Jefferson and Slavery

On this fourth of July, some observations from the writer of the Declaration of Independence on the evils of slavery.  Jefferson has some very nasty things to say in the book this comes from, Notes on the State of Virginia, but here he expresses his sense of the price that's paid for the continuation of the practice, by slaves and slave owners alike:

"It is difficult to determine on the standard by which the manners of a nation may be tried, whether catholic, or particular. It is more difficult for a native to bring to that standard the manners of his own nation, familiarized to him by habit. There must doubtless be an unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us. The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other. Our children see this, and learn to imitate it; for man is an imitative animal. This quality is the germ of all education in him. From his cradle to his grave he is learning to do what he sees others do. If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love, for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriæ of the other. For if a slave can have a country in this world, it must be any other in preference to that in which he is born to live and labour for another: in which he must lock up the faculties of his nature, contribute as far as depends on his individual endeavours to the evanishment of the human race, or entail his own miserable condition on the endless generations proceeding from him. With the morals of the people, their industry also is destroyed. For in a warm climate, no man will labour for himself who can make another labour for him. This is so true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are even seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.—But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one's mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to be with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation."

Jefferson includes a draft of a revised constitution for Virginia, which was never approved.  In it, there's the following clause:

"The general assembly shall not have power . . . to permit the introduction of any more slaves to reside in this state, or the continuance of slavery beyond the generation which shall be living on the thirty-first day of December, one thousand eight hundred: all persons born after that day being hereby declared free."

I'm posting this not so much to absolve Jefferson as slave owner--as I said, he has some horrible things to say in this book.  My purpose is to suggest that, even at the moment of the nation's founding, the evil of slavery was well known.  The continuation of slavery under the Constitution was a compromise with pure evil, and the compromisers knew it.

Bars and Stars

I've seem memes galore about the banning of the Confederate flag.  I'm against banning anything, but at the same time I don't think that "banning" is the right word to apply to what's happening to the Confederate flag.  There's no law that says, "Thou shalt not manufacture the flag."  There are no laws banning the flag.  What's happening is that businesses are making a cold, hard calculation and deciding that it's best for their bottom lines, at this point in history, anyway, not to sell or not to show the Confederate flag.  There are no laws banning the flag.  That state assemblies and congresses may want to remove the flag from public places, which I think is a good idea, doesn't equal banning the flag.  There's no law that says, "Thou shalt not display the flag on your premises." There are no laws banning the flag.

As to why I think it's a good idea not to make use of the flag, there are two reasons, both of them also deriving from memes that I've seen.  With the first I agree:  you're perfectly free to fly the flag; and I'm perfectly free to conclude from that decision that you're a bigot.  Free speech has consequences.

Why a bigot and not just someone who celebrates the greatness of the Southern past?  Well, consider another meme, which says basically that the Confederate flag is in principle not different from the American flag.  The American flag has flown over many and many a despicable act of horror and terror, from the genocide of Native Americans to the enslavement of Africans and from the mistreatment of Revolutionary War loyalists to the massacres at My Lai and elsewhere, too numerous to count.  All flags, the American included, have presided over horrible events.  But (a "but" worthy of an elephant, it's so big) although the American flag may have flown during such horrors, the purpose of America, and so of the flag that represents it, is ultimately not genocide or slavery or mistreatment or massacre.  On the other hand, the Confederate flag had one purpose:  to preserve and protect the institution of slavery.

So, again, my three points:  there are no laws banning the Confederate flag; I think it's stupid to take Dukes of Hazard off the air or to forbid the flying of the Confederate flag; I reserve the right to attribute the intended purpose of that flag to those who choose to fly or celebrate it.

Charleston Massacre

Nine African American citizens are shot in a church charged with the energy of its place in the history of Africans in America.  In case the import of the deed was not obvious, according to survivors the killer told the victims that "you haveto go" because "You rape our women and you're taking over our country."  The terrorist murderer, Dylann Storm Roof, seems to have taken direct action on the advice of so many right wing fear-mongers to "take back our country."

Still, says presidential candidate Lindsey Graham, "I just think he [Roof] was one of these whacked-out kids. I don't think it's anything broader than that. . . .  It's about a young man who is obviously twisted."  The basis for his assertion?  Well, his niece had been in an eight grade English class with Storm, and, says Graham, his niece does not recall that Storm ever made any "statements related to race."

