Sunday Smiles

David Strom 2:30 PM | December 01, 2024
MEME

The election of Donald Trump has had a profound impact in many ways, all for the better. 

But it is easy to underestimate how far the world has fallen; the woke/DEI/transnational elite crowd has hardly been defeated here or especially abroad. 

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The UK is in competition with Canada for having the most woke idiocy, and I think it has pulled ahead in the competition. People are getting arrested for saying the wrong thing, having the wrong opinions, filming people expressing the wrong opinions, and tweeting about forbidden subjects. 

You can get arrested for silently praying or talking about some passages in the Bible. 

When I saw this story in The Telegraph, I just sighed. Just one more step down the path of societal destruction. 

Now, in Great Britain, asking an employee to speak more clearly is to be treated as potentially invidious racial/cultural discrimination. An employer or co-workers having trouble understanding somebody when their accent is too thick to comprehend is actionably oppressive. 

Telling someone with a foreign accent you can’t understand them could be racial harassment, a senior tribunal judge has said.

Commenting on or criticising the way someone from another country or ethnic group speaks could breach employment law, Judge James Tayler said.

The senior circuit judge of the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) made the ruling following a case about a university worker who sued when she received criticism over her “strong” Brazilian accent.

Elaine Carozzi took the University of Hertfordshire to an employment tribunal, claiming she suffered racial discrimination and harassment over comments about her accent.

Although the marketing manager had a good grasp of the English language, managers at the institution had allegedly struggled to understand what she was saying.

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Aside from the absurdity of the decision, what stands out is the underlying assumption: anybody who is unable or unwilling to conform to the needs of the majority population automatically has more rights and protection than the native British population and must be deferred to and accommodated. 

In this case, there is nothing inherently racial involved. Thick accents come in all races and creeds and aren't even exclusively held by non-native English speakers. Somebody with a thick Scottish or Irish accent, had they not been watching the BBC for years, may have such a thick accent that they might be difficult to understand for a Londoner. 

The United Kingdom, not so long ago (pre-BBC in particular), had so many accents and dialects that English spoken by one group might be utterly or nearly incomprehensible to another. 

It's not unreasonable to expect that somebody ensure that they are comprehensible to the largest groups in society. How else do you do business and develop social trust?

Now toss in somebody whose thick accent originates from thousands of miles away and originating in a different language. The difficulty somebody might have understanding it is not based on race and/or culture, but simply from not having the the ability to translate the sounds into something comprehensible. 

”[Ms Lucas] told me that ‘the team’ was having issues with my ‘very strong accent’, and therefore they didn’t want to invite me to important meetings and events,” Ms Carozzi said at the time.

“I have a Brazilian accent. I can’t change my background, my ethnicity and my national origins,” she added.

No, but if you want to work someplace, others have to be able to understand what you are saying. Especially in marketing, obviously. Being comprehensible seems a minimum requirement for persuading somebody, which is the job of a marketer. 

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Decisions like this are based on the ideological presumption that all conflicts of interest are based on prejudice, and interpreted in an inflexible belief that there are only oppressors or oppressed. Considerations such as "ability to do the job" are based on a superiority/inferiority interpretive structure, not some objective standard. 

This is absurd. As a practical matter people need to be able to understand each other to interact over a long time. By the logic of the judge, the Brazilian woman shouldn't even have to learn english to have a right to work somewhere in the United Kingdom. 

In the US we have, unfortunately, taken steps down this path--legally we don't expect people to learn our language, and here in Minnesota you see many signs at government offices that spell things out in an unGodly number of languages using different alphabets--but at least as far as I know things haven't gone this far. 

In basic social interactions it may be simple politeness to work hard to understand somebody with a thick accent that is nearly incomprehensible, but practically speaking it makes no sense to ban employers from expecting a minimum level of comprehensibilty. 

Western countries are governed by elites which reject that notion, at least for the plebs. They likely only hire people they can understand, but since ordinary people are seen as barely more than barbarians, the presumption that all barbarians are the same leads them to decisions like this. 

It's insane. 

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