Whose queen's English?

One of the things about the New York Times that drives me crazy is how they, time and time again, use 'Americans' when they mean 'white Americans'. Or, even 'racist Americans.'

To wit, in an article about "sounding foreign" on television by Mireya Navarro (who really should know better), entitled
Breaking the Sound Barrier, this line:

And television executives, talent agents and linguists say that Americans are growing more accepting of diversity, even with debates over immigration raging.

Huh? So Hispanics, African and Asian Americans are now 'accepting' themselves? Wow, shouldn't that be the headline--Self-Hatred Down Among Minorities!

Sheesh... not to mention the assumption in that sentence, that it matters whether white Americans 'accept' diversity or not. Is that the gold standard now for this nation of immigrants, that whites accept/allow/tolerate their fellow Americans?

Frankly, who cares--if some white Americans don't accept diversity, increasingly, it's gonna be their problem. They'll have to gate themselves up in their little communities and hope for a quick death to escape it--and even then, they better hope they don't need a doctor on their deathbed, it just might be one of them 'foreigners.'

It's ironic that an article about speech is so tone-deaf with its own word choice. The 'American means white' trope shows up again near the end:

But speakers of accented English must still contend with the often intolerant American ear. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission says the increase in the immigrant population has led to a rise in job-related accent discrimination charges filed with the agency, from 48 in 1996 to 161 last year. (Regional American accents are not federally protected, only those related to national origin.) In a study five years ago, researchers at the University of North Texas found that employers gave those with neutral speech high-profile jobs, while steering those with regional accents to jobs requiring little technical expertise or customer contact.

“An accent can signal many things — ethnic roots, regional roots,” said Roderick Hart, the dean of the College of Communications at the University of Texas at Austin. “But it can also call up a series of stereotypes. For certain parts of the country, that fast-talking Easterner is too ready to spend your money and that laconic Southerner is too willing to go back to yesteryear.”

Accent-reduction teachers say their foreign-born clients constantly complain of how they are made to feel like an “other.”

“A lot of them are tired of being asked where they’re from,” said Lisa Mojsin, the director of Accurate English, an accent-reduction school in West Los Angeles.

One of Ms. Mojsin’s students, Colette Fournier, weary of having to repeat herself, is working to reduce her French accent. “I don’t want to feel like I speak like a 6-year-old,” she said.

Another client, Guillermo Harpoutlian, who is from Argentina, deals with clients from all over the world as director of planning for a financial institution. He worries that his thick accent could torpedo his ambitions to become a chief executive.

“In a senior position you can’t have an accent,” he said. “You open your mouth and they say, ‘Oh, you have a beautiful accent.’ What they’re saying is: ‘You don’t know how to speak English.’ ”

There's a lot in there--where are you from, other, patronizing 'foreigners'--but the Times just zips past it all. Given how naval-gazing the Times usually is about things that its UWS/UES upper management deem as important(how many articles can one paper print about bagels?!), my guess is they don't see any of these issues as part of the news that's fit to print.

There are all sorts of other interesting unintended tidbits in the article:

But accents still do matter in this country. Sounding foreign can hinder careers and has led to accent-discrimination lawsuits. People with accents say they are often ridiculed or not taken seriously outside of their social circle. And in going for the largest audience possible, national broadcast networks have historically aimed for mainstream appeal, deeming even a Southern drawl taboo.

'Sounding foreign' with its perjorative trailings should be in quotation marks--otherwise, the New York Times is throwing its weight behind racists who label someone with a Spanish accent foreign, someone with a British accent charming.

Then, there's this wonderful section:

But broadcasters seem to have realized that opening up the tent to accents could attract new audiences at a time when networks are bleeding viewers.

“Each passing year there’s been more acceptance on the part of station owners to take risks and reflect the culture of a community more,” said Dennis Wharton, a spokesman for the National Association of Broadcasters, which represents radio and television networks.

Ah, Dennis (who I've run across a few times)--yes, we should give broadcasters an award, for being so 'risky' (or is that edgy?) as to put on-air people who look and sound like 21st-century America--and out of desperation no less, in a last-ditch bid to keep their 20-30% profit margins (wow, they really are ready to do anything). Bravo! And who says broadcasters are dinosaurs?!

