Showing posts with label language. Show all posts
Showing posts with label language. Show all posts

2021-02-24

The Unspoken Privilege – English Privilege

We all know what White Privilege is but no one seems to speak about English Privilege.

English privilege is simply the ability of English language speakers to get by practically anywhere in the world without learning another language. It brings with it a sense of entitlement. English speakers get annoyed when the have to read subtitles because everything should be created for them. They go bonkers when being forced to read French on cereal boxes.

English privilege is, of course, strongly aligned with White Privilege.

The world has English Privilege because of British imperialism and colonialism, “the sun never sets on the British Empire”. The British hordes scoured the earth looking for riches and in so doing pillaged and enslaved it’s peoples. Indeed the whole basis for the sense of Western European superiority is the idea that the societies most successful at warfare and in capturing and enslaving other people are obviously more advanced and culturally superior to the people they enslave.

This relates directly to the idea that societies based on living in harmony with nature are primitive and those based on dominating nature are civilized.

People willing to live peacefully in harmony with nature are obviously inferior to these more advanced societies, at least that is the rationalization the White Supremacists use to justify themselves.

2019-04-24

Primitive vs Civilized Societies

As someone born in 1950 and raised and educated in a Eurocentric culture I learned early that civilized societies are intellectually, socially, and technologically superior to primitive societies. This despite the fact that the indigenous peoples of this land I was born on have for centuries had their own distinct languages, long tradition of passing down oral history, sophisticated social structures, and technologies well suited to the land they live on.

Reflection on actual facts indicates the reality is that the real difference between civilized and primitive societies is that one is based on trying to conquer nature while the other is based on living in harmony with it and only one by it's very existence threatens the future of the human species.