Officials on the ground know better.  They accept that the act was "racially motivated."  Face Book knows better:  Roof's profile picture shows him in a jacket adorned with the flags of apartheid South Africa and white-dominated Rhodesia.  Roof's roommate, Dalton Tyler, also knows better.  According to him, Roof "was big into segregation and other stuff. . . . He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to dosomething like that and then kill himself."  Motivating a larger action, a civil war or a jihad, is the stated reason for terrorism nowadays.  Roof is, just simply, a terrorist.

The public voice for the right wing in the country, however, could not understand why anyone would call Roof's unspeakable act even a hate crime.  Instead, Fox News analysts said that it was a crime against religion.  And the most bloody-minded of the right wing political class, presidential candidate Richard Santorum, agreed that the attack was an assault on religious liberty, not a terrorist act motivated by racist hatred.

For the Fox News analysts, the obvious solution is to arm pastors and congregants.  Santorum, apparently, had no recommendation beyond a greater devotion to prayer.

What no one in the community of right-wing speakers seems to want to acknowledge is the self-evident point, that Roof's terrorist act is simply racist.  No one states the obvious, that the conversation—or rather, the provocations expressed on an almost daily basis by the right-wing fear machine, that "they" have taken over the country, that "they" have changed the country so that it is no longer the land of the free, that "they" have destroyed liberty and corrupted justice and all for the sake of that needy 47%, as Mitt Romney infamously said.  The closest that the major media gets to acknowledging the truth is the anodyne, really wrong-headed commentary by Peter Baker, whose column is titled "Charleston Shootings Undercut Hope Obama Brought for Better Race Relations."  Really, Mr. Baker?  Really?

Why is it so difficult to acknowledge the obvious?  Would acknowledging the racism of American life endanger the power of the powerful?  Is the right-wing fear machine correct that the minimal adjustment of social inequities that Pres. Obama has tried to undertake do destroy the fabric of the nation?  If so, then it must follow that the weft of the American social fabric, the fundamental framework onto which the decorative warp of out national thread is woven the weft itself depends on racial separation and injustice.

Is that why the Fox News analysts, or Lindsey Graham, or Richard Santorum and their ilk are incapable of stating the obvious truth?

Black Is Black

I'm pretty sure that as a biological question "race" simply does not exist.  I mean, no doubt there are genetic differences that govern skin color and such, but the human genome is the human genome.  So when someone claims to be "transracial," I really don't know what that word means, any more than I know what "race" means.

On the other hand, I'm also pretty sure that there is such a thing as a social construct called "race."  I mean, if indeed there is no biological ground for racial differences, then white privilege is as much a product of social discourse as is black poverty or Asian intelligence or . . . fill in your favorite social stereotype.

Bringing my third hand into play, I can therefore easily, very easily imagine that someone of who fits one socially constructed category might affiliate with members of a different socially constructed category.  I don't mean that a person who is "white" might empathize with the black community, or vice versa; or that an Asian person might love the culture of Puerto Rico so much that s/he becomes acculturated to the Latino way of life—and I say this knowing full well that there is as much "racial" variation in Latin America as there is in North America, so that the Asian might very well be Latino by birth.

My fourth hand tells me, however, that there is a huge difference between affiliating with a socially constructed category and asserting that one is a member of that category.  The reason for that difference is expressly because the categories are indeed socially constructed.

Say that I, who am Latino and yet, as certified by Ancestry.com more European than a great many white Americans can make claim to—say that I affiliate with the African American community, as in fact I do.  Despite that affiliation, my life experiences, the set of circumstances that have constructed my identity, are chock full of white privilege.  When I was a little kid facing the horrible sign that adorned the restaurant in the Coral Gables bus depot where I went daily en route to and from Coral Gables Elementary School—a sign that read NO NEGROES, NO DOGS, and then, scrawled in magic marker, NO CUBANS—I could safely ignore the sign because, as I've indicated, I am more European than a great many European Americans.  As my very ill-informed friends used to say, I don't look Cuban.  When I walked into the bookstore located next to that restaurant, I was not followed around by the storekeeper, as were the black children who also went into the store.  When I climbed onto the bus, I did not have to sit anywhere in particular, as some of my peers in age albeit not in socially constructed identity had to do.

In short, socially constructed though "racial" identities are, they are powerful determinants of how people experience life and so experience their own identities.

I felt empathy for my peers when I was a kid.  I felt outrage at the experiences that they suffered through.  I affiliated with them, therefore.  But their experience was not my experience.  I could not then, nor could I now assert that I am black.  To make such a claim does more than falsify the experiences that define the socially constructed groups and give those groups a powerful reality.  Indeed, it would be simply another assertion of my white privilege.