Heck, the article goes on to point out exactly how risky it is for broadcasters to reflect their communities:

With the Census Bureau putting the foreign-born population at its highest level in recent history — 34 million people, or 12 percent of the population — demographic changes affecting the voice of television go beyond the Latino population.

Yes, it really is quite laudable that instead of television having 0% foreign people, we now will have 1 or 2%.

The article even contains this happy note:

It was only five years ago that Claudia Trejos, a Colombian sportscaster, anchored the weekend sports report at the WB Network affiliate in Los Angeles, and the complaints poured in. Viewers’ letters and voice mail messages suggested that she “go back to Mexico.” And her peers made fun of her accent on the radio and some local sports columnists wrote that she should be closed-captioned.

But Ms. Trejos, now 37 and a freelance reporter for ESPN from Miami in both English and Spanish, says she recently noticed an attitudinal turnaround. When she covered the boxing match between Fernando Vargas and Shane Mosley in Las Vegas on July 15, she ran into former colleagues who joked, “Hey, you finally learned to speak English!”

Ms. Trejos laughed. “It’s just funny, because I continue being me and I speak the same English,” she said. “The mind-set has changed. There’s an awareness that we’re not only menial workers and bus boys. We have the new owner of the Anaheim Angels,” she said, speaking of Arturo Moreno, a fourth-generation Mexican-American. “People know about reggaetón.”

Ah, a barrel of laughs--it's amazing, isn't it, that we've gone from hate mail for someone because of her national origin, to the America of today, a land where President Bush can stand in front of the NAACP and say with a straight face,

We'll work together, and as we do so, you must understand I understand that racism still lingers in America. (Applause.)

Ah, yes, racism still lingers--just like the insurgency is in its death throes in Iraq, I guess. Here and there, but you know, no biggie.

Heck, Bush even added in his speech:

I don't know if you remember, three weeks ago, I went to Memphis, Tennessee. (Applause and laughter.) A lot of people focused on the fact that my friend, the Prime Minister of Japan, was an Elvis fan, because we went to Graceland. But we also went to another stop, a stop Reverend Jesse Jackson knows all too well, a painful moment in his life and in the life of our nation, reflected in the Lorraine Motel.

The Prime Minister and I went there, which is now the National Civil Rights Museum. By the way, if you haven't been there, you ought to go. (Applause.) Among the people greeting me there was Dr. Benjamin Hooks.

Bush tries to paint it as if he's humbly painting out a quiet accomplishment that people (meaning the media) didn't focus on because they wanted to minimize his deep committment to civil rights.

But the Times noted at the time

The president made an unannounced stop at the National Civil Rights Museum, next door to the Lorraine Motel, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed.

The visit was so last-minute that Mr. Hooks was at a dental appointment Friday morning when he received a phone call from the White House, asking him to serve as guide."

This is actually a classic move by a white male when dealing with minorities--hey, look at where I went, for all the right reasons too I'm telling you (don't look behind the curtain!); by the way, you guys could stand to learn from me, you should go there too!

Of course, the greatest irony in all this was artfully laid out by Tony Horowitz in one of the best Op-Ed pieces I've read in the Times in recent years, entitled Immigration — and the Curse of the Black Legend.

I'm not sure anyone should be spouting off on the immigration debate until they've at least read the piece. Here's how it starts:

Coursing through the immigration debate is the unexamined faith that American history rests on English bedrock, or Plymouth Rock to be specific. Jamestown also gets a nod, particularly in the run-up to its 400th birthday, but John Smith was English, too (he even coined the name New England).

So amid the din over border control, the Senate affirms the self-evident truth that English is our national language; "It is part of our blood," Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, says. Border vigilantes call themselves Minutemen, summoning colonial Massachusetts as they apprehend Hispanics in the desert Southwest. Even undocumented immigrants invoke our Anglo founders, waving placards that read, "The Pilgrims didn't have papers."

These newcomers are well indoctrinated; four of the sample questions on our naturalization test ask about Pilgrims. Nothing in the sample exam suggests that prospective citizens need know anything that occurred on this continent before the Mayflower landed in 1620. Few Americans do, after all.

This national amnesia isn't new, but it's glaring and supremely paradoxical at a moment when politicians warn of the threat posed to our culture and identity by an invasion of immigrants from across the Mexican border. If Americans hit the books, they'd find what Al Gore would call an inconvenient truth. The early history of what is now the United States was Spanish, not English, and our denial of this heritage is rooted in age-old stereotypes that still entangle today's immigration debate.

