A Microcosm of an American Debate

Last week after work I returned to my car parked in the local commuter lot and found an advertisement for a daycare center under my windshield wiper. Such solicitations annoy me anywhere since they cause extra effort for us motorists and since most of them end up as litter. They particularly annoy me at the commuter lot where there are giant "State Property / No Handbills or Solicitations / Violators will be Prosecuted" signs posted all over the place. Despite usually being a responsible participant in democracy, I've decided to happily vote against Terry McAuliffe for governor purely because I still can't get some of his flier off of my car after it was left there by his supporters in this same commuter lot on a rainy day.

But I digress. In addition to illegally giving me the flier, the daycare advertisement was riddled with typos. Being a smart alec, the next day I changed my IM away message to quote the flier:

[Eric] is thinking of transferring Ryan to the "Pilar's Proffesional Child Care Provider" [sic] who advertised on his car today.

My motive was that I was irritated with the flier, and my point was that if someone didn't care enough to spellcheck or proofread that I was worried that they would care enough about my child.

To my surprise, the response from my friends to this was universally negative. Their implication was that it was unfair of me to judge a Hispanic immigrant's poor English spelling since this didn't necessarily impact his or her child-rearing abilities.

At first I scolded myself for subconscious racism. But the more I thought about it, the more I questioned which side of the argument had the bias. The name "Pilar" has Spanish origins, although I honestly didn't know that before this week. But I have plenty of Spanish-named friends who can spell and speak English better than I can. And I have plenty of Anglo-named friends with horrific spelling skills. Either group is capable of running spell-check or having a second set of eyes look at a flier before mass producing. How do either I or my readers know if Pilar is American-born? Isn't it discriminatory to assume that just because Pilar isn't careful that she must be a Hispanic immigrant?