Race and racism has nothing to do with it:
Just a week after signing the country’s toughest immigration bill into law, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer now must decide whether to endorse another bill passed by her state legislature — one that outlaws ethnic-studies programs in public schools.
***Arizona’s superintendent for public instruction, Tom Horne, has said he’s backing the measure because ethnic-studies programs encourage “ethnic chauvinism”; he’s also suggested that such programs could breed secessionist sentiment among Hispanic students.
Since when is secessionist sentiment bad? Also, apparently accents will soon be verboten:
The Arizona Department of Education recently began telling school districts that teachers whose spoken English it deems to be heavily accented or ungrammatical must be removed from classes for students still learning English.
State education officials say the move is intended to ensure that students with limited English have teachers who speak the language flawlessly. But some school principals and administrators say the department is imposing arbitrary fluency standards that could undermine students by thinning the ranks of experienced educators.
Arizona wants to make it clear that the only acceptable accent is a proper German one.
EFroh
It’s an interesting experience, watching a major political party commit suicide.
FormerSwingVoter
@EFroh:
The thing that scares me is that they’re not. This should eliminate them from consideration as human beings, let alone leaders – but a lot of people support this crap.
Bullsmith
Banning entire topics of study is surely a new low, even for Arizona, no? Also, since when were Americans not allowed to speak with accents? What does the South have to say about this? How about northern Minnesota?
Midnight Marauder
Wow. I can’t imagine that firing 85% of your teachers is going to be well-received.
freelancer
On the bright side, this might result in the removal of all teabagger educators as none of them can fucking spell in English to save their lives.
JK
Jan Brewer Über Alles
YellowJournalism
@freelancer: Took the words right off of my keyboard.
Flawless English? Would this be for English and Language Arts teachers only, or would it apply to the entire school, including the science and phys ed departments? Some of the worst English I’ve read or heard has actually come from high school science teachers.
Michael
I just wanted to point out that your average local cops are great at dealing with issues on who is here legally or not.
A good example:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/tx/6983452.html
Just a routine legal contact and standard operating procedure in a city that’s thick with consulates, I’m sure. There is zero indication whatsoever that local police would abuse their authority or make a mistake in approaching someone they are encouraged to question on pain of a lawsuit if they fail to do so.
AnotherBruce
I’m afraid the culture war is getting very hot. These assholes will resort to violence if they don’t get their way.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
I have to second the sentiment that the AZ Republicans are not necessarily committing suicide.
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/04/gallup-plurality-of-americans-like.html
Thus far, a plurality of voters are in favor of the law, and only (!) 56% of democrats oppose it.
Clark
There was a bill in MA to make sure that English teachers were native English speakers. It died when lots of people pointed out that kids were scoring low on spelling tests because they were asked to spell words like “Korea” and “career” and got marked down even when spelling it correctly.
Their teachers were born and raised in Massachusetts.
JK
To paraphrase Phil Ochs: “Arizona, find yourself another country to be part of”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IFbJU0VWhE
David in NY
I kinda wish Arizona would secure all its borders, not just the Southern one. I’d like to keep that crazy from leaking out.
LuciaMia
As to their bull-shit excuse that ethnic studies lead to ‘ethnic chauvinism’, I would think it would have the opposite effect.
Being isolated from other cultural/ethnic knowledge would produce that kind of blind chauvinism.
toujoursdan
So what if you have a thick “down East” accent, Boston accent, Brooklyn accent, Texas accent or Cajun accent?
What does it mean to speak English flawlessly? There are numerous versions of English in this country and around the world.
AnotherBruce
So, I’m guessing a Southern accent is acceptable, it’s “the right kind of accent”.
freelancer
That’s because Americans are scientifically illiterate. (Don’t click unless you want to be SUPER-depressed. For example 55% of Americans surveyed correctly answer that the Earth orbits the sun and takes a year to do so. 45% get that question wrong.)
My HS biology teacher was from Sierra Leone. The first two weeks of class
was[Edit] were essentially worthless to everyone until we started to comprehend his accent. [There goes my prospective teaching career in AZ]Proton
Homynym-homynym-homynym
jacy
@YellowJournalism:
My son had a second-grade teacher who said things like “We’re going to the liberry to check out books,” “We’ll have a party for Valentime’s Day,” and “I seen that so we’ll have to axe the principal.”
