Michael Reid: English-Language Privilege – Episode 166

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Michael Reid is a consultant who helps organizations with their diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.

A linguist by training, he is extremely attuned to the role of language in his work, which led to his explorations of the privilege given to English-language speakers in our modern, hyper-connected world.

His discoveries can help content professionals of all kinds identify and address the dynamics and biases that arise from the pivotal role that the English language plays in modern digital business.

We talked about:

• his background in linguistics, interpreting, higher education, and the nonprofit world and how they led to his current work in DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion)
• the concept of a “pivot language” – a language that serves as an intermediary between two other languages
• how business and social dynamics can turn a pivot language like English into a mechanism of privilege
• how English language privilege can affect the quality of localization
• how the dominance of English on the web affects the training data that the LLMs that inform AI agents like ChatGPT
• how actively working to disable the systems that privilege you can help you and your colleagues do better work
• his hope that you’ll reflect on how we got to the current situation and think about how you can improve it

Michael’s bio

Michael Reid (he) is a linguistic and cultural equity consultant, facilitator, linguist, writer, and educator in Athens, Greece with more than 24 years of experience.

He leads workshops and consults for a broad variety of groups and stakeholders on diversity, cross-cultural communication, linguistic equality, and race issues, and has chaired and sat on the board of multiple organizations working for diversity and inclusion.

He has working proficiency in six languages (English, Greek, Japanese, Spanish, French, and Portuguese), was born in the United States, and has studied there as well as France and Japan.

Michael firmly believes that diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice (DEIJ) work must be culturally responsive if it’s to be relevant to the audience at hand and, crucially, if it’s to adhere to the principles of equity and inclusion. Experiences of discrimination, injustice, and inequity are informed by the history, culture, and conditions of the people that experience them and the context in which they take place; we can’t ignore these factors and expect our DEIJ efforts to be effective. In fact, when we ignore these factors, we find ourselves in danger of reproducing the very same inequitable power structures we’re working to dismantle.

Before moving into consulting and workshop facilitation full time, he worked in higher education as a language professor and director of international recruitment. He specializes in diversity issues in the US, European, and Asian, specifically Japanese, context, and is passionate about using his linguistic and cultural skills to facilitate communication and true understanding between different groups of people, across a wide variety of differences.

Connect with Michael online:

• LinkedIn
• aliftoomega.com
• michael  at aliftoomega dot com

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast intro transcript

This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 166. Most of the folks who listen to this show work on products and publications that reach audiences around the world. That global reach is one of the many benefits of the technical and social infrastructure that we call the World Wide Web. For a variety of reasons, the main language on the web is English, even when content is localized for different regions. Michael Reid has thought a lot about the privilege bestowed upon native English speakers in this situation.

Interview transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to episode number 166 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really happy today to welcome to the show, Michael Reid. Michael is a linguistic and cultural equity consultant. He’s based in Athens, Greece. He’s an American guy, but he does really interesting work there. So welcome Michael. Tell the folks a little bit more about your work as a consultant.

Michael:
Thank you so much for having me. My work, I guess what I’ll do is I’ll start with my origin story. That sounds a little grandiose, I’m not a superhero or anything like that, but I’ll start with that and then I think that can contextualize things a bit. I started out in linguistics, French linguistics, that was my major, my undergrad. And after I graduated with my French linguistics major in Japanese linguistics minor, I became a translator and interpreter of Japanese and English or Japanese, French and English. And mostly I was focused actually on interpretation. I worked in social services, I was in the courts and hospitals. And after doing that for about six years, having my own business, I decided to move into higher education because I really liked the interaction with people. I became a language professor. And a couple three years after that I became an administrator.

