Chapter 2: The Evolution of Xenophobia

Cultural Diversity as the Enemy Within

This chapter is trying to trace the history of why some "non-dominant" groups do well in this country and some apparently do not. Cummins refers in particular to Ogbu, J. (1978) Minority education and caste, where he develops a theory of voluntary and involuntary immigrants.

Those who come here voluntarily, he theorizes, may have initial difficulties, but because they chose to come here, they use the strength of their convictions to get them past the hard part and are succesful. Particularly all the immigrants around 1900 have mostly gone on to succes - well particularly the ones from northern Europe, if you ignore the Irish; the ones from southern Europe didn't do as well. And there is the little problem with the Mexicans and many other Latinos, who apparently came here voluntarily... More recent successful voluntary immigrants are the Chinese and Punjabi Indians, he says. (Although the first Chinese who came here weren't treated very well - witness the Chino camp that has left only its name, or the destruction of Chinatown in LA.)

Of course the largest group who came here involuntarily is the former slaves, the African-Americans. But they have had a similar destiny to the Native Americans and Native Hawaiians, who were already here - and then those Mexicans (some of whom were already here, too, of course!)

..involuntary minorities are people who were brought into the united States (or any other society) against their will; for example, through slavery, conquest, colonization, or forced labor. According to Ogby, "thereafter, these minorities were often relegated to menial positions and denied true assimilations into the mainstream society."
(Cummins, p. 32)

I think instead of "brought here" it would have been better to say "brought into contact and submission." Is our problem with Mexicans (and all other Latinos/as by default) that they were here first, and we're afraid they want to take this country back again? Cummins brings a fantastic quote from an essay by Isidro Lucas (1981) Bilingual Education and the Melting Pot: Getting Burned:

There is in America a profound underground culture, that of the unmeltable populations. Blacks have proven unmeltable over the years. The only place allowed them near the melting pot was underneath it. Getting burned. Hispanics were also left out of the melting pot. Spanish has been historically preserved more among them than other languages in non-English-speaking populations. It was a shelter, a defense. (p 21-2)
(Cummins, p 36)

The Welsh Note
Originally uploaded by Canis Major

But to continue the story, these involuntary immigrants, the unmeltable ones, were subjected to enormous indignities from speaking their own language (L1) instead of English (L2) in school, for example. Mind you, the U.S. isn't the only place such things happened. Cummins quotes in a note Richard Llewellyn's How Green Was My Valley about the mistreatment of Welsh children caught talking Welsh in school.

The "Welsh note" (or Note) came into existence after the 1870 Education Act in Britain as a means of eradicatingthe Welsh language. Any child hear speaking Welsh in school had a heavy wooden placard...placed over his or her shoulders. ...If that child hear another child speaking Welsh, he or she could transfer the "Welsh not" to the other child. The child carrying this placard at the end of the day was caned.
(Cummins, p 52)

But by 1967, in what Cummins calls Phase I of Bilingual Education, some enlightened educators decided that it would be a good idea to teach students in the L1 to get started, and then gradually move them over to English.

Unfortunately this didn't last very long, because of a lawsuit in 1974, Lau (a Chinese) vs. Nichols, insisted that children weren't getting assimilated fast enough with bilingual education. They need to get into English atthe deep-end, with what became know as Basic English. If the kids don't know Basic English, how are they going to get on in school? was the thought. The court mandated that "schools take effective measures to overcome the educational disadvantages resulting from a home-school language mismatch." (Cummins, p. 41, my emphasis.)

People also started worrying that bilingual education could cause divisiveness. You only had to look to Quebec to see what happens then. (Now, the streets signs there are all in French, not even bilingual!) Cummins summarizes the conflicts of this time as: ...during this second phase the battle lines were drawn between two opposing but apparently equally plausible arguments: on the one hand, the linguistic mismatch hypothesis, which argues that children can't learn in a language they don't understand; on the other, the maximum exposure hypothesis that if children are deficient in English, then surely they require maximum exposure to English in school. The political aspects of divisiveness, "the broader set of concerns ... [about] the more general infiltration of cultural diversity into American institutions," (Cummins, p. 43) leads into the third phase, starting in 1987.

In the 1980's the organization U.S. English started its xenophobic opposition to bilingual education, getting a referendum passed in 19 states to make English the official language. (The website is scary!) They use claims like "bilingualism shuts doors" and "monolingual education opens doors to the wider world," (Cummins, p. 45) which is a contradiction in terms (and see the next posting!)

This all came to a head in 1998 (the beginning of Phase IV) when California passed Prop 227, which aims to eliminated the use of L1 as a classroom language. Luckily it includes a provision for parents to request that this be done, although not all districts care to tell parents that. There has been a lot of discussion back and forth between proponents of bilingual education (where English is started along with the L1, and content teaching gradually moves into English alone when the student is ready) to moving kids quickly through a transition class that takes about a year and then directly into mainstream classrooms. Reseach has been done on the results of the different methods, with each side infering that the other has fudged the results by not using appropriate data.

Cummins conclusion is that there is "overwhelming evidence against the maximum exposure assumption," which he believes is more based on sociopolitical reasons:

...a patently inferior form of education has been rationalized as being for children's own good and necessary to provide them with access to what U.S. English calls "the language of equal opportunity."
(Cummins, p. 51)

In a later blog post I will relate the experience of my own children learning Danish and English in Denmark with a Danish father and American mother.