On Sunday’s Meet the Press program, former NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw got himself into a jam with his remarks about Hispanics. He was responding to host Chuck Todd’s observation that people in Wyoming and South Dakota are more supportive of building a wall on the Mexican border than the people who live on the border in Texas and Arizona. By way of attempting an explanation, Brokaw said this:
TOM BROKAW: And a lot of this, we don’t want to talk about. But the fact is, on the Republican side, a lot of people see the rise of an extraordinary, important, new constituent in American politics, Hispanics, who will come here and all be Democrats. Also, I hear, when I push people a little harder, “Well, I don’t know whether I want brown grandbabies.” I mean, that’s also a part of it. It’s the intermarriage that is going on and the cultures that are conflicting with each other. I also happen to believe that the Hispanics should work harder at assimilation. That’s one of the things I’ve been saying for a long time. You know, they ought not to be just codified in their communities but make sure that all their kids are learning to speak English, and that they feel comfortable in the communities. And that’s going to take outreach on both sides, frankly.
If Brokaw had limited himself to describing the racist and political motivations some people “on the Republican side” have for supporting a border wall, he wouldn’t have run into any problems. He got into trouble by following that explanation up with his personal opinion that Hispanics are responsible for creating this backlash because they don’t do a good enough job of assimilating.
In part, this relies on the fallacy that prior groups of immigrants from places like China, Italy and Poland were quicker to learn English. There’s no evidence that I am aware of to support this contention. More than that, though, Brokaw gave some supporting validity to the anti-Hispanic attitudes he had just dispassionately characterized. And he made a serious error by asserting that the victims of racism have a responsibility to take action to combat the sources of racism.
Brokaw gave a mealy-mouthed apology to the people he had offended, but he has supporters.
Sorry to see @tombrokaw catching hell for saying Hispanics need to do a better job of assimilating. This proves that any criticism of any non-white ethnic group is automatically considered racist and shows how the national consensus against racism has been weaponized.
— Brit Hume (@brithume) January 28, 2019
As a white male, I’m getting a little testy about how comfortable people seem to be about heaping contempt on white men as a group. But I also recognize that I don’t suffer any meaningful repercussions from this. No one is refusing to sell me a house or admit my child to their school or flying a confederate flag from their porch to protest my mere presence on their street. What I don’t understand about Brit Hume’s position is why he wants to criticize any ethnic group. He doesn’t like it when people criticize his group but he wants permission to criticize other groups without being called out for it as a racist.
It seems to me that grouping people together based on their ethnicity in order to criticize them is a definitionally racist thing to do. This should be obvious if we just look at a statement like, “If Koreans don’t want to face hostility, they should just stop doing x.” How about people stop prejudging every Korean they encounter based on some perceived flaw they.see in them as a racial category? Why not put the onus for change on the racist rather than the victim of racism?
So much of the opposition to political correctness is really nothing more than the desire to have permission to hold negative racial, religious or gender stereotypes about people.
We’ve always had non-English speaking immigrants in this country, and there has always been a lag in how quickly they become fluent in our language. There has always been a group of people who were annoyed by the influx of people with a different appearance, differing languages or accents, and different religious backgrounds. This isn’t something that Hispanics should feel obligated to do anything to address, and groups of people cannot learn a language anyway. Only individuals can do that. If you want to find some Hispanic family that isn’t learning English fast enough for your tastes, then go pick on them rather than going on national television to tear down the entire Hispanic-American community. Most people would think you were a terrible person if you actually did go pick on some non-fluent family, but that only drives home how awful this behavior from Brokaw and Hume really is.
My SIL’s Polish grandmother went to her grave about 20 years ago never learning more than a couple words of English. Being on the south side of Chicago, she never had to. And I want to know what Trump is going to do about all the illegal Polish in Chicago who are here on overstayed visas. These Polish people have been marrying south side Mexican Americans that they meet in their Catholic Churches, and then making brown babies! Back in the day I even was friends with some of them – not knowing any better. It is a travesty that is hurting our white nationalist future.
