Newt’s Tiny But Dangerous Ghetto of a World View

SAN FRANCISCO -- When Newt Gingrich equated bilingual education with teaching "the language of living in a ghetto" this week, it took me back to my own linguistic roots. San Francisco’s Mission district was a place where the crowded housing projects overflowed with sounds of English, Spanish, Ebonics, Spanglish and other languages spoken and sung and mixed and dubbed until those moments when night and morning became one. The multilingual polyphony of this environment still makes it hard to define whether I grew up in a “ghetto” or a “barrio.”

Because these multiple threads of my speech DNA inspired my love of language (while sometimes disturbing my formal studies of it as well), I respond with a mix of anger and some confusion to Gringrich’s recent comments linking languages like Spanish to a “ghetto.” I share neither his experience and views of ghettoes nor his understanding of language as a kind of gated community frozen in time. What he triggers most are various sorts of fear.

One kind of fear comes from having heard during a recent visit to Atlanta both the stately, sotto voce expressions of upscale, mostly white anger in Gingrich’s Cobb County and the more blatant and very loud drawled racist epithets at one of the increasing numbers of anti-immigrant KKK and Neo-Nazi rallies in Georgia. All of this anger and hate was expressed in English, a language, Gingrich tells us, is “the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.”

Rather than cast off Gingrich as another backwoods racist in statesman’s clothing, we should be deeply disturbed about his word choices, his deployment of and attacks on one of the primary definers of the human: language.

Reading about how the repetition of certain words and phrases that denigrated minorities in places like Rwanda and Nazi Germany helped me understand how politicians and other “leaders” can use words to facilitate, normalize, interpret and incite violence, mass jailings and other frightening actions against racial, religious and linguistic minorities.

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