Of course she’s white, and this is a Catholic school, so I imagine her job is safe.
Good little grammar monkey he is, though, he kept on correcting her. So much so, he was moved to another class.
MattF
There’s always the odd idea that kids in school are just little open vessels that you pour ‘good knowledge’ into, and keep ‘bad knowledge’ out of. Anyone who has spent a millisecond or two looking at the way the human race actually behaves will realize that it doesn’t really work that way.
YellowJournalism
@freelancer: Sadly, my bad experiences have been entirely comprised of science teachers born in the good ol’ US of A.
Edit: I want to note that the majority of these people were excellent teachers.
Bret
No one ever went broke overestimating the insularity and fear of white people.
Kryptik
@FormerSwingVoter:
That’s exactly what scares me too. Not the fact that the GOP is doing this crap, but they seem to be getting ridiculous support for it. No matter how outlandish they are, it seems just about anything short of criticizing Israel is game long as it’s against ‘those people’ (meaning anyone who ain’t a god-fearing ‘Real’ American’. You know, not them multi-ethnic…er…multi-cultural people).
Seanly
Wow, gonna make a note for myself that if I ever have children I shouldn’t move to Arizona. Sounds like all the rich white folks have gone kinda nuts.
I expect SC where I reside now will have to do something excessively stupid & retrograde to show that the South is still the seat of racist, homophobe jingoists.
Mnemosyne
So does “public schools” also extend to universities? Because it looks like ASU will need to shut down half of an entire college if that’s the case. And that’s just the undergraduates.
oklahomo
@AnotherBruce: Perhaps Arizona speech therapists will strap the students into their chairs a la Clockwork Orange, and dose them with repeated viewings of “Gone with the Wind,” until the accent is just right.
Clark
It took a while for my wife to understand my grandfather, whose accent is something of a mix between a Southern drawl and a Cajun accent.
geg6
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
This is the typical too-stupid-and-lazy-to-actually-read-and-understand-the-unintended-consequences bunch, especially the Dems. They think that, somehow, there is something in the bill that will stop anyone from harassing any actual citizens. You know, through magic or something.
Once they realize that American citizens may be the ones most at risk because they don’t carry their birth certificates around with them every day every time they leave the house, they will turn against it.
Midnight Marauder
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
That’s a very important caveat. Because “thus far” doesn’t include conducting a pogrom against teachers with accents and poor grammar skills all over the state.
Again, there is a reason that Arizona has rapidly ascended to the position of Peak Wingnut Headquarters.
shortstop
Well, no. Apparently this initiative only applies to spoken English, which means English spoken with a (looks around, lowers voice to whisper) south of the border accent.
gwangung
No.
In my experience, it breed secessionist sentiments among WHITE students, who can’t handle it. Which creates a feedback loop, because the clear message from white people is “You can’t be proud of being Hispanic”, which sparks a feeling of “You can’t take that pride away from me.”
Idiots. The more you try to erase a group’s identity, the stronger it tries to persist and survive.
Xoebe
Teaching English: Albonics
shortstop
In contrast to the smug belief that white northern-western European backgrounds are the default setting, ethnic studies programs encourage ethnic chauvinism. And that would be bad.
Bullsmith
So can we ban the Republican party and the Teabaggers now, on the grounds of being too ethnically homogenous? Or can a hispanic organization continue in Arizona as long as they get a couple of token whites to join?
Unabogie
I called Duncan Hunter’s office yesterday to tell them I thought deporting American citizens because of a crime their parents committed was morally wrong and short sighted. The woman I was speaking to said “hey, I know someone who was born in Australia, to Americans on vacation, and they aren’t Australian citizens, that’s not how Australia does it!” I pointed out to her, “yeah, but they didn’t have to pay for the birth because Australia has universal health care, do you support that too?”
So somehow after that, after listening to a bunch of code words and Teabonics, I lost it and called Duncan Hunter a racist. I’m finding it hard to pretend there’s a middle ground here any more.