In retrospect Brokaw probably wishes he hadn’t rambled on over the cliff, but I can see how he didn’t see what he said as an issue at the time he said it. He was in a comfort zone – less of one than he realized at the time, and ended up speaking his real mind.
Racism is cultural, and Brokaw was just responding from that comfortable cultural space reserved for whites that says there is nothing wrong or racist with generalization to tar a whole damned group of people. We’ve long had the cultural stereotypes about black people as accepted norms: they’re lazy, they steal, they’re violent, and dumb, that are used to excuse the cultural and institutional racism they’re routinely subjected to. Blacks are incarcerated at higher rates than whites? Of course, they’re criminally inclined. Black unemployment rate is higher than whites? Well they’re lazy and don’t want to work. This is why not being held to standards of political correctness is so important to them. How else are they going to give voice to their fears while simultaneously whitewashing their racism?
. . . except among racists.
Tom Brokaw is wrong.
My brother in law and most of his brothers were born here, but his parents and some of his siblings were born in Italy. All the siblings speak English quite well, but his mother spoke mostly Italian all the time and the family spoke Italian at home unless I or other anglos were there. No big deal. In fact my brother in law says he understands Italian but seldom speaks it even at home.
So fuck you Tom.
In the case of the Spanish language this is actually even more offensive. In the first place, Puerto Rico is part of the United States and the indigenous language in Puerto Rico is Spanish. In the second place, Latinos in the entire southwest of the country — Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, California — are not necessarily immigrants at all. They didn’t cross the border, the border crossed them. Insisting that they have to learn “our” language is fundamentally ahistorical. Of course, that population has, they don’t speak Spanish any more, but new immigrants from Mexico are their cousins. In Europe, most people are at least bilingual. Three languages are spoken in Switzerland, two in Belgium, for example. Everybody in Scandinavia is multilingual. Multiple languages are spoken in most Latin American countries including Mexico– Spanish and indigenous languages. Nobody insists that everybody has to learn “our” language. By the way I hablo español. There’s nothing wrong with that. Why don’t more people learn a little? It’s great to understand more than one language.
Tom Brokaw isn’t even coming from racism, he’s totally oblivious. It’s a condition of being old, being born in a world where what he said wasn’t even controversial. It was taken for granted, and still is taken for granted all over the country that “of course Hispanics need to do more to integrate.”
They should do things like be careful to NOT fly the Mexican flag at rallies or to support sports teams because that could be “misunderstood.” The very fact that American citizens marched waiving Mexican flags was a giant rage inducing red flag to all the bigots all over the country. Of course, Italian Americans waiving the Italian flag in Little Italy or Irish Americans flying the Irish flag is perfectly OK.
These rules only apply to black and brown people who are supposed to forget whatever “shit-hole country” they came from.
This kind of thinking even infects some people I know who married Mexican and Latin American women. You would think at that level of integration they’d abandon their casual racial attitudes, but surprisingly, no.
“These rules only apply to black and brown people who are supposed to forget whatever “shit-hole country” they came from.”
Well of course because to be “American” is to be “superior” and not just letting go of but forgetting your own non-white heritage is the required price for paying homage to that superiority. Wearing green shirts and waving Irish flags on St. Patrick’s Day is cool; waving a Mexican flag on Cinco De Mayo is disrespectful. So is kneeling in protest at NFL games.
Kneeling instead of standing is showing extreme disrespect to America. It’s quite different from celebrating Kwanzaa or wearing Green on St. Patrick’s day. It’s deliberately spitting on all of America.
Quite quite different. Confrontational instead of celebratory.
Are you being serious or sarcastic?
Quietly kneeling to bring attention to a serious, life threatening issue is “confrontational” in a sense, but it’s absolutely not disrespectful “to America.”
