Official FF Generic Catch-All Thrad for Reverse Racism, Misandry, etc.

[lisarea]

Yeah, but Utah is just Western Iowa for the vast majority of intents and purposes, and as I think Milton once said, "Mormon is but Midwest writ large."

[Ymir's blood]

[Angakuk]

Was that Milton Friedman?

[BrotherMan]

[Pan Narrans]

[Ari]

Heard on the tubes about That kid Ryan Lochte lying...
"Now how can I believe any man who says he was robbed?"

[Ari]

Man nothing brings out the white male tears and screams of censorship like telling them maybe their ignorant cultural appropriation makes them look like uncreative douches.

I hate this PC culture is just code for how dare you call me out for being a dick and speaking *your* mind. Agree with meee!

Edit to add: Bonus, according to rich people they got rich all by themselves with zero help from history or society!

[mickthinks]

I'm tired of the prejudice against people like me who went to private school - we're not all super-privileged | Voices | The Independent

From the link

There always has, and always will be, a certain stigma attached to those who went to a private school.

Er ... no, there hasn't!

[Angakuk]

Yes, there has.



Seriously though, I thought that what we in the U.S. call private schools were known in Britain as public schools. Is that not correct?

[Ensign Steve]

Classic!

Teacher who can't speak Spanish sues after failing to get Spanish teaching post | US news | The Guardian

Third grade teacher Tracy Rosner filed a federal employment discrimination lawsuit against the Miami-Dade County School Board, claiming that her race – white – prevented her from getting the job.

Because no white person ever spoke Spanish. Next she's going to claim sex discrimination when they tell her she has to teach math.

[Ensign Steve]

Seriously though, you live in Miami and you can't manage 3rd grade Spanish? Go fuck yourself, then watch some Sesame Street.

[The Man]

I honestly do not think I have seen a single news story that more succinctly encapsulates the white entitlement policies of Donald Drumpf than this one. And it doesn't even matter whether this woman is a Drumpf supporter herself; this one news story encapsulates entirely the complete bubble that Drumpf supporters inhabit.

For whatever it's worth, I'm white (well, as white as a Jew can be anyway; there are certainly white supremacists who would beg to differ) and spoke Spanish at a semi-fluent level for many years, so there's one counterfactual to her ludicrous claim.

[Angakuk]

One does wonder how a person that stupid ever managed to get a teaching job in the first place.

show spoiler

Actually, one does not wonder that. One has come to expect that sort of thing from the education establishment.

[erimir]

Several of my Spanish teachers have been pale pasty white.

Especially the ones before college.

[mickthinks]

I hope I am not the only one to ask themselves the question "Was it really a Spanish teaching job, or was it a job teaching something else, for which the requirement to have Spanish language skills is pedagogically unnecessary?". If the latter, then Ms Rosner has a point, I think.

The Guardian's (and presumably Agence France-Presse's) report is unaccountably vague.

ETA: I have found this from Rosner's lawyer:

"Ms. Rosner was denied a job teaching English Reading and Composition to children in the EFL program in Miami-Dade County Schools. The EFL program has a one-hour Spanish component per day that can be taught by any teacher in the program, and not exclusively the English Reading and Comprehension teacher. By requiring the English teacher to understand Spanish to teach English to English speaking students is the issue."

White Miami Teacher Sues School Board After Denied Job That Includes Teaching Spanish | Miami New Times

[Ensign Steve]

FTFA:

After a decade of working at Coral Reef Elementary, Rosner requested last year to teach reading and language arts to students in the Extended Foreign Language (EFL) program, a track that allows students to learn a language other than English for an hour per day.

The school rejected her request because it requires that reading and language arts instructors of the EFL program speak Spanish, said the lawsuit.

Rosner’s lawyers said she was denied the job “because of her race and national origin as a Non-Hispanic individual who was not a fluent and native Spanish-speaker.”

Rosner said the school could have given her the position and had another instructor teach the Spanish component.

Nothing really vague about that, ac countably or otherwise.

[Angakuk]

If the job description includes a requirement for a particular skill and you don't have that skill then you are not qualified to apply for the job. You don't get to apply for the job and then argue that the particular skill which is part of the job description is not a skill that is really necessary for the job. It is that simple.

And yes, my Spanish teacher in Jr. High, Mr. Sherman, was also pasty white. He did, however, speak Spanish.

One could, I suppose, make the argument that actually being able to speak Spanish should not be a requirement for that particular position, but I don't think that a discrimination lawsuit is the suitable place to make that argument. A school district curriculum committee might be a more appropriate venue for that argument. It is an argument that ought to be made, and won, before one applies for the job.

