upset when you are busy listening to a course on "The Western Intellectual Tradition", or the history of ancient China, or really learning the nitty gritty of Einstein's theory of relativity. Some guy cuts you off? Meh, whatever. How do time and space distort around a black hole anyway?
 
I mean it would be kind of annoying if I was an Asian-American from Wisconsin and people greeted me with language of whatever Asian ethnicity they thought I was but whatever. I wouldn't go complain about it or anything maybe just let the person know they are ignorant.

I do exactly that in Spanish because I look to associate with Spanish speaking people. I wouldn't care if someone whom I was going to filter out anyway thought I was ignorant. I sometimes "practice my Spanish" with my American team lead if I want to say something about my phone interviews and efforts to seek employment elsewhere without it turning into office gossip. He and I are the only ones on the team who speak Spanish. By the way, my team lead talked me into waiting until Labor Day to leave.
 
Seriously? If anyone would be offended by this they need to see a mental health professional. To be offended even in the slightest by someone trying to say ' hello ' is absurd. Have we really come down so far that an attempt to say hello to someone in a different language causes offence?

Get a grip.
 
Ciao to everyone, whether Italian or not, whether Italian but not able to speak it, be offended, I don't care.

How about German ' Hallo ' did I offend you , I don't care. lol

How about Korean ' 여보세요 '

This whole thing about being offended by someone saying hello is absurd.
 
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An interesting point was made in the 1980s by Thomas Sowell regarding federal agencies. Each of the hundreds of such agencies was created with a mandate, but they often gradually expanded the scope of their activities. When your personal status and the paycheck of your people depend on demonstrating a "need" for the agency to move forward, you will become very creative and find new reasons to take actions. The point is that circumstances can lead people to believe the "fight" must go on, sometimes because they benefit from pretenses or exaggerations of conflicts, and sometimes because they define themselves by actions in such conflicts. The effect is greater, of course, when reacting to the questionable choices of others in a very public manner conveys a sense of "caring": the objection and the institutionalization of an entire protocol for such objections is a very sophisticated way to signal on "whose team" you're playing. Being offended means you're the "right kind of people," one of the "good guys."

Of course, to anyone who is not massively partisan and politicized, this is just baloney and utter nonsense, as it should be. There is a nuance between asking yourself how your comments might affect other people before speaking and policing what others are saying to each other just in case you might disagree with them about what constitutes an acceptable risk of making someone else uncomfortable. Being concerned for others and polite is something every sane person tries to do, assuming they understand it's easier to get anything done when others are in good dispositions to help them out. Policing speech is not only profoundly unwise for reasons neither I nor anyone should not have to explain, but which we seem to need to explain. You, like anyone, have only limited knowledge at your disposition, just as a limited capacity to retain logical consistency. If you can be wrong, and if others can be wrong, allowing for contrarian arguments to emerge is the only sane thing to do.

That point is at the core of the argument of John Stuart Mills: if you censor people, you will invariably censor the very people who are the likeliest to force you to reconsider your conclusions. It is also at the heart of Karl Popper's Open Society. A utopian vision is by definition not subject to the possibility of being overthrown by the accrual of new evidence and consequently also must be totalitarian: it must be expressed to the exclusion of all other visions. Yet, our best understanding of the world is at best provisory understanding: we never know when a theory is true, only when it is false. To shield an idea or a set of ideas from the possibility of being falsified by facts is to make it extraordinarily dangerous.


It's possible many of these kids are unwise because they're young, though it is quite ironic that many of these people study philosophy, history or sociology. Their hands are mere clicks and inches away from the books that contain these warnings, with arguments and ideas that were filtered for them by the experience of centuries of human life. These ideas that still resonate with us after all the caprice and the whims of both time and fortune, good and bad, are probably what we have that is the closest to the truth. But who will manage to convince an otherwise extremely smart sociology Ph.D. living a 2-and-a-half apartment and who almost certainly is not paid as much as his or her ego commands that teaching classics to their students might make the world a better place than instilling in them the same resentment that slowly chips away at their own capacity to enjoy a smile? The proverbial well-furnished ball sack would be in order.
 
I mean it would be kind of annoying if I was an Asian-American from Wisconsin and people greeted me with language of whatever Asian ethnicity they thought I was but whatever. I wouldn't go complain about it or anything maybe just let the person know they are ignorant.

Come the holidays, wish me a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hanukkah --- it's the thought that counts!
 
What is a bias incident?
A bias incident is conduct that discriminates, stereotypes, excludes, harasses or harms anyone in our community based on their identity (such as race, color, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, disability, age, or religion).

Bias may stem from fear, misunderstanding, hatred or stereotypes. It may be intentional or unintentional.
 
I wonder if she wishes black students good morning in Maasai or Ashanti. And for Asians, why Japanese? Why not some other Asian language? And if she thinks you look Italian, does she wish you buongiorno? Just curious about her thought process.

If you're Italian, you don't say buongiorno unless you're eighty-five years old.

You say: "Ehhhh, how YOU doin?"

 
I mean it would be kind of annoying if I was an Asian-American from Wisconsin and people greeted me with language of whatever Asian ethnicity they thought I was but whatever. I wouldn't go complain about it or anything maybe just let the person know they are ignorant.

I should be greeted with a stein of beer and crushing slap on the back and challenged to a flyte (think early Norse version of a rap battle), like some of my whiter ancestors would do and some of the clan still does.
 
Seriously? If anyone would be offended by this they need to see a mental health professional. To be offended even in the slightest by someone trying to say ' hello ' is absurd. Have we really come down so far that an attempt to say hello to someone in a different language causes offence?


Some people are offended even by "Merry Christmas!"
Now even by a "Hello!" in another language.
Too bad .....
 
I still can't tell if over-sensitive people like this actually exist, or if the news knows that people with a certain worldview simply like to imagine all racism as over-embellished. This specific instance seems more debatable, the employee definitely shouldn't have assumed that, simply as it could make the customer feel a bit awkward, but of course it was obviously not bias. People like this, and the flurry that surrounds people like this, detract from actual racism that does exist, against Asian Americans, as well as other minorities.
 
I still can't tell if over-sensitive people like this actually exist, or if the news knows that people with a certain worldview simply like to imagine all racism as over-embellished. This specific instance seems more debatable, the employee definitely shouldn't have assumed that, simply as it could make the customer feel a bit awkward, but of course it was obviously not bias. People like this, and the flurry that surrounds people like this, detract from actual racism that does exist, against Asian Americans, as well as other minorities.

I think being racially profiled by the help qualifies as “actual racism” no matter how well intentioned. And yeah, encountering rubes blown away by the idea that there is such a thing as Asian Americans and they don’t all speak Japanese or “Chinese” is a source of irritation in the Asian American community.
 
I think being racially profiled by the help qualifies as “actual racism” no matter how well intentioned. And yeah, encountering rubes blown away by the idea that there is such a thing as Asian Americans and they don’t all speak Japanese or “Chinese” is a source of irritation in the Asian American community.

I agree that it's rude and irritating, but "racism" by definition has to be either "discrimination" or in some way negative treatment of someone. They weren't treated negatively, just differently. In order for something to be "bias" it has to have some sort of hierarchy, whereas in this case it seems more like just ignorance.
 
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