I’m extremely serious. In the ’60s I didn’t go for flag burning or wearing the flag on your ass either. I did oppose the war and the draft but didn’t participate in any demonstrations because I didn’t want to be associated with the type of people protesting, rich college boys that thought factory workers kids belonged in uniform but not elite people like themselves.
There is a difference between protesting policy which is everyone’s enumerated right under the Constitution and spitting on your country. There is a difference between protesting local police actions and spitting on your country.
You can be a protester or a traitor. There is a big difference.
And multimillionaire athletes are really being persecuted, aren’t they?
And it is hardly akin to flag burning or spitting on veterans. In fact Colin Kaepernick started to kneel after a veteran told him that would be more respectful than sitting during the national anthem. Beyond that given that many sports spectators use the national anthem to go get refreshments I hardly think it is something sacred.
. . . your assertions are utterly false — the diametric opposite of true or accurate — you’re right!
No it isn’t. Not even remotely.
No it isn’t. Not even remotely.
All it would take to learn how utterly false that all is would be to simply consider the reasons given by the persons doing the “kneeling instead of standing” for doing so. Those reasons are very obviously not what you say they are.
if, like a lot of people, you’re equating racism only with an animus or some other negative attitude, i find that too narrow a definition. i call racist any opinion that over-generalizes about any group based primarily on race or ethnicity or culture. so i consider the statement “hawaiians are lovely people” to be as racist as “eskimos are stupid”, even though the first statement is meant to be positive, and is harmless if it doesn’t become patronizing.
so i’d say that brokaw’s comments are definitely coming from racism. his cluelessness comes from never having been called on it — til now — and it doesn’t preclude any bigotry.
Tom Brokaw isn’t even coming from racism, …
Except he is. Did you know Nixon offered him the Sarah Sanders(aka PressSec) job back in 1969? The dude was the NBC West Coast correspondent and the nightly news anchor for the LA NBC station at the time. It’s kind of like offering Maddow the PressSec job while she was the vacation fill-in for Keith Olbermann.
I was good friends in college with someone who currently works at CIS (which ironically is currently suing SPLC for correctly labeling them a hate group) and he frequently pushed this line. Assimilation wasn’t happening “fast enough” and it was a disaster for some reason. I didn’t think much of it until later, and am ashamed to admit to having spouting it myself until I saw through it for the racist tripe that it is. I am extremely annoyed that I was so very carefully trained by him.
My wife teaches all sorts of kids and the 1st generation born here almost never want to speak anything other than English, even to their parents at home, almost certainly due to this kind of racist peer pressure. Which is a total shame, because at that age kids are language sponges. To my mind, the real assimilation problem is that immigrants, and particularly their children, are pressured into shedding their culture much too quickly.
What makes this country great is that the US assimilates the cultures of the people it takes in from other places. Not only does the increase in population allow for the pyramid scheme we call “capitalism” to continue to kind of function, but it creates a US culture that the rest of the world sees and likes because it is diverse rather than monolithiclly WASPy or whatever right-wing authoritarians consider the “correct” US culture that hasn’t existed ever, and doesn’t exist, except in their own little minds.
Citizens of this country, whether 1st or 2nd generation, all end up speaking English, because otherwise they aren’t going to survive economically.
Brokaw is an old white man who thinks that everyone should change themselves to more resemble him. He’s a BothSidesDoItTM corporate hack, and I gag a little every time someone attempts to paint him as a liberal.
Also, one way to tell if a country gives a fuck about the education of its citizens, is if that country goes out of its way to make sure its citizens are at least bilingual. Being bilingual is amazing exercise for the brain, increases the ability to think abstractly, and, uh, makes the person instantly employable as a translator. I have no kids, but if I did, that kid would definitely be forced into learning to play the piano, and to speak Spanish, and perhaps Chinese, because any parent should want to give their child a chance at success…especially in our rigged oligarchy.