FNWA
In 7th grade I went to a British school in Spain. My teacher was from Land’s End (the area in SW England, not the catalog) and it took me a week before I could understand a word she said. I’d love to send her to AZ and tell the sponsors of the bill that until they speak like her, they’re clearly doing it wrong.
Martin
Holy fuck, PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF SARAH PALIN SIGN THIS BILL!
Let’s rename it the Permanent Democratic Majority Bill.
Badtux
@Bullsmith: It’s not us Southerners who speak with accents. It’s you damnyankees.
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
MattR
@gwangung:
FSM help me, I read that as “facebook group”.
Brett
I could support pulling funding from Ethnic Studies programs at the university level, not because I think they encourage “ethnic chauvinism”, but because they’re a money sink to sucker in liberal arts students who then graduate with worthless degrees, some of whom then make it into academia or politics, but most of whom end up doing other jobs that don’t require their degree. Even political science degrees are more useful than those ones.
No clue on the high school level. Actually having them sounds bizarre, like the type of thing that would stereotype “black” or “hispanic” culture and waste credit hours on stuff that could be used more profitably.
The Grand Panjandrum
And, you’ll respect me in the morning.
gwangung
Heh. How’s that different from 80% of liberal arts? (At my university, that describes sociology to a T).
Fax Paladin
I’d say not so much German as Afrikaans.
binzinerator
The stink of Teabaggers, the stench of neo-confederates and now this. Do I detect a whiff of palingenetic ultranationalism brewing?
Yes, yes I believe I do.
beltane
@gwangung: Maybe it’s time we create a department of Redneck Studies. Many in the civilized world have found the so-called culture of this savage and violent tribe to be wholly incomprehensible.
calliope jane
I knew vote against Horne was justified. Damn it. Of course she’s going to sign it — AZ legislature HATES education. Hates it. They hate spending money on it. They hate k-12, the universities. They’d close the universities if they could (they’re already trying to strangle them through funding costs). Seriously miss Napolitano.
calliope jane
Ack – can’t edit my above comment. I also think this is a part of Arizona celebrating confederate history month– it was a confederate territory after all. Seccessionist tendencies my ass.
Americanadian
@Badtux: It’s all because we won the war, that’s why.
Who the hell thinks it was a good idea to double down on the crazy in face of national outrage? Or did George Will et. al. claiming the first law was justified empower them to think that they could really get anyway with anything?
Americanadian
@calliope jane: It’s not like they belonged to Mexico in the past, anyway.
Brett
@gwangung:
I’m not saying it is different. There’s obviously a place for some historians, political scientists, and scholars, but most of these departments are bloated and glutted with students, with minimal entry requirements at the undergraduate level. It’s perfect for sucking down student loan dollars and student money (as well as parents’ money).
That raises the question – why should you be proud of an identity you’ve done nothing to earn? I’m proud of some individual ancestors (as well as ashamed), but I’m not proud because I’m white, or Euro-American, or British/German in ancestry.
gwangung
A) Less seriously, it should be on the same level as “Proud to be Irish” on St. Patrick’s day. Pretty minor stuff.
B) In a more serious manner, culture is not the same thing as race or ethnicity. And culture is not a dead thing. It evolves and develops. And it’s being created by actions today. You are very much part of a culture you help develop—you most certainly do earn it. Particularly when outside people are telling you that you haven’t earned it.
aimai
Brett,
That’s such a stupid reading of the word “proud” in the phrase “proud of an ethnic identity. Its a total misreading of the concept–and, might I ad, a very common one for white males to argue that all other forms of ethnicity or gender are marked and problematic while you float on a sea of “just normal.”
An ethnic identity isn’t something you earn–its something that is thrust upon you. Just like you don’t “choose” to be male or female, or black or white (in this country). Your identity is assigned to you. Realistically speaking your ethnic identity, like your race and your gender, are things that are historically and culturally bound–to know your ethnicity is to know something about your ancestors and your history.
Since you don’t get to reject it, you (and your children) need to investigate it and understand it. In the course of that investigation you might find things you aren’t so happy about–you might find out that your ancestors owned slaves, or were SS troopers, or you might find out that one of them died in the triangle shirtwaist fire, or started a union, or *any fucking thing*. But all of those things, in this ethnically and racially riven history of ours, may have something to say to you, or to one, or to one’s children.
