Look at any retailer—the signs in the store, any ad, most closed-captioned TV shows, hell, most items in the grocery.  Everything these days is bilingual—English and Spanish.  Why is that?  Are Hispanics the only other ethnic group here?  Hardly.

In fact, the largest ethnic group in the United States is called—White American,  Whites are the majority in 49 of the 50 states, with Hawaii being the lone exception.  The District of Columbia (which is not a state) has a non-white majority.  (The money is doled out from here, so surprise cannot be a real factor.)  Non-Hispanic whites are the majority in all states except California, Texas, New Mexico, and Hawaii.  I’ll give everyone just one guess what country borders all three of the continental states where whites are not the majority.  The Non-Hispanic white majority decreases every year.  (Imagine that.)

Let’s look at how census takers self-identified.  Most said they were German-American, followed by Irish-American.  From central Europe, the largest group identified themselves as Polish, and the largest group from eastern Europe said they were Russian.  Only 47 million of the 2008 census population identified themselves as Hispanic.

Why are the signs we see daily not in German?  Why not Polish or Russian?  Only about 12% of the population identifies as Hispanic, so why do we print everything in their native language?

Now, I know that when someone goes to vote or to the DMV, they can request an interpreter in just about any language or documents to be printed in their native tongue.  But my hotel (I’m on a business trip right now.) greeting book is in English and Spanish.  The signs in stores (Target, Wal-Mart, Lowes, Home Depot) are all in English with Spanish beneath.

We cater to the Spanish speaker.  Why is that?

I have neighbors in many ethnicities.  Until recently, I had two neighbors from South Africa.  The primary language there is Afrikaans.  They learned English just to come here.  I had neighbors from Russian.  Obviously, Russian is their native tongue.  They learned English to immigrate to here.  In Mexico, the official language is Spanish.  They don’t have to learn shit to come here.

We enable them to come here and continue in their own subculture.  We make every other ethnicity learn English but allow the Spanish speaker to continue blissfully along.  When we went on vacation to Italy, the entire menu was not in English.  There may have been a portion of it that was.  But we had to figure a large part of it out.  When we went to Germany, the language in many cities was not English.  I had to rely on my knowledge from eighth and ninth grade German classes.  We had to adapt.  Spanish speakers here do not.  We must think they are too stupid to learn English so we adapt ourselves to their language.

Wouldn’t that piss you off?