There is an intimate play of language in Hegel’s concept of recognition. Recognition is a concept in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit beginning with the moment of Lordship and Bondage and culminating in confession and its forgiveness. While Hegel’s text ends with mutual recognition as an achievement, the validity of this crowning moment is called into question by Frantz Fanon. While Fanon provides a valuable critique of Hegel, he might also present a limit-point to Hegel's account due to the way otherness and racism operate across linguistic lines. In spite of Fanon’s criticism, bringing Hegel into conversation with Post-colonial thinkers Ngugi wa Thiong’o and Sylvia Wynter, recognition and seeing the other as a being worthy of respect is salvageable. For Hegel, language is a form of mediation between self and other and is the true expression of Spirit, or collective sociality. When exploring racism as a linguistic practice, something that must be taken seriously is the approach to language’s content not just its form. As a form, language is a universal medium with which meaning can be shared across beings. While this is the function of language, racism manipulates this and the specific language used as a vehicle for oppression (English, French, etc.). Even though language is a tool of objectification, objectification can quickly become oppression. In striving towards mutual recognition, must the oppressed use the language of their oppressors? What does the language of the oppressed look like? What effects if any does an imposed or colonial language have on narratives and literature of a culture or people? In a global context, does speaking the imposed language allow the oppressed to reach a sympathetic audience among their oppressors? Despite complications relegating it to nigh impossibility, mutual recognition remains something that should be strived towards.