Michael:
I was the coordinator for a study abroad program, and then later transitioned into doing that as well as being the director of international recruitment at the institution where I was working. And then parallel to all of that, I was sitting and occasionally chairing the boards of several nonprofit organizations that worked in the diversity, equity and inclusion space. And I was developing and presenting a series of workshops across cultural communication, competency, humility, that kind of thing. And what I noticed as I was doing it, I sort of came into this. I had always been in the language field and I’d always been in the DEI field, and I thought of them as natural allies. But the deeper I got into those fields and tried to cross what I thought was a pre-constructed bridge, I realized the two sides didn’t really talk to each other as much as I expected they would.

Michael:
We had international business and education over here that already thought it was diverse because it had the word international in its name. It’s like, okay, you’re diverse kind of, still have some work to do there, but you’re not really that inclusive and still have some work to do there. But then you would look over, and I want to be fair, I’ve got lots to say about the language industry, but I’ve got something to say about DEI too, because you would look at DEI, especially in the US, and it would act as if the United States was the only place where people were talking about these issues and as if it were the only place where these issues would even be appropriate. And crucially as if English were the only language in which these issues were being discussed, which is patently false.

Michael:
So it became my mission, I like to say to decolonize DEI, to make sure that we don’t put French solutions on Japanese problems, right? Because when we’re doing diversity, equity, and inclusion, we need to do it in a way that really resonates with and is responsive to the history, the culture, the language, the society of the people that we’re working with. Otherwise it’s not going to land for them. If you went to a group of people who were coming from a US cultural context and said, okay, I’m going to help you understand this concept about diversity or inclusivity by talking about expelling the British Raj from India, people would be like, that doesn’t have anything to do with our lived experience though, right? For an American audience, you’re going to want to talk about Malcolm X, you’re going to want to talk about Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, that kind of thing. Cesar Chavez.

Michael:
With a Japanese audience though, if I use those same people I just mentioned, that’s not going to resonate with them. So I’m going to have to speak to them in a different way using different references and that kind of thing. So yeah, if we try to do DEI in a way that doesn’t respect the fact that people come from different cultural backgrounds and we’re not really doing DEI, we’re just sort of imposing an idea on people or talking at them at best. So that is how I came into what I do.

Larry:
Well, that’s a really interesting overlay on the concerns and interests of my folks, because we’re all word nerds and interested in language and culture increasingly because we’re all sort of the internet and the web where most of us work is global and international. And there’s a whole thing there about globalization versus localization, which we can talk about a little bit I hope. And plus it’s in a business context, you mentioned that a lot of the linguistic, that sort of cultural competency in business. And anyhow, and I think your story also, every little part of your story, you’re still, to me, I’ve got you in my head now as that super-interesting dude at college who knew, was doing a lot of different stuff, but it’s also that gives you the ability to speak specifically to the interests of a lot of different things that my folks are up to.

Larry:
But hey, let me tell you about why, I’ll just share with the folks how we came to connect and why I had you on the show. You did this fantastic conversation with Rahimeh Ramezany on the problem of English language privilege in DEI, a while back. And my story is I recently moved to the Netherlands about six months ago, and there’s two things that ensue from that. One is like I’m hanging out with many more content designers and content professionals in Europe, and over here the concerns and interests and backgrounds of folks are way different. They all come from localization is the pathway into content professions, whereas in the US it’s mostly copywriting, journalism, that kind of thing. So there’s that. And also my personal experience living in the Netherlands, it’s like this is the best place in the world to benefit from English language privilege because it’s a small country.

Larry:
Dutch is kind of a hard language to learn. Nobody’s going to learn it just to do business. So they all speak English. I am living every day this problem that you described so eloquently and can deal with, that I’m just like, I’m just horrible. I’m just a horrible person for not having learned Dutch yet after six months. But anyhow, one of the main things out of that, and I think will be really, my folks will be curious about. The notion of localization. That to me is a super interesting thing. We think in the digital design world that we’ve come up with the ideal way to negotiate an experience or to explain something to somebody, and then you just have to put it in another language, maybe contextualize it for a culture a little bit. Tell me about how English language privilege might manifest in those kinds of situations.

