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Notes -
Good luck explaining why 'Aborigine' is now frowned upon, while 'Aboriginal' is fine.
I have heard people explain something about how 'Aborigine' is a noun and 'Aboriginal' is an adjective, and a clipping of 'Aboriginal person' is better because it acknowledges their humanity in a way that 'Aborigine' supposedly does not. Or sometimes you just get vague waffle about how somehow 'Aborigine' has racist connotations from the colonial past that 'Aboriginal' does not. Now as Amnesty's own link some want to move the treadmill again to 'First Nations', a term borrowed from Canada (and not, contra the article, actually supported or used by a large number of Aboriginals).
It's all just... extraordinarily tiresome, petty language policing as if the letter E does some sort of psychic harm that AL does not, all as a substitute for any policy that might actually improve anybody's lives.
That is similar to the debates regarding “colored person” vs. “person of color” and “Jew” vs. “Jewish person,” where the first is often considered offensive, while the second is preferred. There was also an amusing debate in the autism world, now largely settled, on whether “autist” and “autistic person” are offensive. Advocates declared the terms demeaning, scolding anyone who didn’t say “person with autism.” The autists themselves found that view retarded and continued to use the older and simpler terms.
An associate of mine asked several autistic people with autism what terminology they preferred; one respondent rather crankily stated the View that the entire debate was a disingenuous attempt to wave a shiny object in front of them, in order to gain anti-ableist credit without having to do anything inconvenient such as making workplaces and hiring processes less Kafkaesque.
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