Anonymous asked: Ugh, thank you for pointing out the "English scale" in Simon and Martina's videos. I live in a Brazilian household and my mother struggles with her English because she has a heavy accent from living in Brazil for so long. I hear people talk behind her back about it and they think her intelligence is low because of that barrier. So I personally found that English scale offensive because I know that it's hard learning a second language.

The English scale bothers me for exactly that reason. I currently live with friends of my mother’s while I attend college, and they are from Puerto Rico. They are literally the two smartest people I have ever met in my life, and amazing human beings. They both attended Ivy League schools for undergraduate and graduate work (he is a surgeon, and she’s a lawyer), but the way people treat them because of their accent is atrocious. People assume that just because they have an accent that this somehow correlates with intelligence, which is just not true. And yet, you know that if those same people were learning a second language and a native speaker mocked them for their accent and mispronunciations, they would be highly offended.

It’s a very ethnocentric belief to have, and quite frankly it’s disgusting. I’ve noticed it tends to be very race-centered as well; I’ve never encountered anyone mocking Swedish or French accents - instead they’re considered “sexy”, but when the accent denotes origin from a non-Western nation, one primarily populated with people of color, it’s looked upon as a negative. It’s racist and ethnocentric, and quite frankly people like that really need to educate themselves on how to be decent human beings.

-Admin Anna