Michael:
So there are a few ways. One of the ways that I’m thinking about right now is the use of English as a pivot language. And what I see that doing, and just for those who don’t know of, I’m sure most do what we talk about in linguistics or in language services when we talk about a pivot language, is using a language as basically an intermediary between two other languages when you don’t think you can reliably find somebody in that particular pair. So for example, just to use something close to home for me, say you were unable to find somebody who speaks both French and Japanese. I do, and there are many, many other people who speak French and Japanese, but just say you couldn’t. Well then you say, okay, we’ll take this Japanese content, translate it into English, and then have the French come out of the English content.

Michael:
What does that do? That privileges people who have English either at a native level or a very highly functional level. It introduces massive potential for mistranslation, misunderstandings, just poor localization, really, because you’re taking it from one cultural context, encoding it in a different social cultural context, let’s call it that, and all the linguistic, metalinguistic and paralinguistic things as that implies. And then you’re taking it from that into yet another one. So introduces a massive potential for error, for misunderstanding. And then when we get to the, that’s the logistic part of it, that’s the part of it where we’re looking and saying, okay, we’re not coming up with a good product really. And there are a whole bunch of moral and ethical implications with that.

Michael:
But even if you just want to look at it, which I rarely do, but even if you just want to look at it from a strictly amoral, is this product going to make me money perspective? It may, some, but are you really providing the best, most effective, most attractive product? No, you’re not. Because believe me, you can often tell when a product has been localized in a sort of playing game of telephone or just sort of a shoddy manner. The other thing though, the privilege comes in where, A, it necessitates and encourages focusing on English at the expense of other languages. For example, a translator who wants to get, maybe you’ve got a French translator who is really passionate about Japanese, but they know there’s not much work in the French Japanese language pair, but they know there’s a lot in the French English pair, so they’re going to focus on English. So it encourages them to direct their efforts toward English.

Michael:
Meanwhile, now we’ve got a whole bunch of work that people who are working natively from English, native English speakers are going to be, and excuse me, I’ve turned this around a little bit. So you’ve got a French translator who maybe is really passionate about Japanese, translating from Japanese into French. They don’t focus on Japanese, so they focus on English so they can translate into French. So you’ve got that going on. They’ve been incentivized to do that. And then you’ve got native English translators, English-speaking translators who are going to be translating from the French into whatever. So you create this system where people are, like I said, incentivized to go from English into their native language, whatever other language they might have passion for. And then you’ve got sort of, like I say this ready-made massive work for people who are translating into English.

Michael:
So the people who are native English-speaking translators, translating into English from whatever language, cool, they’ve got themselves set up. Good for them. But they’re getting even more work because their native language is used as a pivot language. And the fact that their native language is being used as a pivot language is incentivizing other translators to work from that language. So that’s one way we see it in localization.

Michael:
Admittedly it is not the most obvious place that we see it in localization though, that’s just sort of a small area to be honest. And there are admittedly nuances that we have to think about in terms of the exposure that people have to English from a young age. So there are a lot of people who, in the way I sort of frame it, I’m conceiving of somebody who was really interested in Japanese or really interested in Greek or whatever, but they went to English where they knew the work was.

Michael:
The reality is a lot of people willingly will turn toward English because they’ve had so much early exposure, it’s a lower barrier to entry. They may have a natural affinity for it too, which is totally legitimate. But I think an even greater area that we can see this kind of thing popping up is when we look at, and I’m going to give a particular example here, and I don’t mean to be coming for anybody, but I think it is just sort of a good way to encapsulate what we’re talking about. If you use the YouTube app on a smart TV in Greek, which we do in our house, you will notice that it does a terrible job rendering the Greek alphabet. There are some letters in Greek that are in different forms if it comes at the beginning or middle or the end of the word, there are things like this, it ignores that completely. The vowels come up as Latin character vowels instead of Greek vowels. It just looks terrible when you’re trying to enter something in Greek.