[lisarea]

It is a pretty common thing for employers to pad out job requirements so they can illegally discriminate, but that's only valid when the requirements aren't a significant part of the job, and when they're discriminating against a protected class. It sounds like she's saying that they can 'reasonably accommodate' her inherent disability of not knowing how to do that part of the job. And "people who don't know how to do this job" is not a protected class.

Her case is stupid, but not all cases that follow that general formula are.

[mickthinks]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

FTFA:

Nothing really vague about that, ac countably or otherwise.

I guess it won't seem vague at all if you (unaccountably) read "to teach reading and language arts" as "to teach Spanish reading and Spanish language arts", or "teaching students in the Extended Foreign Language program" as "teaching students Spanish", or "allows students to learn a language other than English for an hour per day" as "demands that each teacher teach Spanish for an hour a day".

[The Man]

When teaching reading and language arts in a foreign language programme, it's generally understood that one will be teaching reading and language arts in a foreign language, so if one does not possess the foreign language skills to teach such a curriculum, one does not possess the requisite qualifications for the job. Given that the position is in Miami-Dade County, proficiency in Spanish being a requisite to hold such a position is pretty much a given. Her lawsuit is frivolous and perfectly demonstrative of the white entitlement politics that have dominated the Donald Drumpf era.

Even if Spanish isn’t the only language taught in the curriculum, that’s not particularly relevant. An applicant who possesses Spanish language skills is inherently more qualified to teach a foreign language curriculum than someone who does not, particularly in Miami-Dade County. If she was passed over for the position because she speaks French and someone else speaks French and Spanish, that’s not discrimination in any conceivable universe.

And it’s not as if third-grade Spanish language skills are an insurmountably high barrier for even an adult who lives in Miami-Dade County to obtain. Don’t possess them? Take classes at your local community college for a year. I’ve attempted to learn a large number of foreign languages and Spanish was by far the easiest of them to learn. It would be even easier to learn in Miami-Dade County, where probably half the population already speaks it on a routine basis.

e: I underestimated the number of people who speak Spanish in Miami-Dade County. According to a recent census, over 60% of residents speak Spanish as a primary language at home. Owing to that fact alone, anyone who does not speak Spanish is patently unqualified to teach a foreign language course in Miami-Dade County purely for that reason alone. Correspondingly this lawsuit will almost certainly be dismissed without prejudice and I would not be surprised if the plaintiff is issued a citation for filing a frivolous lawsuit.

[erimir]

It is, as you say, not just a matter of whether she is, strictly speaking, "qualified". It's not just about whether she could have theoretically taught that class with some accommodation to her lack of Spanish skills.

It's also a matter of who else they might hire for the position. The question is what are the chances that they wouldn't be able to find someone who IS proficient in Spanish and otherwise just as, if not more, qualified in Miami-Dade?

ETA: Third-grade Spanish skills are not adequate to teach third-grade Spanish though. You clearly don't need to master literary Spanish to teach elementary school Spanish, but you ought to know Spanish at an adult level, I think.

[Stephen Maturin]

Originally Posted by Matthew Dietz, Ms. Rosner's lawyer

By requiring the English teacher to understand Spanish to teach English to English speaking students is the issue.

Huh. This being federal race discrimination case and all, I would've thought the issue was whether the school district "fail[ed] or refuse[d] to hire . . . or otherwise . . . discriminate[d] against [Rosner] with respect to [her] compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment, because of [Rosner's] race . . . ." 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1).

Counsel appears to have cobbled together a plausible argument that proficiency in Spanish may not really be sine qua non for this particular job. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Absent reading the school district's written job description, ain't no tellin'. Point is, attaching moronic, irrelevant, pointless qualifications to a particular job is stupid and counterproductive, but it's not unlawful. Nor is misapplying the actual job requirements to a particular applicant.

Of course, there's almost never any direct evidence employment-related race discrimination against a specific individual. The vast majority of cases are circumstantial, and that's where something the employment lawyers and the courts call the McDonnell-Douglas burden-shifting analysis comes into play. Rosner may be planning to argue that the Spanish-speaking requirement was a mere pretext for discriminating against her whiteness, but that's step three of the analysis. Step one is going to be a formidable hurdle.

[Dingfod]

Originally Posted by Ensign Steve

Classic!

Teacher who can't speak Spanish sues after failing to get Spanish teaching post | US news | The Guardian

Because no white person ever spoke Spanish. Next she's going to claim sex discrimination when they tell her she has to teach math.

My first year Spanish teacher was Margaret Young. She claimed to have grown up in a border town. I was not convinced that was true. My second and third year Spanish teacher was Johnny Lopez. I was not convinced that he knew Spanish either.

