I rarely bring this up because it feels like fairly silly and low-stakes compared to all the other effects of american imperialism, but one of the funniest things when Americans deny that living in the imperial core and the center of global cultural hegemony confers them any sort of privilege over people from the imperial periphery is that like. In order for this conversation where you tell me you have no privilege over me to even be able to take place one of us had to learn the other's language, and it wasn't you.
I think the fact that by default the onus of learning the other's language to enable communication is always put on the other side is a pretty significant privilege on the cultural front.
Not to detract from your point, because you are correct. However, something that I feel is always overlooked in this conversation is just how much by design this is.
(Caveat, I'm in my 30s, and don't have kids in school, so I do lack first hand knowledge of how it currently is, but from what I hear it is worse.)
When I was in school, we did not get offered to learn a second language until high-school. I remember learning that most other countries started learning at least English as a second language as early as 1st grade, and being infuriated. They force us to wait until it is harder for us to learn, and fill us with media that portrays learning another language as boring and tedious and lame. The number of books I read as a kid that had some school kid talking about "how they just picked Spanish because it's easiest" and all the same kinda stuff that perpetuates kids hating math and vegetables.
Of course, the rich kids in the private schools got to learn the languages early.
They designed it so that we have a negative perception of learning other languages, and made it as difficult for us to learn them as they could deniably get away with, to keep us ignorant of our privilege.
Without examining the mechanisms through which privilege is manufactured and maintained, we will forever be doomed to perpetuate it.
It's not about "oh we all have it so hard" it's about "if we(being us not you) work to dismantle the propaganda that makes people anti-learning in the first place then more people would take advantage of the resources that we have and would learn more about the privilege that most of them really have no idea that they have."
It's about understanding how we got here and why most people don't care in the way that makes you so mad.
I'll try to be nice and polite about it because I really think you are coming from a good place: but the thing is you are just wrong.
At least based on my perspective as part of the Latam, all the factors you mentioned were struggles for you and others from the US to learn foreing languages happened here. The difference is that the average brazilian with no classes till maybe high school, the idea learning english is hard and boring and no incitive whastover still needs to know english to get okay-ish jobs, to study in certain academic fields, even to just deal with rude turists in some places. English is more and more becaming a skill that is unacessible but we still HAVE to get.
And this is by design. Is a way to keep us in our place, if we don't understand your language the oportunities created by the US egemony are closed to us and that makes less likely for people from Latin America, specially poor and native people, to get even remotedly close to an even playing field.
The problem isn't simply that you guys don't know our languages is that not knowing our languages means nothing. Doors aren't closed to you the same way they are to us. In that way the biggest problem is that we are forced to know yours.
In Brazil in theory we learn english starting at middle school. When I went to school it was starting when we were eleven. If you ever went to an english class in most public schools or even rural private schools you know that's not really how it works. We spend ten years on the "to be" verb. English was the grade people did because it was easy since we didn't actually had to do shit. The very marjority of people I know don't know english and all the ones I know that do did not learn it from school. But all of them feel like they have to.
In a more personal level I love english, I always loved languages and I would have loved to have learned english at school for fun.
But I learned english because my parents begged from relatives and took extra hours at work to give me some classes and the classes didn't even work as much as I noticed how hard it was for them and had to find ways to make it work for me. And my parents did all that because my cousin failed a bunch of job interviews for not knowing english. They did that because according to them "knowing english was becaming less a skill that helped someone in getting a great job and more a skill you needed to have to get most jobs." Neither of my parents speak english. But they did their best so me and my brother could (mostly via making me teach my brother cause they couldn't pay lessons for the both of us).
I had none of that to help me learn spanish nor italian nor any language I would love to learn for fun if I had the time.
I didn't learn english because it was fun. My brother hates languages. He still learned english after painfull horrible lessons that made me give up on my dreams of ever being a teacher.
The problems are way deeper than your shitty educacional system and it angers people like us because we had all the same problems and were forced to learn your language anyway only to see someone go "well we never had the chance" when neither did we. And I understand that not being incentivized to learn sucks, we didn't either, but the problem is way deeper. They don't want us to learn your language. They want us to have to but fail so that can be used as a justification to deny us oportunities. Is why imigrant characthers with broken english are still a joke on your media.
And this is what this post and this conversation is about. Not knowing other languages might be a result of bad education, might even be by design. But not HAVING to DESPITE the lack of everything is a privilege. And this is the point.
