This is a guest post by Marcella.
Over the past few months, there has been a lot ink spilled over the so-called "immigration crisis" As sensational news coverage whips up concerns over who should be granted refugee status and employment opportunities, I have noticed an increase in another kind of reporting. These stories describe white-bystanders calling the local authorities to report that people around them are speaking Spanish. In one incident, a lawyer called ICE because a Starbucks employee was speaking Spanish to several customers. The lawyer assumed that the people were in the United States illegally and said that he should not have to be subjected to hearing Spanish since his hard-earned money was allowing them to live in his country for free. As the journalist pointed out, even if the Spanish speakers had been undocumented, (their immigration status remained unconfirmed) taxes are still withheld on their paychecks. In another story, a border patrol agent detained and questioned two women at a gas station in Montana merely because he overheard them speaking Spanish. The women were U.S. citizens.
This kind of language discrimination reminded me of a blog post I read about a year ago at the American Conservative. Jason Richwine was reacting to California's recently-passed Proposition 58, which allows public schools to offer bilingual education without having to get a waiver from each child's parent/guardian. I revisited the post, thinking he had feared that too many students would not be able to learn English, leading to communication gaps that eventually would bifurcate the country. But after re-reading, I realized Richwine’s argument was even broader. He actually believes that helping Hispanic students retain their native language will destroy the United States as we know it.
Richwine argues that high numbers of bilingual speakers would undermine national unity in at least three different ways. First, he cited statistics showing students who spoke Spanish at home tended to have lower than average scores and go to college at lower rates.
Second, Richwine asserted that high numbers of bilingual citizens negatively correlated with economic growth:
I do not think that any of these three arguments holds up.
To begin with, he misrepresented the goals of the new law. Even under Prop 58, English mastery is still the priority and English is expected to remain the lingua franca. It is true that the bill was intended to allow all students to receive a solid English education while being able to retain a native language or to learn a second. However, even though Richwine’s primary concern is that the law encourages first generation English speakers to remain bilingual, many Californians who pushed for Proposition 58 were not recent Hispanic immigrants trying to refuse assimilation, but rather were upper-middle class families who think acquiring a second language will be an asset for their children.
Richwine admitted other factors were at play in the achievement gap among native Spanish speakers, but he did not adequately address the issue. He is correct in saying that many families who speak Spanish in their home also suffer from poverty. The gap between the median income of white families and Hispanic families is over $20,000. A 2016 report showed that the poverty is increasingly linked to lower academic achievement. Some of this discrepancy comes from belonging to families that have not had the time or have been prevented from building up wealth, often resulting in diminished access to tutoring, travel, and even the influence of other educated adults. Because these gaps are even larger among monolingual African Americans, however, it seems problematic to say that bilingualism leads to poverty, rather than poverty to sub-par education. Without sufficient discussion of these factors, Richwine should not have implied that speaking Spanish at home was the most significant reason for below average academic performance.
His claim that economic growth correlates with increasing monolingualism is unsubstantiated in the post, and (based on conversations I have had with my historian husband) contrary to general knowledge on the subject. After World War II, for example, there was increasing support of isolationism, but most historians attribute growth to the fact that the U.S. was the only power that came out from the war relatively unscathed, and therefore surged ahead of the other industrialized countries that were still reeling from significant population loss and industrial destruction from the war. And while countries like China may have low percentages of English speakers, the government seems pretty proud that they have been changing that the past few years.
His examples of how bilingual ability inherently undermines social cohesion also failed to convince me. He quotes Putnam on how “foreign language speakers” decrease community trust, but “foreign language speakers” are not obviously also fluent in the lingua franca. And when Richwine wrote “[in] bilingual California, Putnam’s data show that Los Angeles and San Francisco are among the U.S. cities with the least social capital,” he failed to explain how many Californians must speak two languages for the state to be described as “bilingual.” From having lived in Northern California, I would strongly suspect that a minority of non-Hispanic Americans speak Spanish, and unless the majority of all ethnic groups speak both languages, the designation, “bilingual California” is mistaken.
The example he gave to try to support Putnam’s descriptions of social unraveling was unpersuasive. He cited statistics showing that Spanish speaking households and English-speaking households watch entirely different television shows, saying that non-Hispanics have never even heard of the top ten shows on Telemundo. He argued then that different media exposure led to different political messages and gave examples of where politicians John McCain and Marco Rubio gave contradictory campaign promises in their corresponding media markets. Richwine argued that bilingual schools would only serve to polarize these groups further, leading to more cultural fragmentation and political hypocrisy.
