Dear George,
Few people realize the importance of language as an instrument of oppression. You crush natives by taking away their language and insisting that the language of the oppressor is the one “true” language.
The beauty of language as an instrument of oppression is that, over time, the oppressed come to embrace it as a status symbol. They will never embrace the dungeon or the torture chamber, but they will come to believe that to speak the oppressor’s language is to take a step up in the Great Chain of Being.
To proscribe a language is to proscribe behaviors. Language reflects the rhythm of a people’s life. In its cadence is their heritage and their culture. To insist that they speak in the plodding cadence of American Technocratic English is, in the words of Paulo Freire, to promulgate a myth of oppressor ideology: the absolutizing of ignorance. Freire goes on to say:
This myth implies the existence of someone who decrees the ignorance of someone else. The one who is doing the decreeing defines himself and the class to which he belongs as those who know or were born to know; he thereby defines others as alien entities. The words of his own class come to be the “true” words, which he imposes or attempts to impose on the others; the oppressed, whose words have been stolen from them. Those who steal the words of others develop a deep doubt in the abilities of the others and consider them incompetent. Each time they say their word without hearing the word of those whom they have forbidden to speak, they grow more accustomed to power and acquire a taste for guiding, ordering and commanding. They can no longer live without having someone to give orders to.
Now I understand the hidden agenda behind your No Child Left Behind Act. If Hispanics or rappers are unwilling to don the mantle of our linguistic blandness, then it is only fitting that their school be defunded and that they be reduced to a life of grinding poverty or prison, or both.
Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones
4:57:32 AM 
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