#mocking languages

[thisisracism]

seeing an example sentence using AAVE in a GED prep book as an example of “incorrect grammar”

This is racism. AAVE and white ("standard") English are different dialects.

[thisisracism]

our teacher threatening to give us a negative score (punishment) in our school over speaking Turkish.

they say it’s a ‘safeguarding issue’.

This is racism.

Speaking a different language should never be a reason for punishment.

[thisisracism]

idk if this is accepted in the asks

but uhh

I am Asian, and when I was in primary school I really disliked birthdays because one time the teacher was like "what if we sung happy birthday but in different languages" (we switched teachers every year so there were different things), and Chinese was one of the languages, and basically, some people would just straight up sing stuff like "hanky panky shanghai" instead of the actual lyrics :(

It's from a long time ago, but I'm still pissed about it. I also noticed that my little brother was saying stuff like "ching chang" etc one day, which was basically like, mocking Chinese and possibly other languages. So now I'm also worried for him bc he's very young.

:/

This is racism.

Elementary school kids tend to repeat racism they've heard from their peers and parents, though they can come up with some pretty brutal stuff on their own. Your brother will probably grow out of it, especially if you explain to him why it's a mean thing to say.

[thisisracism]

Am not Indigenous American but every time I talk about indigenous languages (im very interested in language learning) my father makes fun of them and insults their names. He said: "Puruborá (Tupian language) sounds like the name of an contagious illness" and I'm pretty sure this is racism

This is racism.

[thisisracism]

@rhythmdestroyer3 said:

TW: racial trauma, tone policing, gaslighting, verbal/emotional abuse

.

So one of the worst racist experiences I had was from my mom and stepdad. It actually led me to moving out and cutting contact.

For context, I am mixed race South Asian. My dad's side is from India and my mom's side is white (mostly German and a tiny bit Irish). I am on the lighter side, but i would prefer the term racially ambiguous. That seems to fit the experiences I have had.

But anyway, I had noticed for a long time that we did not see eye to eye when it came to issues of race. They would constantly say all these microaggressions like how Indian food looks gross or that I smell like curry.

Would also make fun of Indian accents.

And that's not getting into people of other racial backgrounds. But they like to pretend like they're very accepting.

But it is extremely tokenizing, like patting themselves on the back because my mom married a brown man and we are her mixed kids, and so on.

It's really gross and dehumanizing in a way.

So we had this massive fight because they were trying to tell me colonization was a good thing. Considering how half my family is from India and suffered from very brutal colonization from the British, I called bullshit on that.

And they were trying to justify imperialism in the Philippines but then it just derailed from that initial argument. I was just trying to explain like, hey, maybe let's not try to say that genocide, elsavement, and theft of Indigenous land is a good thing. But no, I'm the one in the wrong.

I was very upset after this whole incident and tried to explain how I felt but they did not listen and I felt very unheard. I literally wrote out a whole letter and read it to them at dinner and they started saying "I'm not racist, my family never owned slaves, you're just overreacting, we raised you better than this, you're too PC and we feel like we have to watch what we say around you." Also while slamming dishes around in the sink.

I talked to multiple therapists and they were all like, "You've experienced racial trauma," but it was more than just that.

Because I felt like they betrayed me and stabbed me in the back. And I had no way to even talk about it with them because they were the ones causing me so much pain.

I should also say. This is not the first time l've ever experienced racism either since I have lived my life as a mixed person, but it just felt so visceral and I don't know how to describe it. It just hurt so much coming from people who supposedly had my back but when it came down to it, they discarded me like it meant nothing.

This is racism.

I'm sorry that your family, who are supposed to support you, have done these things.

[thisisracism]

So I almost never talk in my day to day and bc of that I have a tendency to slur my words when I do talk. One of the common problems I have is merging my Ls and Rs (ie. Saying “rock” instead of lock”)

I’m Southeast Asian ethnically but I was born in America and I only speak English. Yet every time I have an L/R merger, I have a few friends who start to mock it by pulling back their eyes and putting on a fake Chinese accent???? I’m not even Chinese btw

Like way to go now I REALLY don’t want to talk 😭🙏

This is racism and ableism.

Neither accents nor speech disabilities are acceptable to mock.

[thisisracism]

saying one word in japanese on a game as a joke ("yuri?" btw, though I didn't say it romanized just typing that here for simplicity) and getting told "nobody cares that you're korean shut up".... :/

This is racism.

Asian languages aren't interchangeable. And making jokes in non-English languages is a common pattern in internet jokes; it shouldn't be any different if it's a non-Latin alphabet.

[thisisracism]

My dad, who is white along with my entire family, said to my mom "are we Vietnamese" because she mispronounced "snatch" as "smack" when we saw a fluffy little dog without it's owner in our neighborhood (she said "I just wanna snatch him up!")

It made me very uncomfortable even if it was a joke

This is racism.