With Alan Jones, Dean of Grace Cathedral

In 1975 I was sworn in as a citizen of the United States. It was a moving ceremony in lower Manhattan. With about two hundred other people from all over the world, I was allowed to enter into this great experiment. I remember looking out over the sea of faces and feeling enormously proud and moved by the variety of human beings seeking a common citizenship. What does it mean to be a citizen of the United States? Surely a common language is essential as is the sharing in common values? There is understandable concern not only about the number of immigrants but about their "assimilation" (no longer a "correct" word) into American society. There is a huge need for programs for education for citizenship. But who are in the most need for such an education?

At a recent discussion on immigration it dawned on those of us who are immigrants -- from the highly to the poorly educated -- that we tended to know more about what it was to be an American that many people born here. We, unlike those who fell into the privileges of citizenship through the accident of birth, knew more about the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the obligations of citizenship than the native born. We are now about to go to the polls to vote on legislation further defining what it means to be an American. The English For the Children initiative sounds good but shows just what a mess we are in. Our tendency as a culture is to define and isolate a problem and them design legislation to fix it. We rely on law to substitute for the obligations of citizenship. Just as it is desirable for us to share a common language so it is desirable for all Americans to know something of our history and to understand the obligations of citizenship as well as the rights. No one in his right might would author an initiative to require all citizens to takes civics course and register as volunteers. We rely on means other than the law to build a civic identity.

The argument of the English Language Initiative runs something like this. It is desirable, for obvious reasons, that we all speak a common language. The way to accomplish this is to ignore the evidence of educators and pass a law to make this happen. What is said however in this proposed legislation is not what is heard or intended. The subtext of the message to those for whom English is a second language is not only "Learn English!" but also, "Be like us!" Proposition 227 is a crude legal instrument to affect delicate and tender transitions in our already polarized society.

Do we not put too heavy a burden on the Law? The Law must be the same for everyone at all times. That's why the Law without the balance of equity (where every case is different) is often unjust. That's why mandatory sentencing is both dumb and unjust. "Three strikes and your out," works for baseball but is disastrous if one is interested in justice. We need laws but they are clumsy instruments without flexibility of interpretation. Judges to be just have to have discretionary power. But (the argument runs) since judges cannot be trusted, we vote to make sure that they apply the law across the board without interpretation. And here we are again, applying the same blunt instrument to a delicate and sensitive issue of what it means to be an American. Since educators cannot be trusted, we need a law to make them do what we want. In the absence of trust, society breaks down. We are called to work for a society that is flexible rather than repressive -- for a society capable of laughing at and correcting itself through its mediating institutions. Legislation should be a last resort. We tend to put it at the top of the list for solving a problem.

If we would look there is an immigrant child in all of us -- and our new world is multi-lingual in which fresh-speech is always appearing, always being invented. We might not like it but, as Lewis Hyde reminds us in Trickster Makes This World, "Complexity is a given in the messy carnival of mass democracy." Who wants complexity when a surgical legal strike will "solve" the problem? Who, in their right mind, would sweat it out in the kitchen of pluralistic moderation when they can eat out, with no sweat, on thoughtless extremism?

Maxine Hong Kingston writes eloquently about Chinese immigrants. "When I went to kindergarten and had to speak English for the first time, I became silent. A dumbness -- a shame -- still cracks my voice in two." She was so quiet that she flunked kindergarten. Language and shame go together. "Children who live in two worlds are vulnerable to several shames, several sets of eyes watching them. Most obviously, of course, both the parents and the school want the child to know that their way is the way, and that other ways lack true dignity. Immigrant children get to shamed first, by their parents, and then they get to be ashamed of their parents. "

We should see behind the language of Proposition 227, to what it is saying about Americanization and the methods for encouraging--or discouraging--a stable commonwealth in which every one has a stake. Wouldn't it be wise to listen to those who know something about language education to develop strategies for our moving to our sharing a common language. How about risking a little trust? Who are the ones in the culture that could do with an education about citizenship? The immigrants? Or, those who take being an American for granted? As for English as a common language, Professor Higgins in My Fair Lady knew that Americans haven't spoken it for years!