I grew up in Utah’s Dual Language Immersion Program, a language-learning program for elementary school students. In this program, I spent half of each day learning in English and the other half in my program language: Spanish. Within this program, I was one of the few white students. While I was taught Spanish as a second language, many of my peers, already fluent in Spanish, were learning English as their second language.

As I grew up, I started noticing hateful comments from white Americans towards Hispanic people in the United States, regardless of citizenship status. I am confident I am not the only one who has heard statements such as “You’re in America. We speak English here,” or “Go back to your country if you’re gonna speak Spanish.” While these comments were not necessarily directed at my elementary school peers, I still noticed the double standard. I also spoke Spanish. How come my bilingual skills were celebrated as intelligence, yet other people get told to “go back to their country” or “speak better English” when speaking Spanish?

English-only movements have been around for years, drawing increasing momentum from growing immigration levels. These movements aim to establish English as the United States’ national language and ban school curriculums such as Utah’s Dual Language Immersion Program. It’s not just Spanish getting targeted, either. These English-only movements aim to dismantle languages such as Arabic and even other dialects of the English language such as African American Vernacular English. These movements are not focused on French, German, Dutch or any dialect of English that white people speak. They aim squarely at speakers of color.

Rachel Hayes-Harb, a linguistics professor at the University of Utah, defined linguistic prejudice, a category within the linguistic racism umbrella, as “any kind of prejudice where it’s triggered by aspects of someone’s use of language.” Anything from word choice to grammar to voice and accent can contribute to this form of discrimination.

We spoke about African American Vernacular English as an example. AAVE is a complicated and valid dialect of the English language. Yet, many white Americans still perceive that way of speaking as unrefined, ignorant and simple. This perception of AAVE did not appear out of the blue — it is built up by years of institutional racism.

“It’s an indication of actually more complexity to the sentence structure than we have in so-called Standard English,” Hayes-Harb explained as we discussed the use of the “Habitual be” in AAVE. “In some people’s minds it makes sense to think ‘oh well, they don’t know how to conjugate be’ … especially when that fits a narrative of racism,” she said. The “Habitual be” refers to statements such as “he be going” or “they be walking” rather than the Standard English use of “he is going” or “they are walking.”

What does linguistic racism look like? Statements such as “your English is so good” perpetrate the false notion that English is the baseline for human intelligence. Though it sounds like a compliment, what are you actually saying? When asked about these types of microaggressions, Hayes-Harb explained that the listener is only complimenting the speaker’s ability to accommodate the listener’s inability to speak other languages. She also referred to call centers in India as an example. Americans and Europeans find it difficult to understand many of the speakers. However, these callers fail to realize that the person on the other end of the line is not “barely speaking English.” The listeners simply fail to understand a dialect of their own language.

“Your English is so good” implies that a “good” form of English exists in the first place, thus concluding that there must also exist a “bad” form of the language. Not only is this morally wrong, but it’s also factually incorrect. It should not seem surprising or particularly interesting when a speaker of color communicates in a way that you can understand. Such expectations play into the role of microaggressions and linguistic racism.

The way someone speaks English, if at all, does not represent their level of intelligence. Dismantle unconscious biases. The U.S. has no national language and to target non-English speakers of color is linguistic racism.

It takes a lot of work to dismantle internalized and unconscious bias and prejudice. Regardless, it needs to be done, especially in our languages. Adopting English as the national language does not promote unity, but rather promotes linguistic discrimination, prejudice and racism. Linguistic differences should be celebrated, not condemned.

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@maddievanwag