I’ve hears stories of some Americans telling other people who are speaking a non-English language “This is America, speak English!” even if the conversation has nothing to do with them. Why do they do this?
Because those Americans are entitled, insecure, ignorant, xenophobic assholes.
Just like any other asshole who gets mad about this. It isn’t a uniquely American attitude.
This is true however there are much more documented instances of this in America. Could be a pure numbers game (more people more cases) but no full proof of that.
Find proof and come back to us, then.
(I didn’t downvote you, by the way.)
Conflicts over language have been tied to other conflicts (political, cultural, war) for a very long time. Cultural genocide against indigenous people has targeted indigenous language use among young people. Many people in India have objected to the establishment of Hindi as a UN language because they fear it will advance the extinction of their own language. I’m not saying some Replacement Theory bigot kvetching because someone dared speak a language besides English is equivalent. It’s more that language does have a special place in culture in a way that is very common.
Oh really! Can you link to one of these documented instances? Since there’s so many …
Just as there are two kind of race, white and political; and there are two kinds of gender, male and political; there also are two kinds of language, English and political.
It’s called xenophobia, the fear and dislike of anything foreign. Some people believe that if your group isn’t dominant it will be dominated, and peaceful coexistence isn’t possible between different groups.
These people are afraid that, if the English language isn’t forced onto other people, one day other people will force a foreign language onto them.
Not everyone disliking something is necessarily phobic towards it. That’s just one possoble explanation.
It would greatly benefit your argument to provide another possible explanation.
They could simply
A) dislike X
B) hate/despise X
C) came to the logical conclusion, that X is bad/wrong/shouldn’t be/whatever
D) genereally mistrusting against X due to a careful nature
E) have had traumatic experience with X (e.g. Being raped/attacked by a member of a specific ethnicity) and hence totally overreacting to an otherwise harmless stimulus, even forgetting the rules of civil behaviour
Those all don’t mean there’s the medical condition of a phobia for X.
A real xenophobic has an irrational fear of anything unknown/alien. Doesn’t mean the person just hates e.g. Mexicans for no real reason. It might even like them once they get to know the better, which often just won’t happen as phobics tend to avoid the cause their phobia instead of treating it.
I just dislike the lax use of medical terms until they’re bereft of any real meaning.
So, a person who yanks “speak English!” to someone, could have many reasons to do. None are neither polite nor politically correct. While the asshole is probably just the uneducated asswipe, the phobic could be helped and probably even feels bad afterwards for being so compulsive and insulting.
Xenophobia isn’t a medical term. All the examples you listed are xenophobia.
It’s literally in the term. But yeah sure, it’s easier to just smack the same label on everything. Whatever makes you happy.
Some words just have more than one definition is all. It’s not about me, it’s about the dictionary.
They are bigoted and racist.
What gets me is when they complain about Spanish, a European language. Where does English come from, you may ask? Oh right! Europe!
So they’re proud of speaking a language that’s not even 'Merican. Learn Navajo, Comanche, or any of the several native American languages, then we’ll talk.
I like your energy!
This is it. The end. Thanks for coming to their Ted Talk.
Thanks for the outro. Ill be performing in more venues in a slice near you.
This is not an American thing. People around the world are biased against immigrants.
It’s not JUST an American thing. People are biased against outsiders and people that are different.
Ftfy
No. That’s not a fix. You’re still focusing on this being American, while it is pretty universal.
goddamn bro, just let your racist flag fly proudly huh?
You need to realize there are americans, born here, with generations going back hundreds of years, that still speak other languages. And still get the snide ‘this is america’ bullshit.
The post may include immigrants but that’s not the entire population. what a chudworthy moment.
I think you maybe read something that the op didn’t write? Pointing out that “there are racists everywhere” is in itself not a racist statement.
This is not an American thing. People around the world are biased against immigrants.
this is their statement - assuming anyone they hear not speaking english are immigrants.
it’s incorrect.
Sure it’s incorrect, but saying someone is racist because of that is asinine. It’s not like they said that they are worse people just because they’re immigrants, it was just a shortcut for saying “people who speak languages other than English in day to day conversation”. Don’t get hung up on such details.
y’all are just too racist to realize. goddamn
It’s almost funny how hung up you are on that
Funny how you have zero shits to give. Privileged life huh?
Its not incorrect. People around to world are biased against immigrants, and someone who is stupid enough to get mad at someone speaking another language is also stupid enough to assume that they are not from the US even if they were born and raised there.
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You are not making sense here. Please try to clarify your point because it seems to be disconnected from the comment you are responding to.
Reporter: [REDACTED]
Reason: rule 1Sorry but chud is not a protected class.
You will understand why better when you take a look at who they say this to and who they don’t.
This is not something that generally happens to white people speaking some French in the US. It does not raise the ire of this psychology. On the other hand, they love to target brown people speaking Spanish (almost exclusively, in fact). There is, naturally, spillover where white people speaking Spanish or brown people speaking Hindi would get targeted.
As others noted, and as these examples suggest, this is an instance of xenophobia and racism. Language is being used as a proxy, really, and provides a way for these people to unleash the frustrations they have been taught, societally, to have against them. Generally speaking, these are people that will call any brown person that speaks Spanish a “Mexican” regardless of their actual place of birth, where they were raised, or ethnic heritage.
But this is just a surfacr-level analysis. The next question is why they are taught to target people with xenophobia and racism. Why are there institutions of white supremacy? Why are their institutions of anti-immigrant sentiment? How are they materially reinforced? Who gains and who loses?