Anyway…
Brokaw and Hume are old white men who are afraid of change. Fuck them and their antiquated, anachronistic views on a culture that has left them the fuck behind, for good reason. They have nothing of substance to add, which is why they lash out as they just did.
Firstly my mother’s family immigrated to the USA from Switerland/Germany beginning in the late 18th C. They settled in Pennsylvania, which used to have a huge German speaking population – and not just the Amish (which my family isn’t). My great grandparents (who were alive until I was almost out of college) and my grandparents all spoke German better than English, but they could speak English with a heavy accent. That’s after well over 100 years of the ancestors/descendents living in the USA.
My mother encountered racsim when she went to school, whereby they forced her to speak only English and directed my grandparents to ONLY speak English at home. This was in order to “assimilate” my mother’s generation “better.”
So things like this have happened before, and of course, they faced a lot of prejudice during the waning days of WWII, when more people learned about the Nazis and what they were doing.
This recent spate of saying that LatinX immigrants aren’t doing enough to assimilate has more to do with people’s racism against dusky-hued people, combined with carefully taught fear about them intermarrying with white people and “diluting” the white race.
Also people get angry when they hear LatinX people speaking to one another in Spanish. Why? Because they can’t understand and maybe fear what’s being said. As for myself, I try to evesdrop just a tiny bit to try to improve my Spanish skills. I ENVY them having 2 languages. We should all be so lucky.
Brokaw’s racist comments are quite typical of his generation, his class status, his carefully learned biases, which, clearly, he has never had the self-introspection to question. Brit Hume is just as bad.
Why aren’t White People learning to assimilate more with other ethnic groups? This is a nation of immigrants. Get with the program.
So-called “assimilation” is total crap because it presumes a one-way street. I’d argue “assimilation” is a hostile word in itself when we have “integration” right there to use.
As a white man over 40, I have no sympathy or patience for others of my type feeling culturally insecure, because there’s no reason for that whatsoever.
Well, there is ONE reason I can relate to: the insecurity about fellow white men with guns, because I do fear those guys and their crippling violent anxieties.
Also, in my experience it’s not just white guys. My stepfather-in-law is a brown guy from northern NM and is conservative and religious af. He’s terrified of black people and non-heterosexual people.
Our society will pay and pay and pay to assuage the fears of old men. Old white men especially, but old men always. I don’t want to be one of those old men.
“much of the opposition to political correctness is really nothing more than”… an excuse for being cruel and hateful towards others.
I thought I read that Brokaw has apologized, sorta.
Meh.
We’ve always had non-English speaking immigrants in this country, and there has always been a lag in how quickly they become fluent in our language.
As I understand, children of immigrants are typically bilingual, and their children do not learn their grandparents’ language.
Ben Franklin in 1751: Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them.”
(Franklin was apparently fine with the German settlers early in his life, but worried that they were woudl be disloyal in part because the Quakers refused to join his militia.)
So much of the opposition to political correctness is really nothing more than the desire to have permission to hold negative racial, religious or gender stereotypes about people.
That’s true, but I’d add that they want to avoid any sort of consequence for their racism as well. Lots of media sources will use euphemisms like “racially charged” or “racially divisive”, which has the effect of giving cover to white supremacists everywhere.
I have years of experience as a volunteer literacy tutor where I live in Portland, Oregon. I’ve worked individually or in small groups with people of various nationalities, most of them refugees, with native languages that include Russian, Arabic, Spanish, and Swahili. I’ve also been a classroom aide where even more native languages are represented. The reason there are even volunteer literacy tutors in the first place is that English as a Second Language classes everywhere are oversubscribed. The idea that native Spanish speakers–or any other immigrants–somehow don’t want to learn English is a pernicious myth. It’s also an extremely durable one. I’ve told many people about my ESL tutoring experience and what I’ve written above and they still repeat the absurdities about brown people not wanting to learn English.