Michael:
And because of that it’ll give you weird results occasionally. What does that mean? That means clearly nobody on the dev team and nobody even on the final sign off was a Greek speaker for the Greek UI of the YouTube app. Which what does that tell us? Okay, one, let’s look at the ads that we see for localization positions. How many of them, it’s most, spoiler alert, how many of them say must have an excellent command of English, knowledge of another language is an asset? Which let’s think about that for a second. You are in the business of turning one content, a content in one language into content in another language with all of the linguistic, and again, metalinguistic and paralinguistic, things that that implies, and you’re only required to know one language and every other language is an asset, which automatically privileges obviously native English speakers because they don’t have to do anything extra to get into that position.

Michael:
Everybody else does, they don’t. And then we see the result of that. If the only thing you’ve required of the people on your localization team is to know English, then you’re going to get things like Greek interface that can’t even write Greek properly because you didn’t require people to know Greek to be in that position. So that to me, those are some of the biggest examples of English language program.

Larry:
And as you’re saying that too, I’m realizing there’s very few, I’ve had a few but very few executives among my listeners. And so I think for the most part people are going to be stuck with, for example’s, decision around how many resources and what strategy you take to localize. There’s everything from simple machine translation out to pure co-creation in the culture. But sounds like most places, even Google, come on, you have all the money in the world, hire a Greek speaker for crying out loud. I guess pragmatically for my folks, one of the things as you’re talking, and I don’t know about meta and para-linguistics, but is that in the same family as semantics? Because what I’m thinking about is the hope is that you’re conveying the same meaning in different languages and cultural contexts. Do we have a chance to do that in the current business and social setup?

Michael:
I think we have a chance to do it. Let me say it like this. I know that we have a chance to do it because we do see it being done successfully occasionally, which clearly means that the chance exists. Otherwise we just wouldn’t see successful examples of it. I would say however, that we are reducing our chances of doing it successfully the way that we have things set up, because we have a system that, when you have a system that is heavily turned toward valorizing or prioritizing one set of skills and you don’t realize that there’s all these other skills, we also say, this is your focus, but around here are all these other skills that are actually crucial to the successful execution of your focus. Then yes, accidentally, occasionally just statistics says you’re going to occasionally hit the target, but you haven’t created a system that is going to actively or proactively bring in all of these other surrounding skills into achieving the goal that you’re looking for.

Michael:
So we’re focusing so much on being able to speak English and what is your English level and can you speak English and other languages are an asset and that kind of thing. Well, we’ve created a situation where people are, again, incentivized to focus on this one skill, which then gets other people thinking that that is the important skill and everything else can just be, it is a matter of less importance, and that clearly is going to affect the quality of what you come up with. And so yeah, do we have a chance? Yes, but I would say right now, good localization is more of, I know it’s the goal, but the way the system is set up, it’s more of an accidental result than an actual feature of the system. I think we see good localization in spite of the system that we have, not because of the system that we have. Let me say it like that.

Larry:
That sounds both accurate and tragic at the same time. And one of the things it occurs to me as you were talking, you reminded me of something you said in that conversation with Rahimeh, about less than 20% of the world even speaks English. So from a pragmatic business perspective, there’s this thing in the startup world of the total addressable market, you’re just limited it to 19% of the world just by taking this English. There’s obviously a whole lot to this. But that notion of, and a lot of what you’re talking about just seems amplified by that statistic that we claim to be. And I guess, and part of this too, and I’m kind of circling around to another thing that I’m obligated to talk about in the year 2023 is artificial intelligence and the large learning models that drive these generative AI things. They don’t have any of that stuff in there I’m going to guess, that other 80%.

Michael:
They do, but in very, this is another massive area where we see an English language dominance, let’s say it like that, which leads to an English language privilege. My experience, and I’ll just speak from my experience. For example, when I was playing around with ChatGPT and tried to get it to give me just a simple paragraph describing DEI work in English. It wasn’t great. It wasn’t one of those texts that you read, it was no letter from a Birmingham jail, let’s just say it like that. It was serviceable as just boilerplate basic DEI stuff. Cool. I tried to get it to do the same in Greek and it spit out something that was intelligible, but with these errors that you would never make. It had gender-agreement errors, it had person-to-number agreement errors like subject-verb-agreement errors. It was just a mess.

