My Pakistani friend at high school always took great delight in calling him self a Paki. After all, he reasoned, Afgahnistan is the land of the Afghans, Kazahkstan is the land of the Kzahaks, so Pakistan must be the land of the Pakis. But there we go.
I had to change manage a change on the ethnic apperance codes of the police system I once worked on, to change 'Oriental' to 'Chinese, Japanese or other East Asian'. It was a lot more effort than one supposes.
Note this is ethnic apperance (the IC codes, you may hear occasionally on the bill), not ethnicity, which is a self defined code, and something quite different.
You may have a North European Apperance (IC1) but self define yourself as ethnically Jamaican.
And it's an important distinction... how someone looks is important for identification, whereas someone's ethnicity is maybe be about how you deal with them.
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Date: 2007-01-29 06:35 pm (UTC)I had to change manage a change on the ethnic apperance codes of the police system I once worked on, to change 'Oriental' to 'Chinese, Japanese or other East Asian'. It was a lot more effort than one supposes.
Note this is ethnic apperance (the IC codes, you may hear occasionally on the bill), not ethnicity, which is a self defined code, and something quite different.
You may have a North European Apperance (IC1) but self define yourself as ethnically Jamaican.
And it's an important distinction... how someone looks is important for identification, whereas someone's ethnicity is maybe be about how you deal with them.