Amendments—Who Need 'Em!

I wrote this a few years ago, to try out a Jonathan Swift imitation but also to make fun of the wingnuts of the nation. And then it occurred to me that it could be understood to be a road map for the American future.

A Modern Modest Proposal

It is a melancholy truth of this, the sixth century in which the sacred name of America can be uttered, that the divine wisdom of our Founding Fathers has become so vitiated that the Nation itself is threatened with dissolution and destruction. Many have alleged various causes for so tragic a state of affairs, but no one has found the true root of the decay. The Constitution written by those sages of the past has been debauched repeatedly by the unfortunate tags and emendations loosely called "amendments"—as if it were possible to improve what the god-like minds of the Creators of our land originally intended. I therefore modestly propose a return to the virgin document crafted by those wise men, wiping aside all the excreta of amendment and putative refinement.

I do not except that initial codicil that began the path of decay, the newfangled Decalogue called the Bill of Rights that substitutes for the Original Decalogue that came down to us from Mount Zion and the Mind of God. Strip it all away. Freedom of the press? How could the Founders have foreseen the socialist corruption and fascist indulgences of a New York Times? Freedom of the press is really freedom to destroy, and it is destruction that I seek to extirpate, root and branch. Freedom of religion? The most cursory glance at our lubrick and adulterate age will reveal that "amendment" to mean freedom from, not of, religion. Our God has been hurried off the Nation's stage and is made to sit idly by, fiddling while America burns. Freedom to bear arms? Freedom to destroy the security of all citizens and of the Nation itself!

But the guiltiest of the guilty catalogue of sins with which we have deracinated the intent of our elders are those "amendments" that turn aside the wisdom of the Founding Fathers in limiting the scope of the electorate. The communist fascism of our current course roots itself directly in the miserable fact that "the people" will vote themselves what privileges and luxuries they see fit, with no regard for the privilege of a free people to live or die by the amount of sweat that they are willing to expend. I aim my broadside, therefore, at those "amendments" that expand the suffrage.

This country was founded by Good Christian Men, descended from European settlers whose single-minded desire to exploit their opportunities without the coercive force of legal and social limitations made this the greatest country in the history of the world. It was those men who wrote that Glorious Document that engendered the federal state, and it was their self-evident original intent that only men like them should rule and thrive. I am broad-minded and will not cavil at the admission of Southern Europeans into the list of the enfranchised; but surely the first large step towards the decline of America came when the Fifteenth "Amendment" extended the right to vote to people who do not trace their origins to Europe. The irrational exuberance fostered by the post-Civil War abolition of slavery led to that erroneous "amendment" to our Founder's wisdom. I do not argue for the return of slavery, but rather for the sensible return of the franchise to those whom the Founders originally intended. It was Europeans who invented, fostered, and understood the worth and price of liberty; and it is Europeans only who should enjoy what our Founders originally intended as their right to political authority and power.

More reprehensible still is the Nineteenth "Amendment." Here surely we have indubitable evidence of the Founders' original intent, that they understood women to be categorically incapable of suffrage. Abigail Adam's repeated requests notwithstanding, John Adams, wise beyond the emotional ties that bind a husband to his wife, rejected her pleas for female political equivalence. In what mind-benumbed universe does it seem right that political rights be given to a gender of peoples who never sacrificed their blood and treasure for the common good? For mistake me not, women who are legally incapable of owning property, as was the case until that estimable practice was undone, could nowise sacrifice what was not properly their own. And of course no woman shed blood on the parapets of Bunker Hill or the fields of Saratoga. Indeed, the Founders understood only too well that the emotional instability of the female sex, coupled with the easy, tearful compassion incident to the sex, would compel the kind of fascist socialism that would give and give and give to the poor, the suffering, the weak, and the sick, all at the expense of the economic well-being of the state. Such emotionalism is worthy of irrational women, but so far from our Founders' original intent that, absent the influence of women's socialist emotionalism, we would never have accepted that Trojan Horse, the Statue of Liberty, and its fascist incitement to receive the tired and the poor of the world. Admission of such people, and the charity incident to their admission, destroys a great Nation whose motto should be, not "give me your naked wretches," but rather what the Founders originally intended: "live free and die!"