I highly recommend Helen Thorpe’s book titled “Newcomers.” She spent over a year in a Denver public school classroom that is part of the school district’s refugee program. If I recall correctly, by mid-year there were 17 different languages represented in a classroom of under 30 students. My numbers may be off, but the point remains.
The book looks at all angles of English as a second language acquisition including the nature of the student’s native language (tonal? western alphabet?), the student’s personality (introverted, sense of humor, social), PTSD related to the trauma of fleeing violence and the loss of family members, support system (family intact, level of poverty) and so forth.
The book also examines all the techniques used to help the children communicate as they slowly learned the new language (drawings, pantomime and so on). Many knew not a single word in English when they entered the classroom and had no one in the classroom who spoke their language. So they felt quite isolated.
. . . existence of
(Presuming that “Metra Rail” is somewhere within the U.S.A.)
Thanks in advance!
A picture worth a thousand words, although there are some helpful versions of those too…
OMG, this is such a ludicrous stereotype. I work with first generation Mexicans and they speak pretty good accented English and I can speak to them in Spanish but I don’t because they are proud of their English.
I get so angry about the lazy stereotypes about immigrants because I am the son of immigrants (Irish, who cares, right?) But all immigrants that I know bring amazing vitality to this country just like mine did. We need more immigrants not fewer.
among the longtime entries in my rotating email sig collection is the following poem, which i think i borrowed many many years ago from either the philadelphia weekly or the defunct philadelphia city paper:
for those who don’t get the reference, see “proposition 187”.
Most humans, me included, generalize our anecdotal experiences to form opinions. It’s far easier than actually doing research or taking time to evaluate sources of data. Our educational system is supposed to help young Americans learn to think analytically, instead of anecdotally. From my purely anecdotal vantage point, it looks like we’ve failed.
The 24-hour news cycle demands constant diarrhea of the mouth. Fill all of those minutes of air time! Capture ratings! It ruins both journalism and thoughtful commentary, because there’s no time to self-edit.
I say harebrained things every day, to myself or to my spouse. By the time I talk current events with my students, I’ve had time to edit out some of the dumb, anecdotal conclusions. If one slips in, I’m usually going to be called out on it. I hope these moments will always be chances for learning and mutual understanding. I do worry that a careless comment could end my career because of the anti-free speech tendencies in education today. However, I refuse to script every comment in class. It’s not natural, and it’s not good for the kids.
In that vein, I must say that I’ve made the same mistake as Brokaw. I’m of Northern European descent, but I lived and worked in Latin America for years. My wife is from a Latin American country. I’m fluent in Spanish. Thus, it was natural that I gravitated to working in schools with a large Spanish-speaking population.
At times, I was very frustrated by what I perceived as an unwillingness to learn English on the part of my students, and their parents. This personal frustration led me to conclude that the population I served (mostly Central American) was somehow different from the “great melting pot” story I learned in my school days.
Over time, I came to understand that migration and assimilation are tremendously complex phenomena. I also realized that learning English is much more difficult when life is precarious. When parents are working four jobs to survive; when kids are sleeping in sleeping bags, not beds, because they move every few weeks; when the risk of deportation and family separation is ever-present – well, queuing up to enroll in English classes is not a priority under those circumstances.
Finally, I want to assert that we do need to face the politically-charged issue of how we educate immigrant kids in the US. The legitimate fear on the part of progressives that immigrant kids would be segregated from their peers has led to the opposite extreme in many districts: kids are “mainstreamed” so quickly that they have no chance to get the intensive English instruction they need to succeed in school. In the name of “assimilation,” we toss these kids to the wolves, so to speak. It’s cheaper, and less perilous, legally, to just drop the immigrant kids into a regular classroom, and to have an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher “check-in” on them. But it doesn’t work.
. . . your own horn — that in fact you didn’t even recognize this as the self-compliment it is re: the success you’ve already accomplished wrt instilling analytic thinking habits in your students: