flowerpower
Member
Wife's side of the family is Chinese.
When one understands a wee bit'o the language,
one finds that slights against non-Chinese are common.
Racism never sits well with someone with a well-adjusted moral compass but xenophobia is just as bad - if not even worse! - in my opinion.
I mean, they're very similar things.
Something as small as an accent or a dialect can attract just as much hostility from some people as a person's outward appearance.
One of the things that I find really disgusting is when a person speaking a language other than their first mishears someone and asks them to repeat themselves, only to have that person get annoyed at them and start speaking slowly and talk down to them like they're an idiot.
I guess verbal communication is a very imperfectly evolved tool and art and a human invention to boot. There are always bound to be problems as we use it. What's the alternative? Insist that every person learn every language and have the ability to enunciate flawlessly or a worldwide, internationally enforced language of some kind to mitigate some momentary awkward events?
It's kind of cool how such a large portion of the world seems to speak English though - one of the rare but understated convenient consequences of bloodthirsty English colonialism. Ironically, in the 21st Century, it's become a sweet, unifying thing internationally.
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