Michael:
And again, was it passable? Could you read it and get the basic sense out of it? Yes, you could. Was it even grammatically correct? No, it wasn’t. And that is because these models are trained on so much English data. And then what we have is this assumption, and really maybe there’s a little bit of a chicken and egg problem, maybe this came from the assumption. And so yet we see yet another problem of English language dominance or any single language dominance, we’re talking about English because English is in people’s minds, the dominant language. But if it were French, we’d be talking about French. If it were any other language, we’d be talking about that language. We see this issue where basically the English data is made to stand in for the whole, right? It’s made to stand in as the default.

Michael:
So that introduces a lot of problems. And you would think it’d be just like, oh, well, what it means is that you can’t get a grammatically correct text in Greek out. But that’s not all it means though, because there are going to be certain conceptions of the world, how the world is divided, especially legally and politically that are going to be different. For example, put a whole bunch of training data from the US say, or from the UK or whatever, into these large language models, and they are going to call the sea, just off of Japan, the Sea of Japan, right? The sea that is between Japan and the Korean peninsula. They’re going to call it the Sea of Japan. If you train that same large language model on Korean data, they’d be calling it the Eastern Sea, because they don’t call it the Sea of Japan. So it’s not just the language, it is the way things are named. It is the way the world is sort of cut up, that’s going to be different on that too.

Michael:
So you can’t just use data in one language and think that that stands in for the entirety of human knowledge. It manifestly doesn’t. And there’s a major problem with thinking that it does, and there’s a major problem with the thinking that gets us to the place where we don’t even consider that until the horse is already out of the barn.

Larry:
Yep. You’re reminding me now of, you’re right in my audience’s sweet spot, that you have things and you’re labeling them, and that sea, some people call it one thing, some people call it another. And I also, I do a lot of work in the knowledge representation world in the AI world around knowledge graphs and ontologies and stuff. And also I’m super interested in the anthropological or the social, the notion of boundary objects. In that case, that body of water is a boundary object that’s perceived by Japanese people one way and Korean people another way. Which kind of gets back to that semantic thing I asked about earlier. It’s like, I don’t know, what’s our best shot at?

Larry:
Because everybody in this field is earnest and committed and serious about including as many people as possible in the digital experiences they’re creating. And I guess is there any, I hate this a three point list or a take home about, I hate that, but that idea, but just that notion of tips and tricks and just lessons from your world of linguistics and inclusion that might help people both understand that different people look at things differently and that your attempt to do it in your native language is going to fall short, and how can you best pick up, try to make up that difference?

Michael:
I think in terms of examples of how, again, you can’t just use one lens, it is what, in fact, do I have the book? I thought I had the book behind me. I don’t. But there’s an author who says that basically the danger of a stereotype is not that it’s incomplete, I’m paraphrasing, but it’s not that it’s inaccurate, it’s that it’s incomplete. In other words, it makes one story the only story. And I think it came from a talk entitled “The Danger of a Single Story.”” And that’s the thing, that’s the danger that we’re in right now, is we are treating one language as a stand-in for all of the languages. And this just circles right back around to what we were talking about with pivot language, using English as a pivot language, right?

Michael:
Because we’re using it as if it were sort of the Rosetta Stone/crucible into which we can just input from whatever language and then we can just take out of that into whatever language, with again, the impact that has on non-native English speakers being incentivized to go to English and then creating this massive amount of content in English because there’s more demand for English content, right? Because for example, in what I was saying earlier, the content that the job, in other words, the work that would’ve gone to the Japanese translator from French is now going to the English translator, because it’s coming from French into English. And then the Japanese translator is may be going to get that work from English into Japanese, but at what rate? Because now how far down the food chain, quote unquote, are they? There’s all these issues that come into that.

