Covering_ The Hidden Assault on American Civil Rights - Kenji Yoshino [60]
When the employer’s reasons are examined, they often fall short. In 1988, a federal appellate court considered a challenge to an English-only workplace rule enacted by a state court in Los Angeles. The defendants justified the provision by observing that the employees’ use of Spanish threatened to transform the workplace into a Tower of Babel. Yet when the court examined the facts, it found the employees’ capacity to speak Spanish was essential in serving non-English-speaking clients. Far from being a liability, the employees’ bilingualism was an asset—an unsurprising revelation given that bilingualism is not a lack of knowledge (such as the inability to speak English) but a surfeit of knowledge. English-only statutes punish individuals not for knowing too little, but for knowing too much.
Dissenting from the court’s decision denying a rehearing of that case, federal judge Alex Kozinski supported the English-only rule by observing that the United States has been able to avoid the controversies that language difference has evoked in countries such as Canada because, as “[a] nation of immigrants, we have been willing to embrace English as our public language, preserving native tongues and dialects for private and family occasions.” This vision goes far beyond requiring that people be able to speak English. It forbids people to speak any language but English in the public sphere, requiring us to closet our difference in the ethnic enclave or the family.
When not justified by a reason that stands up to close contextual scrutiny, that ethic unnecessarily pushes national origin minorities into second-class citizenship. It prevents our lives and our culture from making a mark on the common semantic stock. When that cost is considered, Canada starts to look less like a cautionary landscape and more like a utopian one. Where the United States has embraced the metaphor of the melting pot of assimilation, Canada has espoused the countermetaphor of the mosaic of persisting diversity. It may be time to mix those metaphors.
First performed in 1908, Israel Zangwill’s The Melting Pot follows the fortunes of David Quixano, a Russian Jewish immigrant who lives in penury as a musician and composer in New York with his uncle and his grandmother. The three generations play out the usual pattern of assimilation. The grandmother speaks little English, and weeps over how her son and grandson must break the Sabbath to earn their livings. Fluent in English, David’s uncle Mendel navigates American culture more adroitly, but still turns on David when David declares his love for a gentile, Vera Revendal. A “pogrom orphan” whose parents were killed by an anti-Semitic mob, David is a poster child for assimilation. He aspires to compose an “American symphony,” inspired by the idea that “America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming.”
This vision leads Vera, also an immigrant from Russia, to overcome her anti-Semitism, and the couple gets engaged. Then David’s own commitment to relinquishing old “blood hatreds and rivalries” is tested when he learns the massacre of his parents in Russia was superintended by Vera’s father. Traumatized, David breaks off the engagement. The couple, however, is reunited at the first performance of his American symphony. Sitting on a roof garden, they look at a sunset, which David likens to “the fires of God round His Crucible.” The play ends with David’s paean to the “great Melting-Pot” that will absorb “Celt and Latin, Slav and Teuton, Greek and Syrian, black and yellow” so that “the great Alchemist” can “melt[] and fuse[] them with his purging flame.”
The Melting Pot is overwrought—it is no accident the title has had a longer run than the play. Yet when I first read it in college, my sympathy for its ideals checked my critical faculties. My reaction was akin to that of Theodore Roosevelt, who allegedly called out, “That