I was baffled by Richwine's conclusion that we should reduce Spanish language education to decrease politicians’ hypocrisy. Shouldn't McCain's and Rubio's campaigns be blamed for hypocrisy and division, rather than the passive television viewers? Even if language barriers make it harder for different groups to understand each other, developing bilingual schools as described in Prop. 58 seems like an effective way to circumvent these kinds of double messages. If all students come out conversant with both Spanish and English, suddenly both Telemundo and NBC would be accessible. My own consumption of Spanish language media has increased because my years of language study have given me the ability to understand it.
Significant political polarization among English speakers also makes me doubt that the absence of Spanish media would eliminate conflicting political messages. It is already possible to read newspapers and watch news stations that give entirely different interpretations of events--that Fox News and MSNBC diverge in their reporting and interpretation of events is widely accepted by the audiences of both their audiences. Concerning cultural exposure, my own conversations with Hispanic friends also suggest that Richwine's narrative is insufficient. As someone who was homeschooled and then purposely avoided television with commercials, I am ignorant of many popular shows and music. In fact, many of my Hispanic friends have recommended I watch various movies and shows (produced for an English-speaking audience) to help me improve my cultural literacy. Linguistic difference does not appear to bifurcate media consumption as much as Richwine suggests, and bilingual education again appears to be a potential solution rather than a driver of the problem.
The fact that my Hispanic friends and I can have these conversations with each other--me with my limited Spanish and my friends with their limited English--suggests that Richwine was wrong to so quickly dismiss bilingual education. I doubt the complete cultural unity he imagines could exist in our imperfect world, but education rather than language suppression seems to offer the key to breaking down language barriers and letting people with different culture assumptions understand each other. For example, several times when I have been at my local grocery store, I have seen Spanish speaking families nervously keeping to themselves, looking worried when their children wander off because they are not sure of the social etiquette or if other store customers might be talking about them. When I have made off-hand comments about how cute their kids are, I can see the adults visibly relax. Usually the adults then respond by asking about my children, and we have a nice conversation in which we bond over our mutual roles as parents. If Richwine’s goal is assimilation and unity, then offering opportunities to learn more languages will increase the chances that different cultural groups will communicate and accept each other as fellow human beings.
Richwine does admit that learning another language can be helpful for learning about culture and having a sense of how languages works, and that ". . . mastering in-demand languages can be financially lucrative for soldiers, diplomats, intelligence analysts, academics, and business travelers." But this admission seems only to admit the benefit of a second language to native English speakers. As I wrote earlier, he thinks Spanish speakers would be better off if they forgot their native tongue the way that many 19th century immigrants did. To me this assumption smacks of cultural imperialism, if not outright racism. Even if Richwine were right that the knowledge of Spanish provided no added value to the U.S. economy, I do not see why it is necessary to advocate for the loss of an entire language. Proposition 58 is a plea for the enrichment of all Americans, while what Richwine advocates is subtraction from an already underprivileged minority group. I find this frustrating because diversity of language should be celebrated. After all, the more ways we have to say things, the better we should be able to figure out how to talk about our world and understand it.
The fear that minority groups must be squashed out to maintain power is not new. It has always been a strategy of authoritarian governments to force assimilation. In fact, the nationalist movements found in Quebec and the Basque Country are in part reactions to centuries of government campaigns intended to eliminate local languages. Richwine got it backwards—the drive for unity was the real catalyst for the subsequent polarization.
I read an article in the New York Times describing a contemporary example of what happens when government officials follow Richwine's conclusions. The article explained how a businessman in China, Tashi Wangchuk, received a five-year jail sentence because he advocated that schools be allowed to teach children to read and write in the Tibetan language. The Chinese government jailed him for fomenting "separatism." The Chinese court cited the man's comment, “In politics, it’s said that if one nation wants to eliminate another nation, first they need to eliminate their spoken and written language. . . In effect, there is a systematic slaughter of our culture.” The parallels between Richwine’s argument and that of the Chinese state are striking.
I recently read an interpretation of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel that seemed relevant to thinking about language and it relationship to national identity. When I was growing up, I had learned that the story of Babel showed how the whole world was supposed to speak one language, but then because of the town's sin, the people were cursed with multiple languages and forced to disperse and leave off building the tower to heaven. The Old Testament scholar Richard Middleton reads the passages differently. Middleton bases his interpretation in the context of the Babylonian exile and the tendency of Near Eastern Empires to do what Mr. Tashi accuses the Chinese government of doing to the Tibetan minority groups--require recently conquered peoples to speak only the language of the empire so that any distinction among people groups would be destroyed. The tower of Babel represents an arrogant empire trying to take over the world by trying to erase all markers that other ethnic identities ever existed, including other languages. But the confusion of languages and subsequent dispersion, in Middleton's reading, is a restoration of God's command to fill the earth and multiply.
