Someone mentioned Peggy MacIntosh's useful article which catalogues the
privileges of being white. This has been reprinted in a couple of places,
including the reader Race, Class and Gender edited by Patricia Hill Collins
and others (I am on sabbatical without my external memory, that is,
bookshelf, so forgive partial cite). I have taken her model and used it to
talk and teach about homelessness -- i.e. we who are "homed" have many
taken for granted assumptions about regularity of habits, places to store
things, the moral order associated with being homed, etc.
I wonder if such an approach might be useful in thinking about English
monolinguism? As a scientist who works in different parts of the world and
with people who don't speak English as their first language, I am aware of
things such as: not having to bear the costs of proofreading or
translation, of being faster into conversation at scientific meetings, of
having a catalogue of cultural references and indexicality of examples that
I may draw on and which others are often forced to take on. That's just a
start.
As someone raised in a nearly monolingual family, I remember my family
treating my great-grandmother who spoke "broken" (interesting metaphor,
eh?) English, German and Yiddish as mildly retarded....we never had any
conversations about what it meant to her to take on another language and
country. Would it work with resistant monolingual students to combine,
first, an investigation into their own family pasts, to see how far back bi
or multi-lingualism goes in their families and to understand the process
and impacts? And then also to use the turnabout approach to investigate
English speaker privilege?
Finally -- it's interesting to me how often race, gender and language
relations, in the classroom or elsewhere, is framed entirely as politics.
We don't often speak of it as an integral part of moral and ethical
education, of teaching empathy, compassion, taking the role of the other,
of the moral and ethical wrongness of racism, sexism, etc. It underlies
much of our conversation here on xmca, but often is a silent area. I
liked Eugene's prayer for that reason, it touched some chord about moral
order -- even though I would say Goddess and not God! :-)
L*
***************************************
Susan Leigh Star
address until January 15, 1998:
539 Summit Drive
Santa Cruz, CA 95060
Phone: (408) 454-9218 (h) (408) 454-0965 (w)
FAX: (217) 244-3302 email: s-star1 who-is-at uiuc.edu
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In speaking of lies, we come inevitably to the subject of the truth. There
is nothing simple or easy about this idea. There is no 'the truth,' 'a
truth' -- truth is not one thing, or even a system. It is an increasing
complexity. The pattern of the carpet is a surface. When we look closely,
or when we become weavers, we learn of the tiny multiple threads unseen in
the overall pattern, the knots on the underside of the carpet.
That is why the effort to speak honestly is so important."
--Adrienne Rich. (1979). "Women and honor: Some notes on lying, In her
On Lies, Secrets and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966-1978 (pp. 185-194).
New York: Norton.