French? Italian? I doubt it. (Everyone knows that “French is the most beautiful language” and also “Italian is the most beautiful language”.) But anything from Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa…? Yeah, that’s ugly and offensive. Starbucks Lady would have been all over that. Or Spanish! My god!
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I know a lady much like this. The same bitterness, the same ugliness of the soul affecting her physical appearance. The same xenophobia, the same sort of bluffing. Most likely the same feeling of despair in her life at being old and unloved, because who wants to love an abusive person? Which makes her more bitter and abusive.
This almost never ends well.
Heh, yeah, my wife and I were trying to figure out which one it is by the pictures on the walls. I named about 6 Starbucks just off the top of my head.
I guess I think Walnut Creek is more diversified because I used to play pickup soccer there regularly, and we would get all kinds of people from dozens of different countries.
Spanish always sounds pretty to me. French just sounds like two drunks slapping each other on the cheeks. :>
I can relate. Whenever my parents turned on the kitchen radio (always tuned to BBC Radio 4, 100% talk and totally awesome) I had to leave the entire ground floor of the house. Having the bits of my brain responsible for visual and audible language recognition competing for the attention of my language comprehension centre ruined any chance I had of successfully reading or studying anything at all - I’d be able to consciously interpret the strings of letters on the page into words, but after that they’d just bounce off and I’d have to stop, work out where I’d lost concentration, regain focus and try again. And again. And again. My mother, on the other hand, was some kind of freak who could read and listen and the same time (or so she claimed…)
In the case of this bitch in Starbucks, she’s in a public place, designated as a social zone where people meet to interact. That means TALKING, and she has absolutely no expectation or right not to be disturbed. If this really was all triggered by the fact she couldn’t concentrate on her laptop, preparing to deal with that situation is entirely her problem.
Side question: does her laptop have a headphone jack?
I find hearing Japanese soothing, even if I only understand a fraction of what is being said. Full disclosure: I heard nothing but Japanese from my grandparents when I was a wee kodomo and now, as an adult, hearing Japanese affects me on a subconscious level (I can’t really understand much of it anymore, tbh).
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There is one at Broadway Plaza and four more within two blocks of Broadway Plaza, including the one at the Safeway. Then at Target, then Kitty corner to Lesher. And I haven’t gone beyond Civic and Ygnacio!
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If someone sponsors the airfare, I’d be happy to test this.
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I know I have no proof of this but I do believe people experience stress when trying to recognize words within noise. Those moments trying to grok words on a shitty cellphone I think induce a cognitive cost and stress.
I’ve felt it where my attention has to work overtime to just figure out the words. I think overhearing speech that is unrecognizable causes this and older people sometimes express this with hostility and racism. A persons brain stresses out trying to grok words in a crowd that they have no ability to get so they feel stress that turns into anger of the other.
I think people like this have very little meta-cognition but I don’t think it’s much of an excuse but more an observation. I will also say this:
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Excellent point; I’m an Ohio native, and even before I moved out west, I was used to hearing various other languages when in public… just not as wide a variety as I hear now.
Seriously, though.
I’m often annoyed by most other people in general, regardless to skin color, and being able to filter them out of my immediate perception is a huge blessing.
Obligs:
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I sing in a community chorus, and quite a lot of choral masterworks are in languages other than English. Between taking Spanish in junior college and singing a lot of works in Latin, I can kinda-sorta understand Latin (better than I could write it, at least). We’ve also done enough works in German that some of that has rubbed off on me as well.
I tried Duolingo for German a while back, but found that, for me at least, it really wasn’t a substitute for proper lessons. It would tell me the “what” without telling me the “why,” and I found that frustrating. It would be a useful study aid, if I were to enroll in a class.
On the other hand, I’ve always had some interest in languages; when I was a kid, any time I looked up a word in the dictionary, I’d pay attention to the etymology. That helped me out a great deal when learning Spanish, IMO.
racism in Korea
Despite my white male privilege that seems to extend globally (I get jobs solely based on it), I’ve had some of that “Granny’s Casual Racism” tossed my way in Korea and Japan. Mostly involving being looked at as a box to check off on someone’s sexual bucket list… which despite how some guys will act about it, feels kind of gross if they’re up front and kind of heart-breaking when they’re not. Though in Japan it was more about being able to make some cute “hafu” babies.
However, no one has called me a monkey or a gorilla unlike some black expats I’ve known.
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I don’t think anyone is suggesting that you can’t find racism in every corner of the globe. The point is simply that racism existing in other places does not excuse it nor is it a reason to say a person should not be defended against a racist attack.
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For me, headphones come in really handy when screaming kids materialize at a restaurant where I’m eating. People speaking other languages doesn’t bother me in the least, even if I know just enough of the language to know that yes they’re really talking about me, but 140 dBA screaming (yes, that’s an exaggeration) is something that will bring out the Sennheisers every time.
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i think what white supremacist ideology does is emotionally contort the parameters of empathy, and if you already are emotionally underdeveloped, or taxed, or stressed, then white people will disproportionally receive the lion’s share of what little empathic labor you are willing to do.
i think saying that white supremacy is the symptom of individual lack of empathy does not properly acknowledge how systematic, structural, and societal it can be. walls exist everywhere for nonwhite people, and maybe treating it as individual lacking is not going to lead anywhere except fingerpointing.
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I don’t think anyone is suggesting that you can’t find racism in every corner of the globe…
Why does everyone here and on The Unnamed BBS of Disgruntled Exiles automatically assume every comment that isn’t “Hear! Hear!” is a disagreement? It’s a bad habit that’s got to get dropped.
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Do I do that?
No. I don’t think I do that…
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That lady is the pinnacle of human development. Her language is the best language and her sweater is the best sweater and her haircut the best haircut.
Everyone is on the wrong path for not doing everything in the same way as she does. But don’t worry everyone, I’m sure she would be glad to tell us exactly how to do everything.
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I don’t think everyone anywhere does anything with uniformity.
I think my response to you may have been born out of an apparent lack of clarity of purpose or intent in your original comment.
When a person is participating in an online discussion where they are reacting to racist comments that suggest existing racism negates a persons right to complain about racism directed at them (in this case the claim was Koreans are racist so a Korean complaining about racism is “rich”) and a person replies to with a list of times they have experienced racism in Asia, but provide no other commentary or context, it seems reasonable to assume the response was in support of the original racist comment since all your post accomplished was to add to a list of times someone has experienced racism in Asia and did nothing to support the idea that existing racism is not excuse for racism.
In other words, if you don’t want to have someone assume your intent then it is best you make your intent known. You cannot control how anyone will react to what you write. You only have control over what you write.
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But the issue I have is that none of that should matter. We should stop the racism in our own backyard, regardless of who it targets. The idea that Koreans don’t have a right to complain about US racism because Korea is racist is a crazy idea.
An eye for for an eye, in this case, leaves the whole world racist.
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