Monday, March 14, 2016

Preach it, Brother Caplan!

Bryan Caplan on "The Microaggressions of Immigration":

The microaggression label is narrowly tied to leftist identity politics. Support for the concept, however, is far broader. With the possible exception of Mormons, what group doesn't leap at the chance to decry the slightest of slights? On-campus, of course, we usually hear about straight cisgendered white males committing racist, sexist, homophobic, and transphobic microaggressions. Off-campus, however, I see a totally different pattern: Natives lamenting the microaggressions immigrants commit against our national identity.

The most obvious case: Americans routinely grouse when immigrants publicly speak languages other than English. They get even more annoyed when they have to "press 1 for English" on an ATM machine or customer service menu. Offending Americans is the furthest thing from the immigrants' minds; they're just going about their business. But natives take offense anyway: "In America, we speak English!"

Which of course, leads to a YouTube video that I never tire of embedding:

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