Guy Asks Reddit If Thinking An Indian Girl Can’t Be Good At Scrabble Makes Him An Ass. Yes, And Racist And Sexist!
Before I begin to tell you about this ridiculously racist incident off Reddit, let me start you off with something positive. A little over a decade ago, I was in California and decided to go skydiving. My tandem instructor was a super-friendly dude from New Zealand, called PJ. And PJ was just mesmerised by the fact that I could speak such excellent English! He even asked me if I was born and raised in the United States, because I spoke a lot like the NRIs he had met. Now, here’s the thing though. It didn’t feel like he was being racist or offensive because a) he wasn’t being arrogant about his own English speaking abilities when he asked me that, and b) when I told him that Indians actually speak more accurate English than Americans, he was eager to know more. Which, I daresay, is a whole ocean of different from what this one guy on Reddit tried to do, when he was losing a game of Scrabble to an Indian girl. Surprise surprise, he got a wee bit racist.
There’s a pretty fun and educational subreddit called r/AmITheAsshole which, as the name indicates, lets people put forth incidents where they aren’t exactly sure if they acted like assholes. And then of course, the other Redditors weigh in on it, granting the poster validation or shame, depending on how they feel. Recently, one user who was clearly a non-Indian, posted about how his girlfriend’s Indian friend, Priya, being so good at Scrabble was a total shocker to him. Of course, that he might just be a guy who got racist during scrabble did not occur to him.
Turns out, OP (Original Poster, a term used to refer to the person who wrote the post) and his girlfriend were invited by Priya to her house for dinner. She fed them Indian food and wine, and then OP’s girlfriend suggested they play Scrabble, because Priya loved it. Now OP probably thought, “Oh hey! Two girls, one of them Indian, and a game of Scrabble? Cakewalk!” Unfortunately for him, it wasn’t. Priya was totally decimating him and one prolonged bathroom break on her part later, OP was convinced that Priya was winning because she was cheating. How could an Indian girl, who had been in this English-speaking country for only a year, be so good at English that she could spell words like ‘maladies’ and ‘ostensibly’?
AITA for saying that an Indian girl was cheating at Scrabble?
by u/throwawaygerbil113 in AmItheAsshole
So What Was This Guy Doing Being Racist During Scrabble?
Clearly, dude hasn’t heard of Shashi Tharoor, or he wouldn’t have indulged in this rodomontade or be spewing this exasperating farrago of distortions about Priya cheating. I mean, haven’t Indians been winning American spelling bees left, right and centre? I kid you not, despite being just 1% of the United States population, Indian Americans have actually been reigning at the Scripps National Spelling Bee for the past two damn decades! Who is this guy trying to show down, eh? Who knew a guy could be racist while playing Scrabble?
Sure, @chetan_bhagat! It’s clear you are not sesquipedalian nor given to rodomontade. Your ideas are unembellished with tortuous convolutions & expressed without ostentation. I appreciate the limpid perspicacity of today’s column. https://t.co/GI3mbnlion
— Shashi Tharoor (@ShashiTharoor) September 13, 2020
Anyway, you and I don’t need to sass him much here. Because, as per the ending of his post, not only did his really nice girlfriend call him out for being racist to her BFF and is reconsidering their entire relationship, but also the comments on his post totally did it for us!
I suppose, Badla The Revenge has been extracted.
But jokes aside, it really does hurt when Indians continue to be viewed as mediocre in speaking or writing English. Especially in this day and age, when we’ve already proved ourselves in every global field. We get it, English is considered the world’s lingua franca, but it is definitely not spoken in its purest form by the entire English-speaking population, is it? In fact, according to an analysis by the ETS (which conducts the TOEFL) in 2011, Indians score more on the proficiency test than people who’s native language is English, such as Americans!
So, OP stop being racist and… umm…
