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Thx Angela! “Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich equated bilingual education Saturday with “the language of living in a ghetto” and mocked requirements that ballots be printed in multiple languages.”
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Thx Adina! “Stamford police arrested one Stamford High School student and anticipate the arrest of more teens suspected of involvement in last month’s racist verbal attack on a 17-year-old black female student.”
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“The racial composition of the beret toting Guardian Angels, is racially motivated…it becomes another issue of neighborhood colonialism where outside organizations wield a heavy hand on community issues which are either foreign or contextual city by cit
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Rob wrote:
Regarding the Newt Gingrich article:
“The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. … We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.”
I get the strange feeling that most white Americans don’t even know when they’re actually being insulting.
Posted 02 Apr 2007 at 9:14 am ¶
Adina wrote:
Connecticut 17-year-old black female student Candace Owens received racial slurs and death threats on her voicemail on Saturday, Feb 3. At least two of the voices were identified as fellow Stamford High School students. Candace left school the following week and did not return until March 26 when she was accompanied by 10 members of the state NAACP. It’s 7 weeks into the investigation and only one arrest has been made.
Incidents like this could start to make you doubt the common assumption that as generations advance, racism will automatically disappear. That is a stagnating view that keeps the status quo. If you truly think an incident such as this should not happen again, you have to stop and wonder where these high school kids are getting their ideas from.
Posted 02 Apr 2007 at 9:26 am ¶
Lyonside wrote:
Re: Newt.. I heard this yesterday and just kept thinking, “Consider the source.”
What Gingrich fails to grasp is that areas that have bilingual education don’t have it for grades K-12, and that the programs are often CONCURRENT with English-only classes, or ESL classes. But bilingual education attempts to ensure that students do not fall so far behind native English speakers that they fall OUT of the education system entirely.
ESL and bilingual education also shows that in classes such as MATH,where the concepts are universal but the naming of things is the only barrier, second language students can be competive with native English speakers.
Could it be that that concept is what is so threatening to Gingrich and his allies?
Posted 02 Apr 2007 at 10:12 am ¶
yousername wrote:
RE: the CT black student.
She has set an example that calling the NAACP will bring this racist victimization to light, while the authorities will do nothing.
And so this mayor has brought up a disgusting racist son. Mmmm, what an upstanding citizen.
Posted 02 Apr 2007 at 12:39 pm ¶
naina wrote:
I have a question for Carmen…why is the bilingual education link tagged solely as a “hispanic latino” issue? You’d be surprised how many non-Latino children are also affected by this debate, particularly Southeast Asian immigrant students in CA.
Posted 02 Apr 2007 at 2:52 pm ¶
Carmen Van Kerckhove wrote:
Sure, but the slant of this particular article was definitely positioning it as a Latino issue.
Posted 02 Apr 2007 at 2:54 pm ¶
Aaron wrote:
I don’t see so much of a Latin@ slant to the article. Sure, Gingrich probably had mostly latin@s in mind, and most people will probably think of this mainly as a hispanic/latin@ issue, but it’s not. In fact, it appears that the writer was very careful to avoid that implication, avoiding referring only to “spanish speakers” or “hispanics”. The only evidence for a hispanic slant is the choice of interviewing a representative of the Hispanic Education Coalition, but that representative, Zamora, also seems to have chosen his words carefully, to include all non-native english-speaking immigrant populations. Obviously, to tag the article for every conceivable immigrant group is impractical, but it should be tagged with immigrants, immigration, non-native english speakers at the very least to be inclusive of groups besides hispanics.
Posted 02 Apr 2007 at 3:59 pm ¶
Lyonside wrote:
Aaron et al: the fact remains that most bilingual education initiatives in the public school system are geared towards Spanish speakers. Therefore, it’s not unusual that the primary focus of many readers (including myself) would be Spanish-speakers first.
I don’t have the stats in front of me, but I do think that Spanish is the 2nd most common language in the US, after English, both for immigrant populations and native-born populations.
Posted 02 Apr 2007 at 6:13 pm ¶
Tereza wrote:
In my graduate program for teachers of non-native English speakers, we learned that research consistently shows that children who are taught in a bilingual classroom or at least in a class where some of the first language is used along with English, do better than children in English-only classrooms. Gingrich & co. either haven’t seen the research or are threatened by the success of the affected groups. Both could be true, but the latter is definitely the case. Just google: research bilingual education students outperform.
Why else is the GOP threatened by the “alien invasion”? Well, maybe it’s the fact that 66% of Latinos and 78% of Asian-Americans vote Democrat.
Many groups are negatively impacted by English-only laws. See this article about Native American tribes in Omaha, opposing egislation to make English the state’s official language, for example.
Posted 02 Apr 2007 at 8:47 pm ¶
Rob wrote:
UPDATE:
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=3011223
Newt has come up with a recent case of “what I really meant was” disease.
Posted 05 Apr 2007 at 10:57 am ¶