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Friday, February 12, 2010
Boomer with Attitude / News 'No Spanish' incident is appalling bigotry
Posted By John Grooms on Fri, Feb 12, 2010 at 1:26 PM
One of my college history professors once answered a student’s question about a current event by saying, “I am completely goddamned appalled.” His words became a favorite catchphrase, and so I’m reviving it as reaction to the uproar over the Devonshire Elementary principal who banned school employees from translating for Spanish-speaking parents. The fact that a secretary was canned for helping out parents in any language is bad enough. But what raised the hackles of this writer, who was raised in a bilingual home, albeit French-speaking rather than Spanish, was the reaction from those in Charlotte who think the principal did the right thing.
So far, the most talked about advocate for keeping the evil Spanish language out of our schools is one Sharon Dixon, whose letter to the daily paper a couple of days ago was a masterpiece of self-deluded intolerance. Read it here (scroll halfway down), and weep for such blatant, un-self-aware ignorance. Dixon momentously declares, “In America, we speak English, even at school.” First of all, the translation didn’t take place in a classroom, and no one is even remotely suggesting that Spanish-speaking students shouldn’t learn English — in fact, CMS does a decent job of teaching English as a second language.
Secondly, no, Sharon, we don’t all speak English in America, not all the time, and if you got out in the real world more, perhaps you'd know that. People in America — people who are as “real American” as you — speak hundreds of languages: English, Spanish, Italian, Portugese, Japanese, French, Cherokee, Chinese, Choctaw, Gullah, Polish, and lots of others. And you know what, Ms. “Be like me or you’re un-American”? It’s been that way for a loooong time, and it’s not gonna change just because some sheltered bigot with a computer thinks it should.
What really burned my butt in Dixon’s letter, though, was where she wrote, “We’re aiding the Latino/Spanish-speaking community if we speak Spanish to them in our American schools.” As if “aiding the Latino community” is a bad thing — she may as well have added, “Maybe if we don’t translate for them, they’ll go away.” This is the same kind of xenophobic nonsense — what writer Marsha Dawkins calls “The fear of a multi-cultural America” — we’ve heard more and more of in the past few years. It’s a stupid, brutish, ostrich-like way of seeing the world and yes, I’m completely goddamned appalled. Have a great weekend.
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