Having once given the franchise to women, however, it was inevitable that this great Nation would sink even further as the Founders' original intent simply disappeared into the morass of socialist fascism. The Twenty-fourth "Amendment" was an unfortunate but inevitable consequence of the emotional irrationality introduced into the national character by the suffrage of women. Abolish the poll tax indeed! How then are state governments to weed out those whose economic failure is a clear sign of their moral and intellectual unworthiness to govern? The Constitution wisely provides that each state determine who can be a federal elector. The wisdom of the Founding Fathers is to be understood in light of the laws of the thirteen glorious colonies whose legislatures ensured that the franchise would be limited to those who had the wisdom and intellect to make money and own property. Of the thirteen colonies, only three—Georgia, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire—did not have property limitations for electors. The three exceptionalist colonies, vitiated by the socialism of Quakers and the fascism of egalitarian founding documents that encouraged the poor and the debtor, indeed of the criminal convict in the case of Georgia, to immigrate, would have seen the light sooner rather than later, as had all the other colonies that preserved the vote for European men whose property made them have a significant interest in limiting the reach of the taxing power of the state—a power to destroy, as John Marshall affirmed in the only coherent decision of his career as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. But women having encouraged the tired and the poor and the naked wretches, now thought it only right to extend the franchise to people who clearly had no business deciding the fate of the Nation. The original intent of the Founders is clear in ceding the right to limit the franchise to the wise self-interest of the landed gentry and substantial burghers of each state. To remove that power by "amendment" is so far from the original intent of the Founders that only a dolt would think otherwise.

And then comes the final act that transforms the Nation into a sociofascist state, when the feminazi bleeding heart of the ladies and of the poor naked wretches forced the extension of the franchise to eighteen year olds. The Twenty-sixth "Amendment" is so obviously a travesty of the Founders' original intent that it beggars the imagination to see it in any way other than an indulgence of socialist fascism. Yes, eighteen year olds do go to war and yes eighteen year olds do shed their blood for the safety of the Nation. But for the same reason that wise laws prevent those same eighteen year olds from drinking alcoholic beverages, so too the law should preclude their voting. An eighteen year old has neither the wisdom nor experience to command himself, let alone the fate of the Nation. The Founders clearly saw the ripeness of age as a singular criterion for the franchise. Why else would the Constitution expressly state the age at which a citizen could become a legislator or a Commander in Chief? Yes, the Constitution offers no direct language limiting the franchise to those who have achieved an age of rational and experiential wisdom, but the original intent is clearly evident in the limitation of federal responsibility on the basis of age.

And so "amendment" by "amendment" the Nation has been destroyed. We owe more to China and other foreign potentates than we can ever repay. And why? Merely so a corrupted nation could limn out a socialist fantasy of eternal ease by the imposition of fascist rules of conduct. It would be completely useless to argue for a rational response to the problems of the Nation, as for instance returning our armies to a reasonable size, or recognizing the folly of becoming a latter-day Roman Empire, or limiting the influence of those imaginary beings called corporations so that only the citizen would be consulted in the deliberations of Congress, and then taxing the corporations at a rate that would enable the well-being of real people. Such visionary schemes are impossible to consider seriously as a plan by which the Nation might achieve a fruitful, self-perpetuating, and sensible future. It is therefore that I modestly propose a return to the original intent of the unadorned, un"amended" Constitution. Let the Nation be governed as the Founders originally intended, by financially substantial men of European extraction who have achieved an age at which reason and experience command their behavior. Any other proposal is mere folderol.

College Costs

I understand, completely and sympathetically, the anger of graduating from college and owing over $35,000—the average debt of college graduates in 2013.  I understand the pain because, when I graduated from college, I also owed a great deal of money.  I owed a whopping 3,000.

I can hear the snickers now—three thousand bucks?  Seriously?  Nowadays that wouldn't buy you a decent meal plan at most schools.  True.  And the key term in the snickering response is "nowadays."

Let's do a little cost comparison.  I was actually fortunate in what I owed.  The College Board says that in 1974-75 the average debt of college students was just over $5,000.[1]  According to the US Dept. of Energy, in 1974, the year I graduated from college, the average cost of a new automobile was $4,524.[2]  That is about 11% less than the average college debt in 1974.  USA Today indicates that in 2013, the average cost of a new automobile was $31,252.[3]  That is about ten percent less than the average college debt.  The numbers are remarkably close, aren't they?  The average college debt in 1974 could buy you a new car; and average college debt in 2013 could do the same.

Another way of accounting for the debt I accrued in my college years takes me to the Bureau of Labor Statistics and its Inflation Calculator.[4]  Plugging in the average debt in 1974, it turns out that the equivalent in 2013 would be about $23,000.  So yes, the relative price of a college education has risen more quickly than the consumer price index, and has done so by a significant amount.  But not outrageously so.