[livius drusus]

My Spanish teacher was from Spain. He was a tall, pale, befreckled ginger. He definitely spoke Spanish, although he did infect me with the Castilian lisp which doesn't work out so great when trying to make yourself understood in the States.

[The Man]

Even when I spoke Spanish semi-fluently, I found it very difficult to understand the Castilian accent, and had to watch Pan’s Labyrinth with subtitles on (although I understood it better the more I watched it). It’s not like British and American English; the differences between Latin American and Continental Spanish are different enough that they’re practically different languages, the way the various forms of Chinese are. I suspect there may actually be more difference between Norwegian and Danish (modern Norwegian evolved from Danish a bit over a century ago), although as I speak neither language, I cannot confirm this for certain; I’ve certainly heard several times that native speakers of the three Scandinavian languages find them mutually intelligible. (Note that Finnish, which is usually considered a Nordic language but not a Scandinavian one, is a from completely different language tree that, strangely, includes Estonian and Hungarian; Icelandic, also usually considered Nordic but not Scandinavian, is a Germanic language like Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and English, but has evolved substantially less from Old Norse than the other Scandinavian languages have and is more difficult for speakers of those languages, or English, to learn; however, after learning Icelandic it is naturally quite easy to learn Old Norse.)

Originally Posted by erimir

It's also a matter of who else they might hire for the position. The question is what are the chances that they wouldn't be able to find someone who IS proficient in Spanish and otherwise just as, if not more, qualified in Miami-Dade?

I feel like I largely addressed this in my post by pointing out that a person who speaks French and Spanish would be more qualified than one who spoke just French, and also by pointing out how many people speak Spanish in Miami-Dade County. But yes, the question is not just whether the person is qualified, but whether the employers can find someone who is more qualified. If that is the case (and it’s Miami-Dade; of course it’s the case), then that’s another factor making the lawsuit frivolous. Even if the position doesn’t even include Spanish right now, it probably will in the future; that’s reason enough to prefer someone with Spanish skills over someone without them.

The thing about needing better than third-grade skills, however, is probably a fair point; I got the impression from above that third-grade skills were being cited as the requirement for the position, but that may not have been correct.

Regardless, an adult who does not speak Spanish but lives in Miami-Dade County should be able to pick up enough skills to teach such a course in two years rather than one, then, unless they really suck at language acquisition. Spanish is quite possibly the easiest language for a native English speaker to learn (note that I haven’t spoken regularly for around eight years, although I still read Spanish routinely for my work, and that I did not learn every dialect, so some of these may not be fully accurate or applicable to all of them):

• The grammar is extremely simple with only a couple of quirks that don't correspond fully to those of English;
• Spelling and pronunciation always correspond 100%, so you only need to remember spelling;
• A surprisingly large numbers of words are cognates to English, given that English is Germanic and Spanish is Romance;
• There is no bizarre case system for nouns and articles as in languages like German;
• The nouns always pluralise in exactly the same way, with at worst a small number of exceptions;
• Apart from irregular verbs, of which there are admittedly quite a few, verb conjugation always works the same for each suffix and there are only three suffixes to learn;
• There is no need to learn a new script;
• There is only one prominent sound in most dialects of Spanish, the trilled r, that is radically different from sounds used in the English language (although there are two variants of it, r and rr);
• And most importantly, there is a huge number of native speakers in the country already, particularly (as I keep saying) in Miami-Dade County.

A strong case could be made that one cannot truly master a language unless one has native speakers to practise with; certainly, the fact that there are so few native German and Japanese speakers in the States is one reason both of those languages never fully clicked with me (although they’re also pretty difficult languages, particularly Japanese, thanks to the huge number of characters one needs to learn before one can even begin to read it; I have, however, heard that once one clears that hurdle it becomes way easier). That won’t be the case for anyone who lives in Southeast Florida.

Honestly, one could also argue that a person who has lived in Miami-Dade for more than a few years and doesn’t already speak Spanish is either simply lazy or just sucks at learning foreign languages, both of which themselves could presumably be considered justifiable disqualifications for a job teaching foreign languages. I’m honestly not even 100% certain how one would be able to function in Miami-Dade without at least cursory Spanish knowledge.


In other news, tampons in men’s bathrooms are the latest thing that is destroying America. It might not have occurred to some of these wingnuts that trans men might still need tampons, but according to said wingnuts these men shouldn’t be allowed to piss or shit in a public bathroom anyway, so that probably wouldn’t matter to them even if they had thought of it. They presumably also don’t care that men might wish to have them other reasons (according to one of the male commenters, he used both tampons and condoms regularly in the Boy Scouts for reasons having entirely nothing to do with genitalia), or that they might know women who might need them.