Michael:
So that in other words, how to illustrate the danger of that, I just gave one example. I think another very, very pertinent, two pertinent examples, and they are DEI related are racial categories. Now, one of the biggest proofs that race is a social construct, is that your race, quote unquote, can change just by crossing a border, right? So for example, in the US where I was born, I identify as black because that is when I’m in the US I know that’s how I code, that’s how I go. I carry that identity with me, but it doesn’t translate, quote unquote, no pun intended, the same way in Greece. My in-laws have said to me repeatedly, “but Michael, you’re not black.”” Because for them black is a certain set of features. When they think of black, they’re thinking of somebody who is from directly from Nigeria or Kenya or something like that.

Michael:
They aren’t thinking African-American, biracial, all of that kind of thing. They’ve got a particular thing in mind. They look at me and they’re like, hey, you just look like a southern Greek guy in the summer. But it is one of those stories that’s funny, but it points us at something. The way we look at these categories is very, very culturally determined. And so if you put in a bunch of data that says, people that look like this are this, people that look like this are this, and it’s from one cultural perspective, that’s not going to translate the same in another language and in another culture. What are some of the things that can be done about it? I’m about to make probably my least popular suggestion, but this is very DEI based and it is always the suggestion that goes over the hardest, no matter what I’m talking about, especially though when I’m talking to executives, this is the one that they go, “oh, okay, sure.”

Michael:
Which is, for those of you who are in a privileged position, and in this case privileged defined by having English as your first or very highly proficient language, is to actively work to dismantle what privileges you. And here’s what I mean by this, and everybody goes, wait a second. That sounds like less power for me. Yes, yes, that is exactly what I mean. Just in case anybody was wondering, does he really mean? Yes, he really means less power for you. Because I have seen people in, much love to all of you, but I have seen people in the localization industry who are not functionally multilingual, who are in monolingual anglophones. They’re not functionally monolingual. They very occasionally, and I know it is not without malice, but they will occasionally try to advocate for the lack of necessity of learning other languages to be able to do their job.

Michael:
And my first reaction is, okay, your colleague from Mexico, did they get that luxury? Did they get to not learn English and get your job? Because you didn’t have to do anything else other than be good at your job. That’s the thing, I am never saying somebody who’s a native English speaker is not good at their job. What I’m saying is that they are Fred Astaire to their colleagues, Ginger Rogers, let’s say it like that, right? Fred Astaire, he’s this wonderful dancer. What does Ginger Rogers do? Everything he does but backwards in his heels. Your colleagues who don’t have English as a native language do everything you do. They’re just as good at you as your job. You’re excellent at your job. They’re similarly excellent. They have to be excellent in another language. You just had to show up excellent. They had to show up excellent, having learned your language to get their foot in the door.

Michael:
So if you are in that position, question it, interrogate it. Say, hey, why wasn’t I required to learn another language? Maybe I should start learning another language. Oh, but it’s hard. Oh, but it takes time. Yes, that is all true. And it was hard and took time for your colleagues as well. Why is the burden shifted? Because we talk a lot about this in DEI about burden shifting, right? Burden shifting and focus shifting and impact shifting. Why is the burden on your colleagues to have done that work and not you? How did you get exempted from it? And then people will say, of course, well, that’s just the way things are when we’re not talking about some emergent property of the cosmos, is just to me a major cop out, because we create the way things are, right? The privilege of English is no more the way things are than the fact that my father couldn’t sit at the same lunch counter as everybody else when he was a child.

Michael:
It was the way things were, but people made it the way things were. It is the same thing with English. If you look at what was being talked about by Teddy Roosevelt, by Winston Churchill, by all of these anglophone leaders who had this vested interest in the promotion of English, you realize it wasn’t really an accident. There was some thought that went into this. And I’m not saying there’s some grand conspiracy or English cabal behind things. No, that’s silly. But the fact of the matter is, this isn’t a system that just grew up out of the ground like a birch tree. It’s a system that we made. And by interrogating it, by questioning why certain people have those privileges and certain people don’t, and by working to dismantle some of our own privileges, then we can move toward a system that is not more just and more fair, which is the Kegel, but the nice collateral benefit of that is that we’ll be actually doing our jobs better.

