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NBC News Columnist: “Spanish, not English, is the Most All-American Language & has been for Centuries”

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Published on: May 29, 2018

Once you leave your foundations and you allow minorities to dictate norms, this is what happens.  An NBC News columnist is now claiming that Spanish is the “most all-American language” and “has been for centuries.”

Gustavo Arellano, an NBC News “THINK” contributor and LA Times columnist, penned a short piece which he titled, “Spanish, not English, is the Most All-American Language & has been for Centuries.”

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

After listing a few incidents while questioning if it was safe to speak Spanish in “Trump’s America,” Arellano wrote:

Arellano claims there is “open bigotry” against Latinos in America and points to left-leaning Vox’s report on the FBI’s report from November 2017 on 2016 “hate crimes” to make his point.

He writes:

Such open, ugly bigotry seems like the new normal for Latinos, and statistics are starting to back that up. An FBI report showed that hate crimes against Latinos rose 15 percent from 2015 to 2016, which just so happens to coincide with the rise of 45.

But the reality is that speaking Spanish in the United States has always been dangerous: In this age of social media, the rest of the country is just learning about what Latinos have had to deal with for generations.

Many Mexican-American baby boomers lost their Spanish language skills as children because their parents didn’t foster it out of fear of discrimination. And those fear were well-founded: Chicano memoirs are chockablock with horror tales of teachers washing the mouths of students with soap for daring to speak Spanish in class. And that wasn’t even the worst school abuse: Administrators would regularly classify Spanish-dominant children as “retarded” and place them in special-education courses, severely stunting their chances at success.

The United States already has the second-largest population of Spanish-speakers in the world, after Mexico.

And yet Spanish in los Estados Unidos persisted. The United States already has the second-largest population of Spanish-speakers in the world, after Mexico — and if current trends continue, we’ll beat our south-of-the-border frenemies by 2050.

Now, if Arellano were honest and was not pushing an agenda here, he would have asked whether whites were also in danger in 2018 America.  Why?  Because according to the report, the percentage of increase in whites being targeted for alleged “hate crimes” from 2015 to 2016 was two percent more than Latinos.

Arellano didn’t mention Muslims either, even though we have reported that a ton of alleged “hate crimes” against Muslims were actually self-inflicted, meaning they were faked.

And Arellano surely wasn’t going to mention Jews in his report.

Nope, he simply focused on Latinos.

He is correct in pointing to history that many Spaniards did establish areas in America.  After all, that’s where Columbus came from.

However, the fact of the matter is that it was the English who developed America, who made it what it became.

No one is “freaking out” that people speak Spanish, as Arellano claims though.  I certainly don’t fear or get worried that people speak Spanish in America.  However, for decades, America has been known to be an English speaking country.  We developed businesses and government that primarily communicated in English. Our education system is almost entirely based in English.

From the Mayflower Compact to the US Constitution to general laws and contracts that take place in the US, it is English that is used, not Spanish.

Arellano does point out some history of Spanish that we should remember, and I’ll give him credit for that, but the attitude with which he presented it was clearly to promote certain agenda.

So why do some Americans keep freaking out about Latinos speaking Spanish? Part of it is anti-Latino sentiment, for sure. And our president has emboldened xenophobes like few presidents since Woodrow Wilson. But a better explanation is that it’s a reminder that our country has historically been fine with citizens speaking more than one language. The Continental Congress printed documents in German and French. German bilingual schools existed across the Midwest right up until World War II. And, like the song said, even Old New York was once New Amsterdam (where people spoke Dutch).

Now, with an increasingly diverse America, speaking Spanish is just going back to our roots — roots that modern-day Know-Nothings fear being left out of.

Feeling left out?  Hardly.  In fact, Chris Menahan writing at Information Liberation mocked the tone of that last sentence when he wrote, “Indeed, our ‘roots’ of Spanish conquistadors imposing their language on the native Mexican population (where Arellano’s is from).”

Arellano then provided the punchline near the end of his piece.

Thankfully, today’s internet culture quickly deems anyone who freaks out about someone speaking Spanish in public a pendejo. That jerk Manhattan lawyer? A crowd-funded mariachi not only played outside of his apartment, but the attorney also got booted from his office and eventually apologized. Same with the Jersey teacher. Good people are not only realizing that speaking a foreign language is okay, but that it’s not okay to be racist about it.

“Spanish is an American language,” concluded Princeton history professor Rosina Lozano in her recently released, excellent “An American Language: The History of Spanish in the United States.” “Not just because of its place in the Americas and the future of the nation, but also because of its pivotal role in the United States for over a century.”

So get with the program, racists, and learn Spanish. And for the record: when we speak Español, we’re not talking about you. We don’t even care about you.

Except to put out your propaganda, Mr. Arellano?

I’ve worked around tons of Latin Americans on construction sites for years.  They often spoke Spanish and I tried to learn what little I could to interact with them out of courtesy, to be friendly and helpful.  I always enjoyed that, but people like Mr. Arellano rides a high horse in his piece for sure.

Of course, there are always going to be people who will look down their noses at others in every culture, but here’s the thing, when I go to Spain or Mexico, I don’t expect them to accommodate my English, even though many might do just that.  I either have to learn the language or struggle to communicate the best I know how.

In America, while people are welcome to speak Spanish, French or any language they choose, the reality is that just because Spanish has a place in our history, it is not the predominant American language, nor is it the “most all-American language” that Arellano proclaims it to be.

Frankly, I take it that Mr. Arellano is engaging in a tad bit of racist rhetoric himself because from the tone, it doesn’t sound like he is merely going after a few paranoid people who overreacted to hearing people speaking Spanish.  What do you think?

Article posted with permission from Freedom Outpost

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