In San Diego, a white woman leaving a restaurant went on a 3 ½ minute rant against a group of people waiting to be seated for a family birthday party. Hearing these people speaking to one another in their native Spanish was so offensive to this woman, her tirade accused them of being Nazis, Russians, fascists and tied to Castro (San Diego Union-Tribune, 8/4/15).

A white man leaving a New York restaurant went into a rant about immigrants and threatened to report the restaurant staff to ICE because he had heard them speaking Spanish (HuffPost, 5/16/18).

An angry white male humiliated two Macy’s sales clerks in Dallas, because they had spoken Arabic to one another. At the end of the transaction, when they told him, in English, that he would need to get his purchase wrapped at a different counter, he couldn’t handle it. “All you Arabs. All you Arabs and Democrats, go back where you came from,” he says in a video posted to Twitter. As other customers tried to intervene, his anger continued to escalate, ending in a homophobic rant aimed at the one filming the encounter (Vice News, 12/27/18).

These are examples of what has been happening with increasing frequency to people on buses, on planes, in lines at grocery stores or at random. Someone white becomes irate at someone speaking a language other than English. As if white ears take a beating around non-English speakers. As if white ears are so fragile, they cannot stand encountering evidence that we are a nation of diverse people. As if even the ears of bigots are bigoted.

You can also hear, in these examples, the volatility of toxic masculinity, the eruption of white supremacy, the cruelty of nationalism, the brittleness of white fragility. Public tirades against strangers come from those who have not found healthy ways to deal with their emotional reactions to finding themselves living among people who are not white, not straight and not conservative Christian.

“I don’t care where you are from,” some white people say. “You are in America now. Learn to speak American.” In other words, I’m not dealing with this. You deal with it.

White nationalists have tried throughout our history to make other languages inferior to English, the same way we have tried to make people whose skin is not white inferior to people who have white skin. Ever since white colonists used cruel tactics against Native American children to eradicate their culture and their language, white people have stoked the myth that being American requires limiting your language to English.

There is no truth to the idea that only English is spoken in America. Go into any city and you will hear Italian butchers, French bakers, Irish bar tenders and Asian fishmongers using their mother tongue. You will hear Setswana over here and Khmer over there. You will hear restaurant staff and merchants of all kinds who have learned the English needed to conduct business, but who prefer their mother tongue.

You will hear a variety of dialects used in black communities across the country. You will hear Hebrew spoken on some streets, Spanish on others.  You will hear different Native American languages in different regions of the country.

Schools are teaching languages to children from grade school through high school. Proficiency in world languages – not just one’s mother tongue – is considered a vital skill for job opportunities and social competency for the generations currently in our public schools.

And as of the 116th United States Congress, you can hear a variety of languages in the halls of government.

Whether you want it to happen or not, all around you in your own community, people from different cultures are teaching their children to be bi-lingual. They speak English, and they want their children to be able to speak to all of their grandparents, aunts and uncles and family friends in their mother tongue. In our homes, among family members who have kept their mother tongue alive, we speak many languages.

“That’s fine,” you say. “Just make sure they speak English in public.”

When white people find their ire rising at the mere sight or sound of an element of the human environment that is not like them, the question is not, “What’s wrong with those people?” or “Why aren’t those people speaking/acting like us?” but rather, “What is wrong with you? Why are you so broken that this sight or that sound makes you act like a crazy person?”

Several emotions lie behind the anger and resistance white people express when someone speaks a language other than English.  Here are just a few:

Impotence: The feeling that you are powerless in this situation. You cannot understand what is being communicated, although it is none of your business.

Paranoia: The feeling that people may be talking about you and mocking you behind your back.

Inferiority: Those speaking another language know more than you do. They know at least two languages. But you, who are supposed to be the darling of society, sits in the shadow of their ability to communicate with one another.

Entitlement: As a white person, you feel that you are entitled to understand everything everybody is saying.

In the eyes of those who go ballistic at the sound of a language other than English being spoken, this is not the America they signed up for. They cannot exercise control over such babel. They were okay with one or two here and there, but not so many. Not right under their noses.

Whiteness has trouble with too much diversity. As if there is a limit on what is acceptable, some kind of abstract quota where white people get to say how much is enough, a limit that leaves white people fully in charge in a world made for whiteness. As long as the status quo remains intact – a white word made predominantly for white males – whites are fine with a little feminist activity over here, a little LGBTQ protest over there, a Black Lives Matter rally down the block.

The push back comes when there is a perception that others are starting to infiltrate the white world. For example, when white people think that the number of black and brown immigrants has risen too high to keep the white majority intact, they begin to talk about how whites are losing jobs and whites are not getting the benefits that immigrants get. If minorities are succeeding, so their thinking goes, minorities must be getting advantages and privileges white people don’t have.

Diversity gets treated like a passing trend, a friendly group project in which everyone takes on equal risks and rewards. In the mind of whiteness, half-baked efforts at diversity are enough, because the status quo is fine . . .”Is there more?” white innocence asks . . “(I’m Still Here: Black Dignity in a World Made For Whiteness, by Austin Channing Brown; Convergent Books, 2018; p. 121).

There is no good way to push back in anger against our diversity. Yelling at people, flinging crude remarks at strangers, going off on tirades about unfairness of it all – these behaviors reveal a person’s unhappiness and inability to find a way to cope with a world that is not now and never has been just for whites.

Hearing other languages in your own neck of the woods is a good sign. It means that the old system of governing based on bigotry and oppression is being revealed and reworked. It means you can relax and be yourself. You can let go of what someone else told you is the way to live your life and be fully engaged in the pursuit of happiness. You will be cherished. Your own story will be important in this new world.

So trade in that anger for a little kindness towards the stranger who is spending more time and energy than you can imagine, learning how to navigate this American society. And save a little kindness for yourself. You don’t have to be superior to anyone. You just have to learn to live as an equal among equals.