Michael:
We’ll be doing localization better. We’ll be doing translation better. We’ll be doing content creation. We’ll be doing media better if we do it that way, because we’ll have more stories contributing to that massive human knowledge.

Larry:
Nice. You couldn’t have known this, I don’t think, but my very first episode of this podcast was a guy named Hanson Hosein, and I started this whole podcast because he said, “does the world really need any more stories?” And from what you just said, I’m like, yes, we need many more stories. Thank you. Michael, I can’t believe it, we’re coming up close on time for the episode, but is there anything last, anything you want to make sure we share before we wrap up?

Michael:
I think the last thing I want to say is just sort of a reiteration really of what I’ve just said. I know some of us are allergic to thinking about our own privilege for various reasons, and a lot of them understandable, it can kind of bring up unpleasant feelings sometimes. I think about my privilege in the fact that I have a US passport. I think about my privilege in the fact that I am a native English speaker and the fact that I’m not disabled and I live in a neighborhood with really uneven sidewalks, but I don’t have to worry about it, that kind of thing. I think about those things a lot, and I think, okay, what can I do to make this better? I know it’s uncomfortable to think about our privilege, but I think it is absolutely vital to do so.

Michael:
Let me say it like this. It becomes a moral obligation in the sense that we are not just looking at what does the system do to others that we are directly impacting. In other words, the people on whom are shifting the burden of learning other languages. But then we have to also look at the ancillary effects that might not seem to be connected, but actually are. For example, you’re talking about living in the Netherlands and you haven’t learned Dutch yet, which okay, that’s hardly the greatest sin you could commit. But let’s think about it this way. If you moved to the Netherlands and you didn’t speak English either, but you spoke Somali or you spoke Arabic, would you have as many chances for success? Would you be welcomed as much? Would you be received as warmly?

Michael:
That’s the other issue. It’s not just about you are expecting Dutch people to know English, it is that other people who come in also not knowing Dutch, but not knowing English crucially, are not going to have the same reception that you do. So it’s this widening these ripples of effects that hit farther than we even imagined. So to try somewhat unsuccessfully to be brief, I would say what I would really encourage people to do is not from a place of guilt, not from a place of shame, that does nobody any good. And again, most people are acting with malice so they don’t deserve it. But to really start interrogating, how is it that we got to this place? What privileges do I have that other people don’t have, and what can I reasonably do? And that answer might be different for everybody, but what can I reasonably do, me as an individual in my situation, to make the situation better?

Michael:
It might be learning the language of the place where you live. It might be just deciding to learn another language that a lot of your colleagues speak. It might be advocating for your colleagues who don’t have English as a first language. How it’s going to look is going to be really different. It might be advocating to make sure that you have people that speak the language in which a product is going to be released on the dev team of that product, for example. But it is going to be that kind of thing. It’s taking that critical interrogative eye toward your positionality and your processes and saying, okay, where are things working and working not just in a profitable sense, but in an ethical and a moral sense, and where are things not working and where they’re not working, what can I do to improve it?

Larry:
Nice. Thanks so much, Michael. That’s exactly, that’s like a brilliant punctuation mark on this whole conversation. Thanks. Hey, one very last thing. What’s the best way for folks if they want to follow you or connect online to reach you?

Michael:
I’m a nobody on most social media platforms, buy you can find me on LinkedIn. You can also find me at my website, which is aliftoomega.com. You’re hearing it right? It’s alif, the first letter of the Arabic script and Omega the last letter of the Greek script. So A-L-I-F T-O Omega O-M-E-G-A dot com. And you can email me at Michael@aliftoomega.com as well.

Larry:
Great. Well thank you so much, Michael. I really enjoyed this conversation a lot.

Michael:
And thank you. I loved it. It was great. Thank you so much, Larry.