I’d venture to say that you are, in fact, on some level “proud” of your ethnic heritage–you certainly mention it rather rapidly–and of course most of our history books valorize it and praise you for having it even though you, as you say, did nothing to deserve it. Why should other people from other histories be denied the same opportunities you and your children have to see their histories, to reflect on them, and to praise (or condemn) them as they contribute to the greater stream of American history?
aimai
Badtux
@Americanadian: But doubling down on the crazy is what Republicans *do*. And what’s this notion about the North winning the war? Oh sure, the North won the shooting war, but they lost the peace — after the Confederates in the form of the White Leagues / KKK (original edition) drove out the Republican governments of the South by hanging any uppity Negros or “Republican Negro sympathizers” who dared run for office or show up to vote, the North surrendered, tired of the financial burden of maintaining an army of occupation in the South to protect the black majority from a vicious white minority well armed with military weapons (because most Southern soldiers deserted before the end of the Confederacy, taking their military weapons with them, a little fact of Southern cowardice that you’re not taught about in schools). From 1876 (with the Hayes-Tilden compromise) to 1954, the nation operated under an implicit agreement that as long as the South pretended to be part of the nation and pretended to not have slavery, the North would let them pretty much operate as an independent nation with slavery in all but name. Which was pretty much what they wanted in the first place. Brown v Board of Education was a shock to the South primarily because it was the first time since the early 1870’s that the Federal government had attempted to assert real power over the South. The deployment of the 101st Airborne to Little Rock made it clear that the Civil War was back *on* again… and the South spent the next forty years plotting, until finally the Republican Party became the Party of the Confederacy and brought them victory yet again. For a definition of “victory” that has resulted in a nation swiftly becoming ungovernable, an insane Republican Party, and a South that’s become a national disgrace, but hey, the South got what they wanted, right?
Regarding John Cole’s snark about secessionist sentiment: secessionist sentiment is bad if it’s brown people who want to secede. Secessionist sentiment is good if it’s white people who want to secede. Duh. Any questions?
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Americanadian
@Badtux: That was supposed to be a bit of snark about how the North won the right to consider their accent normal. Now there’s all these painful truths flying around…
Mnemosyne
@Brett:
Which makes it different from most undergraduate business programs … how, again?
Badtux
@Mnemosyne: One of my close personal friends was a business professor who taught “business math” (for true! There is such a course in the Business Administration curriculum!). He stated to me, quite bluntly, “my job is to keep these frat boys off the street for the next four years in hopes that by the time they graduate, they’ll be mature enough that they won’t tell fart jokes to potential customers.” Sadly, four years was not enough for many of them. Thus why George W. Bush has a MBA :).
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Triassic Sands
@Brett:
Your comment reflects the widely held belief (in this country) that college is trade school and training for a job is education.
That’s sad.
I like to make a distinction between education and training (but overlap is possible).
Some of the most highly trained individuals I’ve ever met — medical doctors — have been among the most poorly educated people I’ve encountered. (No, I’m not saying that of all doctors.)
Education and training are not the same thing.
Training allows one to perform a job, task, etc.
Education broadens one’s horizons, develops one’s intellect, and should make a person a much more complete human being.
Most training is unlikely to help develop empathy — something in short supply in this country, especially, but not exclusively, among Republicans — which is vital to being a responsible world citizen.
Education and training can take place in both formal and informal settings, but training generally leads to credentials that are useful in getting a job, but worthless when trying to figure out life.
A person becomes educated to maximize life. Training is for maximizing income.
Jrod
The way I hear it, any racial law passed by AZ is the direct result of the federal government refusing to use its magical djinni to seal the border, and therefore Arizonans can’t be held responsible for the laws they pass. Also, if you argue against these laws you are literally worse than Hitler, because it’s impossible to dislike anything the AZ legislature does without being a mass-murderer who wants to kill everyone in Phoenix.
It’s a real shame LD quit the site. We could use some clarity about why this new law isn’t racist, and how nothing in the bill explicitly states that it targets Mescans therefore only Hitler would think it will.