The comparison of automobile costs in 1974 compared to 2013 might suggest why college costs have risen so much more quickly than the general CPI.  What does a modern car give you that a car, even the most advanced car, could not begin to give you in 1974?  Well, there's keyless entry.  There's tremendously better fuel economy.  There's automated, computerized systems.  There's built-in GPS.  There's . . . .  The technological sophistication that a 21^st century car provides make a modern automobile close to an entirely different object than a car from the 1970s.  The cost of a car in 2013, as out of whack with the general CPI as college debt, can easily be associated with all of those tremendous changes.

The same is true for a college education.  I know that people tend to focus on the eye candy that, no doubt, adds to the cost of colleges.  Do we really need the marble floors or the climbing wall or the three Olympic sized pools or the row after row after row of exercise machines?  Well, students seem to think so, and I will not reject their estimate.  But the eye candy is, relatively speaking, not that significant.  Much more important are the changes in technology.  My school has something like four or five hundred computers in laboratories, not to mention a computer on every employee's desk.  Those computers have to be refreshed regularly, on at most a three-year cycle.  By contrast, when I was in college, the university had a mainframe.  It had had the mainframe for several years.  It continued to have the mainframe for several more years.  And the computers are only the tip of the technological iceberg.  Colleges have to have an on-line presence, not only a web page but also the utilities and facilities that allow the school to function.  Even the cheapest course management software arrangement is not cheap, and the subscription is an annual budget item.  Server space is also not cheap.  The T-3 lines are not cheap.  All colleges have a department of information technology—IT Services—that employs a cadre of technologically savvy, expensive workers.  None of that existed in 1974.

On top of costs that had not existed in 1974, colleges are also bound to pay for resources that have outpaced the general CPI.  I will mention only the cost of energy.  The US Energy Information Administration has a Real Price Viewer that provides figures back to 1977.[5]  In 1977, the average price of a gallon of gasoline was $.59.  In 2013 the same gallon cost an average of $3.51, almost six times as much.  Oil cost $14.53 per barrel in 1977, but $99.63 in 2013—almost seven times as much.  Figures for 1979 show that the average cost of electricity per kilowatt hour was $.0464, and in 2013 $.1220, two and a half as much.  Only the cost of electricity traces the rise in the general CPI.  Colleges use electricity, obviously, but they run on oil and gasoline.

But then, people say, there are salaries for all of those expensive professors.  Faculty are blamed not only for being lazy, but also for being paid exceedingly well for that laziness.

It is almost impossible to provide an average figure for faculty salaries that means anything.  The Chronicle of Higher Education indicates that in the 2011-12 academic year, the "average" full professor at Harvard earned almost $200,000 per year, whereas the "average" full professor at Villa Maria College earned only $42,000.[6]  A different set of distinctions produces equally sharp differences.  In 2011, a professor of law earned an average of $134,000 whereas a professor of English earned an average of $80,000.[7]  My discipline is English, so I will restrict myself to general figures for that discipline.  In 1974-75, the Association of Departments of English indicates that the average salary for a professor of English was about $25,000.[8]  Given the figures from 2011 that The Chronicle of Higher Educations reports, then, salaries for people like me have just about tripled from 1975 to the present.  In other words, we have not kept up with the general CPI.

So why has the debt load of college students outpaced the general CPI?  The technological sophistication of the modern campus is a big reason for the greater increase.  I would add as well the unfortunate political reality that states have reduced appropriations for colleges and for education generally by a tremendous amount, so that students have had to put up more and more of the cost.  The problem, in other words, is almost entirely a matter of political will.

---

[1] http://trends.collegeboard.org/sites/default/files/student-aid-2012-source-data_01122013.xls

[2] https://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/facts/2008_fotw520.html

[3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2013/09/04/record-price-new-car-august/2761341/

[4] http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm

[5] http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/steo/realprices/

[6] http://chronicle.com/article/faculty-salaries-table-2012/131433

[7] http://chronicle.com/article/Average-Faculty-Salaries-by/126586/

[8] www.mla.org/adefl_bulletin_d_ade_43_50.pdf

Latinos

I've been thinking about Latinos in the United States, mostly because I have so often heard complaints about them—us, I should say, since I am one of them.  One complaint is the criminal activity associated with Latinos.  If only we would go away, the crime rate would plummet.  The Chicago Post agrees:  "Putting them on a boat and sending them home would end crime in this country."  But then, the Post was complaining about Irish immigrants in 1870, not Latinos in 2014.

