Dumidu Handakumbura: Language discrimination and superficial assessments

A couple of weeks ago I overheard some of my colleagues make fun of the language use of another colleague of mine who happens to be a native Tamil speaker, who had during one client call made a slip of the tongue saying avocado integration instead of another technology related term that sounds like avocado. Then this week he was assessing my language use and making fun of me for having made a few typos on a post I had made on social media, not knowing others had laughed at him behind his back. Then the design school children who take up the lower parts of our office building put together a typo-graphy exhibition, because some of them were born cleaver in that way. But what they failed to notice was the fact that I was overloaded, famined and had gone without proper sleep at that point for over a month. But that's not what this post is about, it's about the absurdity of assessing someone's worthiness to receive wealth or opportunities based solely on the externally accessible aspects of language use, worse yet the outright language based discrimination some of us have to deal with.

According to Wikipedia [1], a prominent linguist has captured the idea of language description as “ideologies and structures which are used to legitimize, effectuate, and reproduce unequal divisions of power and resources (both material and non-material) between groups which are defined on the basis of language”. As a post european colony with deep roots of cultural imperialism, and a history of corruption Sri Lanka is yet to flush out the elitist bigots and the ignorant masses they manipulate using beliefs, culture and traditions to enforce language discrimination.

It is public knowledge that a decade ago, I wished to migrate out of Sri Lanka because of the financial inequality and perceived ideological mismatch between me and my country. But all of it depended on me getting a superior English score on IELTS [2], which time after time I missed by the smallest margins. Unbeknownst to me the people of the country had already decided I was not worthy of such an opportunity (as discussed in my post on the brain drain [3]) and absurdly when I had not given up on getting that golden IELTS score, I went through what felt like an unending period of poor sleep with a few sleepless nights preceding the test that rendered me barely capable of writing my own name down on the IELTS paper or catching a single word being said during the listening test, and what resulted was my 7.5 band score dropping to a 3! I comprehend that experience as Albert Camus perceived the guilt and fate of Meursault in his work “The Outsider”, though I had not read the book at the time [4]. So over the decade I worked on my physical and mental endurance, autonomy of my body, thought and soul, so that whenever I had to perform for assessment (which I rarely consented to) I would fare better, and I did continue to get better to the annoyance of some. And this year I sat for the IELTS again, carrying weeks worth of poor sleep and next to no sleep a couple of days before the exam and managed to score a 7.5, sadly like the wild coyote that never manages to catch the roadrunner, I missed my chance of eligibility for a skilled migration by 0.5. But I was proud of my achievement, in a country where politicians fall asleep during parliamentary sessions on public television and incoherently decide the fate of our country, I was able to keep my brain with me.

Do you think you can do better if one half of society was hanging on every word that leaves your mouth and the other half is made to believe your barking mad? Is it rational to look at the number of occurrences of error instead of the percentage of error and the quantity of content produced? Better yet, how can you compare a 27 year old with a 37 year old? Or how can you compare the language use of someone who's sober and has autonomy with someone who's moved by the spirit? Shouldn't you value how much control someone has when they are going against societies will and opinion? If agency and autonomy were the real criteria of assessment, should be use a quantitative instrument developed through neuroethics to measure the criteria instead of using a language test?

At the heart of the problem is how the majority of us are fooled by or accept superficial assessments done in the name of distributive justice. You compare two engineers without mentioning one is 27 and the other is 37. You compare leadership skills of two engineers by the number or projects they're leading instead of looking at the level of involvement or the complexity of the projects. You compare two individuals on who is more moral without mentioning one was forced into doing immoral acts through social force and financial hardship, while the other one was sheltered by society and wealth.

When you assess individuals this way on paper it might look like justice was served, but what we have truly done is sinned against the one who received injustice. If the distributive justice system in Sri Lanka is broken, why would anyone stay? Why would anyone try to become better or make their communities better? If there is no justice, why would the bus conductor bake inside a metal tin can whole day without resorting to stealing from the weak man who's inside the mercedes? The perception of justice keeps the social classes in place! And hustice is the language of the reality, be it within us or outside us.

Why would we not have to a answer to the countless multitudes who we have denied the rightful place at the rightful time. Why would we think we won't pay for using the beliefs, culture and traditions of people to enforce language discrimination when those people have not given their concent for the real reasons why they are being used for the enforcement of a type of discrimination?