Prometheus 6

An inane idea in any language
By Dennis Byrne | a Chicago-area writer and consultant
August 27, 2007

As I read this I thought, "He's kind of excessively bent out of shape over bilingual signage in chain stores." And as I finished that thought I encountered this.

These folks want to dump English as the national language because, to them, anything that smacks of English-only suggests that "assimilation" is a good idea, when they believe that the whole concept of assimilation is a bourgeoisie, white-bread, if not racist, idea that no longer has a place in America. And anyone who disagrees is a "nativist," "hater" or racist.

Whoa.

No one is trying to dump English as the national language. It's not even possible to dump English as the national language. But the bilingual signage isn't his problem. 

His problem is that he thinks people don't want to assimilate, which is to say they don't aspire to be like him anymore. 

By the way, you might be surprised, as I was, to see the term monolingual increasingly applied to teachers -- and other Americans -- who speak only English. How insulting. It's as if English-speaking teachers were the same as teachers who spoke only, say, Kataang.

Reading this was a lot like observing an oozing wound.

White folks in the USofA have been suffering an identity crisis since the Pettus Bridge "incident" was televised. The need to deny the forces at the root of their status opened the same sort of mental schism that DuBois described in Black folks as having a dual soul. I would describe the problem as having one's self-image as dependant on your view of how others judge you as on how you judge yourself.

Whiteness has always been defined negatively, as in not-Black and not-Indian. It's the reason the first thought you have about self-described pro-White groups is that they are racist...because whiteness has always been "that which non-White people are not". So when minorities are able to assert posession of the traits not-defined as Black or Indian, they shrink that negatively defined space. Worse, they create new spaces that are only accessable from non-White spaces.

English is our national language, and in this setting it is inaccurate and disingenuous to refer to an English-only teacher, or another American, as monolingual. English-speaking is a more precise description than the generic monolingual, but you can expect the politically correct elites to continue to use the deprecatory term precisely because it diminishes the importance of speaking English.

You must torture language and reason to assert "English-speaking is a more precise description than the generic monolingual". "English speaking" can be just as accurately applied to the bilingual if one of those languages is English. If precision is the issue, the rejected "English-only" is the term to use. 

Being able to speak more than one language is admirable. But, in the American classroom, we need to acknowledge the greater importance of learning English.

But precision isn't the issue. 

And not treat its speakers as a disposable category.

Identity is the issue. The writer is feeling the first slice in the death of 1000 cuts, and Black folks having taken about, oh, 620 of them, my sympathy is limited to not directly salting his wounds. But I do feel he's making a big deal to little effect here.