Every day there appears to be a new form of racial animosity, hatred, discrimination and downright hatred. I would like to say that nothing surprises me anymore, but on reading Allyson Waller’s November 26 article in The New York Times, I was surprised. Ms. Waller wrote about the recent victory of two Mexican-Americans in Montana who were profiled by a Border Patrol Agent and then detained for no other reason than that they were speaking Spanish.
We live in a time where wearing a mask makes one appear weak to some; speaking another language providing tinder to others to fan the flames of nationalism and white supremacy ideology. An exchange between one of the detained women and the Border Patrol agent caught my attention. Waller relates that, “Ms. Suda asked the supervisor if she and Ms. Hernandez would have been detained if they had been speaking French. “No,” he responded, “we don’t do that.”
What an interesting comment to make. Are we to suppose that nothing would have happened if French had been spoken? That the two women, one of whom was born in California and the other in Texas, were speaking Spanish, made them in the eyes of the agent “illegal immigrants”? The supervisor did not even pause to think about what he was saying. And this is exactly what implicit bias is and illustrates how deeply embedded it is in our culture.
Those of us in international education have a lot of work to do!
Photo credit: Brooke Swaney/ACLU of Montana, via Associated Press