an-angry-linguist:

The Western world will tell a white person that learning a new language and becoming bilingual will present new opportunities for them and promise a high-paying, competitive job. Meanwhile, Latinx people who grew up bilingual in Spanish and English, or learned English later on, will be offered a job that is lower paying than jobs of the same title offering to monolingual people. A bilingual, non-white person will be looked down on for code-switching or forgetting a word in their second language, but a white person will be told that it’s okay and just “part of the process.”

The Western world doesn’t care if someone is bilingual unless they’re white.

White second-language learners and bilinguals, myself included, should understand what kind of privelige we carry even in situations like these.