Even the story of Pentecost, which uses the Tower of Babel as a symbolic backdrop, does not actually restore the world to a homogenous mono-lingual culture. Rather, Peter and the other disciples miraculously communicate the Gospel with Jewish travelers who speak a variety of different languages. After Pentecost, those travelers disperse once more, spreading the gospel in their own hometowns, speaking their own native tongues. The Church is unified in Christ, not in language or culture.
I recognize that Richwine is not talking about the Church. It is important, however, for Christians to be careful not to adopt Richwine’s vision of a unified national identity as a model for protecting the United States as a Christian nation. Doing so would be to build Babel anew. Even if somehow bilingual education did weaken national identity, I would still argue that educational achievement, economic growth, and adherence to a particular cultural tradition are not most important reasons to defend the legality of speaking other languages or to improve access to foreign-language education. As a Christian, I think that humans are made in the image of God, and so I want to be more concerned with figuring out how to create unity by communicating with and learning from minority groups rather than coercively making them into my own image.
Over the past few months, there has been a lot ink spilled over the so-called "immigration crisis" As sensational news coverage whips up concerns over who should be granted refugee status and employment opportunities, I have noticed an increase in another kind of reporting. These stories describe white-bystanders calling the local authorities to report that people around them are speaking Spanish. In one incident, a lawyer called ICE because a Starbucks employee was speaking Spanish to several customers. The lawyer assumed that the people were in the United States illegally and said that he should not have to be subjected to hearing Spanish since his hard-earned money was allowing them to live in his country for free. As the journalist pointed out, even if the Spanish speakers had been undocumented, (their immigration status remained unconfirmed) taxes are still withheld on their paychecks. In another story, a border patrol agent detained and questioned two women at a gas station in Montana merely because he overheard them speaking Spanish. The women were U.S. citizens.
This kind of language discrimination reminded me of a blog post I read about a year ago at the American Conservative. Jason Richwine was reacting to California's recently-passed Proposition 58, which allows public schools to offer bilingual education without having to get a waiver from each child's parent/guardian. I revisited the post, thinking he had feared that too many students would not be able to learn English, leading to communication gaps that eventually would bifurcate the country. But after re-reading, I realized Richwine’s argument was even broader. He actually believes that helping Hispanic students retain their native language will destroy the United States as we know it.
Richwine argues that high numbers of bilingual speakers would undermine national unity in at least three different ways. First, he cited statistics showing students who spoke Spanish at home tended to have lower than average scores and go to college at lower rates.
On both the math and reading sections of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, 12th-graders who speak English well but also speak another language at home score slightly lower than students who speak only English at home. Furthermore, adults who were born in the U.S. but remain bilingual have a lower median income and are less likely to complete college than U.S.-born adults who speak only English.
Second, Richwine asserted that high numbers of bilingual citizens negatively correlated with economic growth:
Many of the most successful trading nations today, such as South Korea and Japan, are linguistically homogeneous. China has become an economic powerhouse largely by manufacturing products for the North American and European markets, yet only a tiny fraction of the Chinese people are fluent in English or another European language. The U.S. itself became the world’s foremost economic and military power at a time when immigration was low and full assimilation was encouraged.He went as far as to claim that the isolationist fears during the World Wars were what reminded Americans to keep out people who spoke other languages. Third, Richwine described various ways in which bilingual Hispanic Citizens threatened to divide communities, and cited sociologist Robert Putnam to try to prove: “. . . that American communities with larger proportions of foreign-language speakers suffer from less neighborly trust, even after controlling for a host of socioeconomic variables. Putnam is famous for finding that ethno-cultural diversity causes people to trust everyone less, including members of their own group.” Richwine then compared the predicament in the United States with regions like Quebec and the Basque Country that have threatened to secede from their countries, in part to protect the people’s right to speak traditional languages. He noted some people hope Prop 58 will bridge this potential linguistic gap, but he explained that hope is misguided because even the bilingual speakers in Quebec and the Basque country still want their own governments. He is so worried about this that he proposed immigration caps as the only viable long-term solution for decreasing the number of Americans who are multi-lingual.
