First, I hate saying “Trump’s America.” Like no. He’s one guy with one bad hairstylist in one white house that finds itself in one city that’s, I guess, fine (sorry, DC, we both know it’s true) . He is not Leo DiCaprio circa 1997–there is no omnipresence/omnipotence here.
But now that my disclaimer is out of the way, there is still obviously a tide of white resentment that brought Trump to power. That tide of white resentment is as old and grounded as whiteness itself, but its spot in the limelight as of late (pushing all levers of governance) has made it a much more overt part of daily national life.
People who come from other countries, or who are labeled as other than white, of course, have always borne and continue to bear the full weight of this pathology. As someone who studies Latin America, though, I have noticed some palpable changes in how people interact with what I do, particularly when it comes to my language teaching.
As many of you know, learning a language is hard. It’s a real struggle. Being able to confidently communicate who you are to the world (which is really what language has been invented to do in our need/desire to create communities) in a tongue that is not the one you grew up speaking takes an almost herculean amount of effort. And yes, it is easier for some people than others. But it’s never easy, per se.
That’s true for any language. The relentless wheels of cultural valuation obscure this fact, though. What I mean is this: languages are assigned a value. French, Spanish, Arabic, German, Russian, Tagalong, Japanese, and Portuguese are all ranked according to this hidden system of worth, and in this system, Spanish and Portuguese sit near the bottom.
People come to take Spanish and Portuguese because they’re looking for the easy “A” that they don’t think they can get in Latin. Spanish and Portuguese are “simple.” They don’t contain great literature, like French, or philosophy, like German. They are the languages of spring break and soccer. No one expects them to require any work.
Of course, Spanish is the second-most spoken language on the planet after Chinese. The first novel ever was written in Spanish. Brazil is the eighth-largest economy in the world and Portuguese is skyrocketing as an international communication language not just in South America, but also in Southern Africa.
These are complex languages, with complex grammars and complex regionally specific vocabularies that lend endless shades of meaning to speech. But like people expect tacos to be cheap, they always expect Portuguese and Spanish to be simple, which of course reflects an insidious racism that holds that the people who speak them are similarly simple.
Most students end up in the class fishing for a good grade. Others see Narcos or Cidade de Deus and basically want to talk like Pablo Escobar. It’s strange and a bit upsetting to see how transparently we stereotype and value something that is inherently outside of value.
That’s what racism as a systemic and diffuse engine of society does.
WanderWoman 