Oh wait, you actually don’t have to love them. This phone message was received at Sen. Leland Yee’s office recently regarding his language discrimination bill, SB 242. The bill would include language discrimination into the Unruh Civil Rights Act. A reasonable idea, all in all, but obviously controversial. (By the by, the bill does have a business purposes exception.)
Anyway, this ignorant nativist decided to give Sen. Yee a piece of her mind. She was really angry that there were people talking on her radio. She was sure they were not in the country illegal, because they had the nerve to use another language.
If anything the call illustrates the need for this legislation. This woman apparently forgot that in fact the European immigrants were not here first. I have a hunch that the Native Americans might have a bit of an argument about who was here first.
But my favorite part was the end: “Leland, which is a white name.” This lady is mad that immigrants come to America and try to change it. Then she’s mad that he has a “white name.” Classic.
At no time in the 40,000+ years that humans have inhabited what is now North America has there ever been a single language used by its residents.
This is especially true of California, where for at least 39,850 years we had among the greatest language diversity in the native world, and where for the last 150 years we have persistently had the greatest language diversity in the United States.
This woman probably does not know that less than a mile from where I sit, at Colton Hall in Monterey, Spanish speakers joined English speakers to write a constitution in 1849 that explicitly guaranteed the language rights of Spanish speakers in this state. That was taken away in the nativist 1879 constitution, unfortunately, but that doesn’t change the fact that some languages, like Spanish and Chinese, have been in use in CA for at least as long as English.
The fairest solution is to provide well-funded quality English language instruction to every Californian who wishes to have it – and to at the same time ensure that those who do not speak English well or at all, for whatever reason that may be, are not discriminated against because of it.
As you can probably tell by now, few things piss me off more than language bigotry. The only reason anyone would object to Yee’s bill is because they see people who do not speak English as threat, as inferior, as holding second class citizenship. Such people are thugs.
we ought to expect a nativist backlash against immigrants. We only have to look at the protectionist policies that were put in place during the Great Depression to predict what might happen here.
That means we need to be prepared to push back against this meme. Right now the migrant workers in the Central Valley are being hit incredibly hard as farm jobs dry up along with the water and there are no construction gigs to fall back on.