I do not think that any of these three arguments holds up.
To begin with, he misrepresented the goals of the new law. Even under Prop 58, English mastery is still the priority and English is expected to remain the lingua franca. It is true that the bill was intended to allow all students to receive a solid English education while being able to retain a native language or to learn a second. However, even though Richwine’s primary concern is that the law encourages first generation English speakers to remain bilingual, many Californians who pushed for Proposition 58 were not recent Hispanic immigrants trying to refuse assimilation, but rather were upper-middle class families who think acquiring a second language will be an asset for their children.
Richwine admitted other factors were at play in the achievement gap among native Spanish speakers, but he did not adequately address the issue. He is correct in saying that many families who speak Spanish in their home also suffer from poverty. The gap between the median income of white families and Hispanic families is over $20,000. A 2016 report showed that the poverty is increasingly linked to lower academic achievement. Some of this discrepancy comes from belonging to families that have not had the time or have been prevented from building up wealth, often resulting in diminished access to tutoring, travel, and even the influence of other educated adults. Because these gaps are even larger among monolingual African Americans, however, it seems problematic to say that bilingualism leads to poverty, rather than poverty to sub-par education. Without sufficient discussion of these factors, Richwine should not have implied that speaking Spanish at home was the most significant reason for below average academic performance.
His claim that economic growth correlates with increasing monolingualism is unsubstantiated in the post, and (based on conversations I have had with my historian husband) contrary to general knowledge on the subject. After World War II, for example, there was increasing support of isolationism, but most historians attribute growth to the fact that the U.S. was the only power that came out from the war relatively unscathed, and therefore surged ahead of the other industrialized countries that were still reeling from significant population loss and industrial destruction from the war. And while countries like China may have low percentages of English speakers, the government seems pretty proud that they have been changing that the past few years.
His examples of how bilingual ability inherently undermines social cohesion also failed to convince me. He quotes Putnam on how “foreign language speakers” decrease community trust, but “foreign language speakers” are not obviously also fluent in the lingua franca. And when Richwine wrote “[in] bilingual California, Putnam’s data show that Los Angeles and San Francisco are among the U.S. cities with the least social capital,” he failed to explain how many Californians must speak two languages for the state to be described as “bilingual.” From having lived in Northern California, I would strongly suspect that a minority of non-Hispanic Americans speak Spanish, and unless the majority of all ethnic groups speak both languages, the designation, “bilingual California” is mistaken.
The example he gave to try to support Putnam’s descriptions of social unraveling was unpersuasive. He cited statistics showing that Spanish speaking households and English-speaking households watch entirely different television shows, saying that non-Hispanics have never even heard of the top ten shows on Telemundo. He argued then that different media exposure led to different political messages and gave examples of where politicians John McCain and Marco Rubio gave contradictory campaign promises in their corresponding media markets. Richwine argued that bilingual schools would only serve to polarize these groups further, leading to more cultural fragmentation and political hypocrisy.
I was baffled by Richwine's conclusion that we should reduce Spanish language education to decrease politicians’ hypocrisy. Shouldn't McCain's and Rubio's campaigns be blamed for hypocrisy and division, rather than the passive television viewers? Even if language barriers make it harder for different groups to understand each other, developing bilingual schools as described in Prop. 58 seems like an effective way to circumvent these kinds of double messages. If all students come out conversant with both Spanish and English, suddenly both Telemundo and NBC would be accessible. My own consumption of Spanish language media has increased because my years of language study have given me the ability to understand it.
Significant political polarization among English speakers also makes me doubt that the absence of Spanish media would eliminate conflicting political messages. It is already possible to read newspapers and watch news stations that give entirely different interpretations of events--that Fox News and MSNBC diverge in their reporting and interpretation of events is widely accepted by the audiences of both their audiences. Concerning cultural exposure, my own conversations with Hispanic friends also suggest that Richwine's narrative is insufficient. As someone who was homeschooled and then purposely avoided television with commercials, I am ignorant of many popular shows and music. In fact, many of my Hispanic friends have recommended I watch various movies and shows (produced for an English-speaking audience) to help me improve my cultural literacy. Linguistic difference does not appear to bifurcate media consumption as much as Richwine suggests, and bilingual education again appears to be a potential solution rather than a driver of the problem.
