A bilingual message for Ms. Xenophobe

By Court | Permalink | 1 comment | October 3rd, 2005 | Trackback

On our message boards there is a lot of discussion, appropriately, about languages. I find myself in the camp that desperately wishes I could speak another language. Six years of Spanish, a quarter of Italian and a continued education class of Russian have left me with one conclusion: I suck at languages. Now, I haven’t ever lived abroad in a country where English wasn’t the predominant language, and I’ve never gone the extra step of trying to learn more at home by putting the stickies my primer provides on my lamp, toothbrush, and door handle. However, I still have a strong desire to become fluent in Spanish, and to be able to carry on a conversation with a 5-year-old in Russian. Underlining this is my belief in the importance of learning other languages. Knowing more languages is not a bad thing. However, some people have other ideas….

SO MUCH FOR Santa Monica being ground zero for tolerance and progressivism.

Recently at a Whole Foods Market — itself supposedly a beacon of touchy-feeliness — a woman accosted my son Sebastian’s baby-sitter for speaking to him in Spanish.

Sebastian, all of 11 months, was eyeing some fruit being offered for tasting, so Ursula asked him, “Quieres probar?” That’s when this perfect stranger — let’s call her Ms. Xenophobe — swooped in to impart her hateful ignorance: “You shouldn’t speak Spanish to that child,” she said, “I am sure that’s not what the parents want.”

She is sure, is she?

Such breathtaking impudence; if only I had been there to give this woman a piece of my mind.

It isn’t just that the father of this blond child happens to be a blond half-Mexican, or my suspicion that nosy Ms. Xenophobe might not have minded so much if Ursula had been speaking to Sebastian in Swedish or German. What is most disheartening about the incident is how mainstream this woman’s views are about the undesirability of American kids learning a foreign language.

From A bilingual message for Ms. Xenophobe

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