Chapter 10: How We Hurt Ourselves

So far, we’ve looked at how English-speaking cultures shape history, news, language, and world events. We saw how powerful stories get made, how words hide biases, and how world conversations often lean towards an English-speaking view. But this isn’t just theory. The deepest harm happens inside us, as we live in this English-influenced world.

How It Clouds Our View

Hearing English-speaking stories all the time, often told as if they are neutral or true for everyone, changes how we see the world. Worse, it changes how we see ourselves, our people, our past, and our culture.

Ask yourself:

• Do you catch yourself feeling your accent isn’t as good as standard American or British English?
• Do you believe parts of your own culture are ‘backward’ or less ‘modern’ than theirs?
• Do you chase ideas of success or beauty that come mainly from English-speaking cultures?
• Do you learn about neighbors or other cultures mostly through English news and history books?
• Do you repeat their stereotypes about other people?
• Have you accepted their version of world history, or even your own country’s history, without asking who told the story and why?
• Does their story ignore what your ancestors achieved, or gloss over the bad things colonizers did?

This clouded view isn’t an accident. It happens when one viewpoint dominates the information we get. When the main news sources and biggest websites mostly show one culture’s view, that view can start to feel like the only reality, even for the rest of us.

Working Against Ourselves

The biggest danger is helping them hurt you, without realizing it. When you casually use the language, watch their media, and accept their stories without thinking hard, you might be:

• Repeating their biases about your culture or others.
• Choosing their culture over yours, weakening your own heritage.
• Accepting their definition of success, even if it doesn’t fit you.
• Passing these biases on to your children.

When you start believing ‘Western’ is always better, or that your history began when they arrived, or that world news only matters if it affects them, you shrink yourself.

The Real Betrayal: Hurting Ourselves with Words

This leads to the book’s title: Anglophone Betrayal. Remember, this isn’t about English-speaking societies betraying the world’s trust. They often acted in their own interest, and few people they ruled ever trusted them.

The real betrayal is how we can hurt ourselves when we carelessly use English and accept the worldview hidden inside it.

It happens quietly in your mind, in your diary, in how you think about your hopes. You think and talk using English. But English carries baggage from powerful cultures that often harmed others. If you use it without thinking, you might adopt views that harm your own success and dignity. You end up helping to continue stories that may have hurt your people in the past.

This doesn’t mean using English is bad. It connects the world, and that’s valuable. The key is awareness. Are you choosing your words carefully, or are the hidden assumptions in the language controlling you? Do you use their ways of thinking because they truly help you, or just because they are common and you haven’t questioned them?

Seeing how you might betray yourself is the first big step. It helps you take back your own story. It helps you use English in a way that builds you up, not tears you down, and connects you to who you really are.