http://abcnews.go.com/WhatWouldYouDo/story?id=6551048&page=1
I found out that they filmed a piece on racism at a bagel place a few blocks from me and showed it on last night's "What would you do?" ABC Primetime special. I actually know a few people who wound up on camera. It was an interesting piece, but a bit skewed, and IMO it mixed two different, although not separate issues. Basically they had an actor portray a sales clerk who was refusing service to a couple of Mexicans who couldn't speak English, going so far as to accuse them of being illegal aliens and threatening to call the police on them. The whole point of it was to gauge the other customers' reactions, and see what they would do, if anything.
I don't know, I'm kind of torn on this. The racist clerk was pretty over the top, and it's hard to condone his actions of refusing service based on race and taking it further to accuse them of illegally entering the country because of it. On the other hand, I think it completely glosses over the fact that there is a real problem with people coming to the US and, for whatever reason, refusing to learn the language. I'm not talking about the people who've just immigrated to the country and need to get acclimated, but rather the ones who've lived here for YEARS and still can't communicate. I went to grammar school with someone who, from 1st to 8th grade, never was able to communicate in English. I'm assuming that at home all they ever spoke was Spanish, so he was always somewhat of an outsider. I have no idea what happened to him after that, but it's hard to imagine him amounting to much. The counter-argument to this always seems to be that people are asking them to give up their culture, but I don't think that's the case. Realistically, I don't see how a person can expect to live in a country over an extended period of time and feel that everyone should learn their language instead of them even making an attempt to be able to communicate with the masses.
Of course, the fact that so many native speakers have absolutely no grasp of the English language is a problem all in itself. For the love of God, I can't understand half of the posts I read on this site, and they're all supposedly written in English...