At a deeper level, these social systems are maintained because they are effective forms of marginalization. In the United States, racial marginalization was honed in the context of the creation and maintenance of chattel slavery, beginning, more or less, as a reaction to the multi-racial Bacon’s Rebellion. In response, the ruling class introduced racially discriminatory policies so that the rebelling groups were divided by race, with black people receiving the worst treatment and the white people (the label being invented for the purposes of these kinds of policies) being told they would receive a better deal (though it was only marginally so and they were still massively mistreated). This same basic play had been repeated and built upon for hundreds of years in the United States. It was used to maintain chattel slavery, Jim Crow, and modern anti-blackness. It was used to prevent Chinese immigrant laborers from becoming full citizens and becoming a stronger political influence in Western states.
It was and is used to maintain the labor underclass of the United States, which also brings us to xenophobia more specifically. The United States functions by ensuring there is a large pool of exploitable labor in the form of undocumented immigrants. It does this at the behest of the ruling class - the owners of businesses - who have much more power to dictate wages and working conditions when it comes to this labor underclass. They make more money and have more control, basically. But this pissed off and pisses off the labor over class, as they have lost these jobs (or sometimes are merely told they lost them even if they never worked them). To deflect blame away from the ruling class for imposing these working conditions wages, the ruling class instead drives focus against the labor underclass itself, as if working that job for poor pay and bad conditions their fault. This cudgel should remind you of Bacon’s Rebellion again: it divides up workers so that rather than struggle together they fight amongst themselves on the basis of race or national origin. The business owners are pleased, having a docile workforce to exploit.
So while racism and xenophobia are themselves horrific and what is behind the "Speak English!’ crowd, it is really just an expression of the society created by this system that, by its very nature , pits workers against business owners while giving business owners outsized power (they are the ruling class, after all).
Another important element to this is imperialism and how imperialist countries carefully control immigration (it used to be basically open borders not that long ago). But I’ll leave that for any follow-up questions you might have.
Sure but I’ve gotta ask: why not write 7 paragraphs of run-on sentences like a true proletarian!?
😂 why waste time say lot word when few meme do trick
Shout out to our Vietnamese & other Asian friends who get the shit thrown at them in SoCal by racist cunts.
It’s good old-fashioned xenophobia and is by no means unique to Americans or English-speakers even in the modern era. Anyone who has spent enough time in certain parts of France, Italy, or Belgium has probably encountered it at some point.
It’s everywhere but it is probably most prevalent in countries with a strong nationalist core and, in my opinion, ironically occurs most often in countries that have really fucked around with having an empire in the last century or so.
because racist people are stupid and ignorant
True.
Also, there is a psychological effect of people either feeling excluded from a conversation, or suspicious that they are being secretly insulted when they can’t understand it.
Happens in every country and in every nation. This isn’t a strictly American issue
Yep, went to france to learn french, was questioned (by an idiot) why I didn’t knew (spoke) french well.
They exist in all countries.
Edit: learn, not kearn…
Don’t you DARE speak French in France unless you’re a native speaker!
That country is the reverse complaint put forth in this thread.
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Same.
Of course, the first phrase I made absolutely certain I could rattle off was “excuse me I don’t speak French well”. Deliver that with a smile and they can be pretty damn forgiving.
Xenophobia.
They can’t be nosey if they can’t understand you.
Some people are shit
As a kid I worked fast food for a few years, and there was an “English only” on the line where customers could hear. One of our managers was Mexican, and actually enforced this pretty strongly. He once told us about when he went to a Subway and the staff was speaking what he suspected was Hindi, and explained to us all that yeah, it matters sense, you tend to get upset when you can’t understand people. They could be saying anything, making fun of you without your knowing, or whatever.
I tend to just ignore other languages (I’m in Chicagoland, there’s plenty of them) and an of the opinion that lack of exposure is one of the root causes of ethnic (and of other kinds of) intolerance. A lot of Americans live in their little rural bubbles where everything is samey and familiar, dealing with their little isolated lives, away from anyone noticably different than themselves. They’re tribalistic and comfortable there, and don’t like outsiders or change. They vote Republican because “people from the city” are bad, and they’re Democrats.
It’s not a new problem. The root philosophy in the fucking Bible is that “city people are immoral” because its all passed down by oral tradition, and its oldest stories are descended from periods when its creators were nomadic herders. Hospitality for them vs. urban hospitality are very different, and of course anecdotes get mutated through centuries of the telephone game.
TL;DR, lots of people need to meet more kinda of people and it’s been a problem since forever.
Racism
I remember smoking outside a pub near Chinatown with a mate something like ten years ago when two Chinese people went by speaking Chinese, and he said “they should be speaking English; this is Britain,” so I asked why, and he couldn’t explain why. Just on a vague principle.
I find the type of people that get angry at those that don’t speak English, usually have not a single interesting thing about them so they use English as an excuse to feel superior. It’s funny because the type to get angry at another language, rarely can speak English better than a 4th grade level.
Exactly! I have a friend who said a similar thing to his daughter, who came to him crying because her friends said she was not American enough because she wasn’t white. My friend said “you’re top of the class, excellent at sports, well spoken, well educated and very friendly and polite. They try to attack you for the sake of doing it, they try to find something bad about you, and they get nothing. So what do they resort to? Skin color!” (and yeah, I know this is about language, but it’s pretty much in line with your comment.)