The fact that my Hispanic friends and I can have these conversations with each other--me with my limited Spanish and my friends with their limited English--suggests that Richwine was wrong to so quickly dismiss bilingual education. I doubt the complete cultural unity he imagines could exist in our imperfect world, but education rather than language suppression seems to offer the key to breaking down language barriers and letting people with different culture assumptions understand each other. For example, several times when I have been at my local grocery store, I have seen Spanish speaking families nervously keeping to themselves, looking worried when their children wander off because they are not sure of the social etiquette or if other store customers might be talking about them. When I have made off-hand comments about how cute their kids are, I can see the adults visibly relax. Usually the adults then respond by asking about my children, and we have a nice conversation in which we bond over our mutual roles as parents. If Richwine’s goal is assimilation and unity, then offering opportunities to learn more languages will increase the chances that different cultural groups will communicate and accept each other as fellow human beings.
Richwine does admit that learning another language can be helpful for learning about culture and having a sense of how languages works, and that ". . . mastering in-demand languages can be financially lucrative for soldiers, diplomats, intelligence analysts, academics, and business travelers." But this admission seems only to admit the benefit of a second language to native English speakers. As I wrote earlier, he thinks Spanish speakers would be better off if they forgot their native tongue the way that many 19th century immigrants did. To me this assumption smacks of cultural imperialism, if not outright racism. Even if Richwine were right that the knowledge of Spanish provided no added value to the U.S. economy, I do not see why it is necessary to advocate for the loss of an entire language. Proposition 58 is a plea for the enrichment of all Americans, while what Richwine advocates is subtraction from an already underprivileged minority group. I find this frustrating because diversity of language should be celebrated. After all, the more ways we have to say things, the better we should be able to figure out how to talk about our world and understand it.
The fear that minority groups must be squashed out to maintain power is not new. It has always been a strategy of authoritarian governments to force assimilation. In fact, the nationalist movements found in Quebec and the Basque Country are in part reactions to centuries of government campaigns intended to eliminate local languages. Richwine got it backwards—the drive for unity was the real catalyst for the subsequent polarization.
I read an article in the New York Times describing a contemporary example of what happens when government officials follow Richwine's conclusions. The article explained how a businessman in China, Tashi Wangchuk, received a five-year jail sentence because he advocated that schools be allowed to teach children to read and write in the Tibetan language. The Chinese government jailed him for fomenting "separatism." The Chinese court cited the man's comment, “In politics, it’s said that if one nation wants to eliminate another nation, first they need to eliminate their spoken and written language. . . In effect, there is a systematic slaughter of our culture.” The parallels between Richwine’s argument and that of the Chinese state are striking.
I recently read an interpretation of the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel that seemed relevant to thinking about language and it relationship to national identity. When I was growing up, I had learned that the story of Babel showed how the whole world was supposed to speak one language, but then because of the town's sin, the people were cursed with multiple languages and forced to disperse and leave off building the tower to heaven. The Old Testament scholar Richard Middleton reads the passages differently. Middleton bases his interpretation in the context of the Babylonian exile and the tendency of Near Eastern Empires to do what Mr. Tashi accuses the Chinese government of doing to the Tibetan minority groups--require recently conquered peoples to speak only the language of the empire so that any distinction among people groups would be destroyed. The tower of Babel represents an arrogant empire trying to take over the world by trying to erase all markers that other ethnic identities ever existed, including other languages. But the confusion of languages and subsequent dispersion, in Middleton's reading, is a restoration of God's command to fill the earth and multiply.
Even the story of Pentecost, which uses the Tower of Babel as a symbolic backdrop, does not actually restore the world to a homogenous mono-lingual culture. Rather, Peter and the other disciples miraculously communicate the Gospel with Jewish travelers who speak a variety of different languages. After Pentecost, those travelers disperse once more, spreading the gospel in their own hometowns, speaking their own native tongues. The Church is unified in Christ, not in language or culture.
I recognize that Richwine is not talking about the Church. It is important, however, for Christians to be careful not to adopt Richwine’s vision of a unified national identity as a model for protecting the United States as a Christian nation. Doing so would be to build Babel anew. Even if somehow bilingual education did weaken national identity, I would still argue that educational achievement, economic growth, and adherence to a particular cultural tradition are not most important reasons to defend the legality of speaking other languages or to improve access to foreign-language education. As a Christian, I think that humans are made in the image of God, and so I want to be more concerned with figuring out how to create unity by communicating with and learning from minority groups rather than coercively making them into my own image.
Marc, I love it! I'm entirely intrigued by that interpretation of the tower of Babel as well as your final point about forced unity being the thing that actually creates reactive division. I'd like to hear more of what you think about the ways in which unity can be built in culturally diverse communities.
ReplyDelete