tbh I don’t get why “speaking louder and slower to people who don’t understand your language very well” became a bad shameful white action performed only by bad shameful white people who should feel shame and derision and are morally and spiritually impure
talking slower and louder makes it easier for people to understand you. fucking half the people I meed on a regular basis mumble most of the time, and I’d sure fucking appreciate it if they talked louder and slower to me so I could understand them the first time instead of asking them to repeat three or four times, making them angrier every time
[le sigh]
It happened because “talking loud and slow” scans primarily as “talking the way you’d talk to a child,” and “treating foreigners like children” lies near the heart of the ugly-colonialist / ugly-tourist memeplex, for reasons that are mostly pretty reasonable.
Also because non-culturally-cosmopolitan Americans (in particular) occasionally lapse into the mindset of thinking that of course everyone in the world speaks decent English, or should…and, thus, that language-barrier problems are in fact problems of stupidity or obduracy, which can be solved by making the English communication sufficiently simple and hard to ignore. Unsurprisingly, non-Anglophones find this behavior unpleasantly condescending.
None of which contradicts your basic normative point. Speaking loud and slow is often useful. And even at it’s worst it’s mildly obnoxious in a provincial way, which is not the same as “horrifically shameful evidence of moral bankruptcy.”
But even in the “bad” situation it doesn’t seem all that bad? I think it doesn’t have to be “everyone speaks English well” but “most people have probably picked up a few words here and there, or could have cognates in their language.”
Like, I don’t speak Spanish. If you don’t speak English, and try to talk to me like a normal Spanish-speaker, I will understand nothing. If you talk loudly and slowly, enunciating each word, it is much more likely I will pick up on a word I can recognize, and from there can try and figure out what you need.
I mean, you’re not wrong. It’s not “that bad,” in any direct sense. It’s just closely associated with bad things…or, more precisely, with things that people have invested huge amounts of identity and ego into hating.
When you’ve learned to hate gentrification (and there are people with really excellent reasons to hate gentrification), then it can piss you off when people build nice things in your neighborhood. Even though “building nice things” is pretty much the archetypal textbook methodology for making the world a better place.
When you’ve learned to hate chauvinistic sexism (and there are people with really excellent reasons to hate chauvinistic sexism), then it can piss you off when a dude holds the door for you and calls you “m’lady.” Even though this is, in theory, a small token of respect combined with an imposition-free decision to make your life slightly easier.
And when you’ve learned to hate Obnoxious Westerners Coming In and Messing Up The Place…and, boy, are there people with really excellent reasons to hate that…then it can piss you off when they talk loud and slow at you, like those goddamn Obnoxious Westerners always do, treating you like goddamn sub-adults and forgetting that you have your own goddamn language. Even when the only actual direct effect of this behavior is that it makes it easier for you to understand what they’re saying.