Older
@Brett: Everything requires a degree now, and it doesn’t apparently have to be a degree in what you’re doing, so people might as well get a degree in something that interests them, even if it is (gasp!) ethnic studies.
rasta
Ich bin ein Berliner.
Yutsano
@rasta: You’re a doughnut?
Brett
That’s fair, although I don’t know about that last sentence.
I find it amusing that you accuse me of being “proud” of my ethnic background – which I inherited and did not earn – for mentioning it . . . in the context where I was talking about how I wasn’t proud for it.
I said nothing about studying or reflecting on either history or ancestry, your attempts to pidgeonhole me aside. I also mentioned that yes, you can be proud of or contemptuous of actions your ancestors take – but that doesn’t translate into a reason for you to be proud just because they were your forefathers.
To know about your ancestry does not mean that you should take a sense of pride in your ancestry and identity just because they were your ancestors. That is, unless you equate “pride” with “distinction”, which is what culture and ethnicity is really about – “I’m different from you, and that makes me special Just Because.”
For most people, it should be. Even if this country by and large gave a damn about history, there’s only so many historians, scholars, and the like that can find work in their fields, meaning that for most people doing those degrees, its an exercise in self-indulgence that ends up being either useless or a prop in terms of getting on with life.
Yes, and that’s a major problem with the system, because by and large, your degree in one of those fields basically amounts to “I did x for four years, and learned how to write reasonably well in the process.” In other words, as I mentioned earlier, it’s a money sink, a waste of time, and yet you see people graduating with these degrees and finding themselves shocked – shocked! – that it has little use other than as a certificate of achievement.
Barry
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason: “Thus far, a plurality of voters are in favor of the law, and only (!) 56% of democrats oppose it. ”
Wait until people see how it’s applied in practice.
Fierce Pika
Brett, this is about learning about such things at the high school level, or at most as part of a liberal college education (as in “liberal arts”). The entire POINT of this vocation is to help people know more about the society in which they live, including the other people (different from them) who also occupy it. It’s about being a citizen. Learning about not only the history of how ethnicities came into being and have been defined, but also a thorough going over of how to talk about or understand such things, seems to me like a good thing. Hell, when one of the two major parties appears to have no freakin’ clue why they have a “minority problem,” or earnestly don’t get how something could be “racist”, then this seems to me evidence that maybe our school curricula could use a bit MORE of this.
This is not about “pride”, it’s about understanding.
Secondly, on the accent thing: if an accent is very thick, this can be a problem, but they way they’re approaching this is clearly from a standpoint of white privilege. I wonder how many of them would put up with a law that said, “We all must speak the Queen’s English now, because that is “proper” English, so you will be asked to drop your r’s.” Or what if the teacher speaks Cockney or (like my wife) in a Kiwi accent? “Accent” is a code word here, clearly. They just don’t want “their” culture being “taking over” by (brown) undesirables.
Svensker
@Brett:
The purpose of learning history in a liberal education is not to become a historian or a history teacher. The purpose is to become educated so you know what the hell has gone on in the world, which gives you a clue about what might be going on and what might go on in the future.
We have forgotten what an education means. Which is why we end up with people like Sarah Palin getting even 15 seconds of fame.
grumpy realist
Put this together with that nitwit in Alabama who wants to have all driving exams in English….
Look, if we’re going to go after “heavy accents” I think we can wipe out a sizable percentage of the South as well. Proper Upper-class British phonemes only, please!
Hell, let’s get really traditional and insist everyone go back to even earlier stuff…as far I’m concerned, the decay in Western Civilization became manifest when doctoral students defending their theses didn’t have to do it in Latin anymore…
Less Isbetter
Lived in Phoenix, AZ, for nine years (health reasons.)
One summer that I was there, I took a city bus over to Tempe.
Got to chatting with a very excited and thrilled young woman.
It was her first day of college.
Her enthusiasm was real. We talked. She was taking remedial English and remedial math.
She had a full scholarship because she had been either the class salutatorian or valedictorian in her high school, South Mountain High School in south Phoenix.
The Arizona education system has a lot worse problems than that fool administrator is admitting to. Obviously the problems start at the top.