Made In America - Bill Bryson [230]
Similarly she cautions against using black in a general sense – black humour, black eye, black mark, blacksmith (though not, oddly, blackout) – on the grounds that most black words have a negative connotation that subtly reinforces prejudice. Or as she puts it: ‘Avoiding words that reinforce negative connotations of black will not do away with racism, but it can lessen the everyday pain these expressions cause readers.’ I cannot pretend to speak for black people, but it seems to me unlikely that many can have experienced much ‘everyday pain’ from knowing that the person who shoes horses is called a blacksmith.
Even ‘violent expressions and metaphors’ – to kill two birds with one stone, how does that strike you, to knock someone dead, smash hit, one thing triggers another, to kick around an idea – are to be excluded from our speech on the grounds that they help to perpetuate a culture sympathetic to violence.
Such assertions, I would submit, are not only an excessive distraction from the main issues, but dangerously counterproductive. They invite ridicule, and, as we have seen, there is no shortage of people who ache to provide it.
A final charge often laid against the bias-free speech movement – that it promotes a bias of its own – is also not always easy to refute. Maggio outlaws many expressions like a man’s home is his castle (and rightly in my view) but defends a woman’s work is never done on the grounds that ‘this is particularly true and usually more true than of a man with a paid job and a family’. Just because a sentiment is true doesn’t make it non-sexist. (And anyway it isn’t true.) Others take matters much further. When the University of Hawaii proposed a speech code for students and staff, Mari Matsuda, a professor of law, endorsed the idea but added the truly arresting belief that ‘Hateful verbal attacks upon dominant group members by victims is permissible.’21
With respect, I would suggest that consideration, reasonableness and a sense of fairness are qualities that apply to all members of a speech community, not just to those who hold the reins.
III
So where now for America and its distinctive strain of English? One of the few certainties about the future for America is that it will continue to become, far more than any other developed nation, a multiracial society. By the end of this decade, only about half of Americans entering the workforce will be native born and of European stock. By 2020, if present trends continue, the proportion of non-white and Hispanic Americans will have doubled, while the white population will have remained almost unchanged. By 2050 the number of Asian Americans will have quintupled.
Many Americans see this as a threat. They note uneasily that already the most popular radio station in Los Angeles is a Spanish-language one, that Spanish is the mother tongue of about half of the two million inhabitants of greater Miami, that 11 per cent of Americans speak a language other than English at home. Some have even seen in this a kind of conspiracy. The late Senator S. I. Hayakawa expressed his belief in 1987 that ‘a very real move is afoot to split the US into a bilingual and bicultural society’.22 Though he never explained what sinister parties were behind this move, or what they could possibly hope to gain from it, his views found widespread support, and led to the formation of US English, a pressure group dedicated to the notion that English should be the sole official language of the United States.
In fact, there is no reason to suppose that America is any more threatened by immigration today than it was a century ago. To begin with, only 6 per cent of Americans are foreign born, a considerably smaller proportion than in Britain, France, Germany or most other developed countries. Immigration is for the most part