As is true for Latinos nowadays, Irish poverty and criminality went together.  The Post affirmed the connection:  "Scratch a convict or a pauper, and the chances are that you tickle the skin of an Irish Catholic."  The religious prejudice was more notable in the 19^th than it is in the 21^st century, but Latinos too are tarred with the religious brush, albeit indirectly, as in the complaint that we breed like rabbits.  In fact, we breed like Catholics.

The poverty of Latinos, like the poverty of the Irish in the 19^th century, has at least two roots.  First, immigrants then as now came to the U. S. because they were dirt poor in the old country.  Second, once we were in the U. S., the work that immigrants got, then as now, was the lowest paying, least desirable of jobs.  After the Civil War, when the country was flexing its transcontinental muscles, the Irish did work that other Americans, except for the newly enfranchised African Americans, simply would not do.

As if echoing the racially charged comments by so many conservative commentators, Jim Kinsella points out on his web page that the Irish in the 19^th century, "became chamber maids, cooks, and the caretakers of children.  Early Americans disdained this type of work, fit only for servants."  As a result, continues Kinsella, the Irish immigrants came into economic conflict with African Americans, who "were the first to call the Irish 'white nigger.'"  As time passed, the Irish became politically and socially powerful, and finally economically successful.  Noel Ignatiev traces the process in How the Irish Became White.  The vicious racism of the 19^th century aside, one expects that Latinos will follow the same trajectory, and that the criminality of the present will become the dignified success of the Irish have in America for the last sixty years.

In my first trip to downtown Reading, back in 1989, I learned another element of the complaint against Latinos:  "Why don't they learn English?"  Fortunately for the Irish, most of them spoke English, so they were not subject to this complaint.  That was not true for the Italian immigrants who started arriving in the U. S. in large numbers in the 1870s.  For them, as the Virtualitalia web page puts it, "Overcoming the language barrier was a difficult obstacle."  Michael Musmanno explains the consequences of the language barriers in The Story of Italians in America:  because Italians could not speak English, "Many people were under the misconception that an Italian possessed only limited abilities for unskilled labor."  Given only the poorest of jobs, Italians fell into the same cycle of poverty and criminality that the Irish had earlier in the 19^th century and that the Latinos have more recently.

Feeling excluded from the dominant culture, Italians formed organizations that provided continuity with their Italian cultural and linguistic past.  As Musmanno says, "The organizations also served as places for social gathering at which the culture, language, and food of Italy could be shared."  Just as Latinos do now, the Italian immigrants celebrated their culture and spoke their native language.

And then the Italian immigrants set about learning English.  Second language acquisition is not easy.  Study after study shows that it takes about seven years to become proficient enough in a second language to use it with ease, and that's true specifically for people who are well educated in their native language.  For the poverty-stricken and for the most part illiterate Italian immigrants of the early 20^th century, it took longer.  In some cases, if the person was too old, it never took place at all.

The same is true for the current crop of immigrants.  Depending on their sophistication in their native language, like Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, or Swedes, Latinos will take somewhere between seven and ten years to learn English well.  Because Latino immigrants are constantly entering the country, however, it may seem that they never learn to speak English.  But in fact, like previous groups of immigrants, Latinos struggle to learn English.  As that process unfolds, and as was true for previous immigrant groups, the struggle is reflected in the economic difficulties that afflict Latinos generally and the academic problems that affect Latino children in particular.

A nostalgic sense of the past makes it Gospel truth that our Latvian, Norwegian, Slovenian, German ancestors were quick to learn English, and that their success as Americans was a consequence of their advanced language skills and, no doubt, superior intelligence.  They, it seems, were just far more adept and capable than are current immigrants.  In fact, as Judie Haynes points out on her Everything ESL web page, "In 1911, the U.S. Immigration Service found that 77% of Italian, 60% of Russian, and 51% of German immigrant children were one or more grade levels behind in school compared to 28% of American born children."  In short, our ancestors were no quicker, and no more adept, at learning English than are today's Latinos.

Haynes notes that second language acquisition is easier for children who hear their native language spoken at home.  The reasons for this phenomenon are many, but most significant is the fact that adults speak in more sophisticated and more challenging ways in their native language than they do in a new language.  The greater sophistication stimulates their children to develop language skills generally, and that is what makes acquisition of a second language easier.  So next time you hear an older Latino speaking in Spanish to his or her child, don't ask when they will learn English.  Instead, pay attention to the unsurprising fact that the child is responding in English.