Fwiw, the patient records I have from the late 19/early 20th century from California don’t refer to Asians as “Oriental”. They’re “Yellow” (and that was among the nicer things they were called…)
I won’t even mention the myriad of terms used to refer to Black and Hispanic/Latin@/etc Americans (regardless of ethnic heritage).
People retire archaic words to standardise things all the time, that doesn’t mean words are only ever pulled due to offence. Could just be a cultural thing, it’s hardly a big thing in the US, but it’s definitely a non-issue everywhere else, including amongst actual Asians. I’d hate to see a Brit get banned off this site for not fitting into a cultural norm.
The fact that it’s a regional descriptor that doesn’t explicitly mention an ethnicity is what makes it different from “Hebrew”. It’s got a much wider context and the way people go about getting offended by things, they’ll want to pull oriental from describing items pretty soon too. I’m not removing a perfectly viable word from my vocabulary because someone gets hurt, especially if it depreaciates the number of ways I can describe something.
Once upon a time, “Oriental” was also used to refer to Middle Easterners – including Arabs, Persians, and Jews (and including Jews living in the West). Now, it’s basically synonymous with East Asians (Japanese, Chinese, Koreans), and not so much even people from Southeast Asia. So it’s really not so broad anymore.
Even the The Asian-American Journalists’ Association don’t call Oriental a “slur”:
Words like “Chinaman” they do label as slurs.
God forbid we actually respect people’s terms for self-identification, and refrain from using identifiers they find offensive. After all, who are they to inconvenience those among us who have always enjoyed default socio-political primacy? Don’t they know who’s in charge?
Michael Brown may not have been friendly or even nice. But he was surrendering and his hands were up and there was plenty of safe space for Wilson. I do mourn him and include him in the gruesome body count.
I wouldn’t put much stock into any decision made by the Washington State legislature, if you know their recent history of feebleness and do-nothingness. Also, the term ‘East Asian’ is rarely, if ever, used in the Pacific Northwest to describe folks from Korea, China, Japan, Philippines etc. The new (circa 1990s) term of art is ‘Asian and Pacific Islanders.’