#Meaning of chinese fire drill professional

#Meaning of chinese fire drill professional

It’s crude language which I definitely agree would have no place in a professional journal, or in a conference speech, but I’m not sure I would agree that in itself it’s derogatory in all contexts.Īnyway, it’s not a conversation for this post so I think the term is best removed. Certainly, I believe gendered insults (bitch, whore, cunt, …) are problematic, but something like “tits up” is just saying “it fell over on its back”. Maybe there is a wider conversation to be had about this term, since I’m not sure that simply saying “tits” is derogatory. So when something goes completely tits-up due to incompetence… For those reading later, it used to be here: It isn’t important to keep that term in there so I will remove it. I don’t regard my blog as being the same as articles in a professional journal - more like social conversation amongst friends - and honestly I’ve never before considered the term “tits up” to be offensive when used in that context.īut that could just be my own prejudices at play, and although this isn’t a professional venue it is a public one where I don’t know all of the people observing. Yes, I see your point that the term could be offensive and I’d like to confirm that it was used without any bad intent! But once they grow up and are sent into the wider world we could not expect them to be able to justify continuing to call their game “Catch the Nigger”, right? It wouldn’t be their fault that they were raised in a society that taught them something so dysfunctional, but once they were educated about it there would be no argument for continuing to use the term. They will have no way to know that it would be offensively racist to the wider world.

They will quite possibly have a great time playing the game. So, knowing all of that, is someone who persists in calling it “Chinese Whispers” being racist?Īs a hypothetical thought experiment, what if I raise a group of children in isolation from the world and teach them a game that I tell them is called “Catch the Nigger” where one of them blacks up their face and is hunted by the others. The rest of the world calls the game “Telephone”. At best it seems to suggest that communicating with Chinese people will lead to confusion it very possibly implies that Chinese people are inferior to colonial-era British people. The evidence seems quite strong that the phrase “Chinese Whispers” has a pejorative meaning. This article doesn’t ask if people playing a game called Chinese Whispers without any knowledge of the origin of the term are being racist.

It seems rather obvious that if someone has no idea that they are doing something racist then they by definition are not, because racism requires intent. If that’s the case, I’m afraid this is not a very interesting argument to me. a group of children playing a game they know to be called Chinese Whispers are not being racist if they are not aware of the possible racist origin of the name.

Your argument appears to be that intent is the determining factor as to whether something is racist or not, i.e. I have never heard the game of Chinese whispers referred to as telephone before so I suspect that most people in UK would be unfamiliar with it also (similar to how we know the song as “okey cokey” but the rest of the world knows it as “hokey pokey”). I have been using the term “Chinese whispers” all my life (though not often, as I kind of grew out of this game fairly early on) without any thought to its origin. So when something goes completely wrong due to incompetence or stupidity leading to mass confusion, it got called a Chinese firedrill, the implication being that Chinese are stupid, and they can’t communicate clearly. It basically got blamed on the Chinese for being stupid. Chinese firedrill is named after a fire drill done on a ship with Chinese crew who didn’t understand what was going on, the end result being it all got screwed up. You may not know, because I didn’t know until I looked it up very recently, that the term is a very colonial one (late 19th, early 20th century British empire) and refers to a game which most of the rest of the world knows as “ Telephone“.Īs far as I have been able to determine, Chinese whispers is derived from another phrase, Chinese fire drill. Here’s something I’ve been pondering recently.