Forget for a moment the millions of Indians who occupied this continent for 13,000 or more years before anyone else arrived, and start the clock with Europeans' presence on present-day United States soil. The first confirmed landing wasn't by Vikings, who reached Canada in about 1000, or by Columbus, who reached the Bahamas in 1492. It was by a Spaniard, Juan Ponce de León, who landed in 1513 at a lush shore he christened La Florida.

Most Americans associate the early Spanish in this hemisphere with Cortés in Mexico and Pizarro in Peru. But Spaniards pioneered the present-day United States, too. Within three decades of Ponce de León's landing, the Spanish became the first Europeans to reach the Appalachians, the Mississippi, the Grand Canyon and the Great Plains. Spanish ships sailed along the East Coast, penetrating to present-day Bangor, Me., and up the Pacific Coast as far as Oregon.

From 1528 to 1536, four castaways from a Spanish expedition, including a "black" Moor, journeyed all the way from Florida to the Gulf of California — 267 years before Lewis and Clark embarked on their much more renowned and far less arduous trek. In 1540, Francisco Vázquez de Coronado led 2,000 Spaniards and Mexican Indians across today's Arizona-Mexico border — right by the Minutemen's inaugural post — and traveled as far as central Kansas, close to the exact geographic center of what is now the continental United States. In all, Spaniards probed half of today's lower 48 states before the first English tried to colonize, at Roanoke Island, N.C.

The Spanish didn't just explore, they settled, creating the first permanent European settlement in the continental United States at St. Augustine, Fla., in 1565. Santa Fe, N.M., also predates Plymouth: later came Spanish settlements in San Antonio, Tucson, San Diego and San Francisco. The Spanish even established a Jesuit mission in Virginia's Chesapeake Bay 37 years before the founding of Jamestown in 1607.

Two iconic American stories have Spanish antecedents, too. Almost 80 years before John Smith's alleged rescue by Pocahontas, a man by the name of Juan Ortiz told of his remarkably similar rescue from execution by an Indian girl. Spaniards also held a thanksgiving, 56 years before the Pilgrims, when they feasted near St. Augustine with Florida Indians, probably on stewed pork and garbanzo beans.

The early history of Spanish North America is well documented, as is the extensive exploration by the 16th-century French and Portuguese. So why do Americans cling to a creation myth centered on one band of late-arriving English — Pilgrims who weren't even the first English to settle New England or the first Europeans to reach Plymouth Harbor? (There was a short-lived colony in Maine and the French reached Plymouth earlier.)

The easy answer is that winners write the history and the Spanish, like the French, were ultimately losers in the contest for this continent. Also, many leading American writers and historians of the early 19th century were New Englanders who elevated the Pilgrims to mythic status (the North's victory in the Civil War provided an added excuse to diminish the Virginia story). Well into the 20th century, standard histories and school texts barely mentioned the early Spanish in North America.

And here's how the piece ends:

On talk radio and the Internet, foes of immigration echo the black legend more explicitly, typecasting Hispanics as indolent, a burden on the American taxpayer, greedy for benefits and jobs, prone to criminality and alien to our values — much like those degenerate Spaniards of the old Southwest and those gold-mad conquistadors who sought easy riches rather than honest toil. At the fringes, the vilification is baldly racist. In fact, cruelty to Indians seems to be the only transgression absent from the familiar package of Latin sins.

Also missing, of course, is a full awareness of the history of the 500-year Spanish presence in the Americas and its seesawing fortunes in the face of Anglo encroachment. "The Hispanic world did not come to the United States," Carlos Fuentes observes. "The United States came to the Hispanic world. It is perhaps an act of poetic justice that now the Hispanic world should return."

America has always been a diverse and fast-changing land, home to overlapping cultures and languages. It's an homage to our history, not a betrayal of it, to welcome the latest arrivals, just as the Indians did those tardy and uninvited Pilgrims who arrived in Plymouth not so long ago.

It's odd--we're Americans; why would some people rather be English?

Heck, then we'd have to eat all that curry....

Uncredited AP photo of Zuleyka Rivera Mendoza, Miss Puerto Rico 2006, reacting after winning the Miss Universe pageant in numerous places online. Runner-up Miss Japan totally should've won, by the way... sadly, there were no Asian American judges.