English Only...

So according to the Tennessean, John Tanton, the man behind Nashville's push to make English the city's "official" language, has been identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as having ties to many national hate groups.

No surprise there... Several years ago, when working on a paper at Stony Brook, I decided to try connecting the dots between seemingly innocuous immigration groups (those that put a genteel and "reasonable" face on their arguments) and the most vicious, vituperative groups, like the Border Patrol, No More Illegals and Deport Aliens.com. Unfortunately, in most cases it was a question of one or two clicks of the mouse.

Nashville has the biggest population of refugee Iraqi Kurds - those same souls we wept for as we heard of their persecution by Saddam Hussein. Now that we have welcomed them as newcomers, have helped them settle here and become part of what could be a rich and cosmopolitan landscape here in Nashville (together with our Sudanese and Ethiopian and Honderan and Mexican and Turkish, and Persian friends), let's not embarrass our city with this utterly asinine, English only legislation.

Militant anti-immigrant groups create a climate of fear and hate. Racially hateful language is part and parcel of the increasing xenophobia pervading this country, reflecting a growing national phenomenon of linguistic and cultural tensions. We have never been a country particularly curious about other cultures and worlds. Rather, we prefer to stick to our own cultural references – the more uniform they are, the more unified we feel as a people. We are content and seemingly highly satisfied with the cultural homogeneity that has overtaken the country. Whether it’s Barnes & Noble laying waste to the small bookstores in lower Manhattan, new subdivisions eating up the remaining farms in Suffolk County, the arrival of Wal-Mart’s in Anytown, USA, or the deregulation and consolidation of every conceivable industry – most chillingly, in the media and communications sector – most Americans are curiously happy to oblige.

As for so-called “multiculturalism,” it’s just fine in small doses and as long as it’s restricted to ethnic restaurants and at carefully circumscribed ethnic festivals.”

It’s not even English-centeredness itself – love of the language, mastery of its nuances, fascination with the beauty of the language per se – that moves people. Unlike the French who fetishize their language (to the point of obnoxiousness), as Americans we just know that English is “good” and Spanish is “bad.”

There is an almost knee-jerk response in people’s acceptance of certain givens – that Miami turning into “little Cuba” is “awful,” that calling up one’s bank and being offered services in Spanish is “outrageous,” that hearing people conversing in the grocery store in another language is “a disgrace.” The unspoken assumption, of course, is that all right minded people accept these givens.

Given the reality of our current economic crisis, it will be immigrant newcomers everywhere who for the foreseeable future will continue to shoulder the blame, even though that very population will be one of the most affected by service cuts and an overall decreasing quality of life. The “language issue” is but one piece of a web of intersecting economic, social and political variables in an increasingly complex and competitive world.

It’s up to those who see immigrants as bringing a richness and texture to the American table (or who, like me, just don’t believe in borders) to fight off restrictive English Only legislation.