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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32956 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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They also legally suppressed the French language across the state. Cajun and Creole children were paddled for speaking it in their public schools well into the twentieth century.

This is technically true, but the dominant factor in Cajuns abandoning the French language was that their bosses were Texans who preferred English speaking workers, and Cajuns who had mostly been paddled for speaking French in school and then continued speaking it anyways stopped teaching their children French because they wanted them to make more money as adults rather than be stuck in the rice fields subsistence farming. The paddling mostly suppressed the Cajun language in a few holdouts.

The narrative that state pressure, rather than economic factors, was the main reason for the decline of the French language is mostly driven by Cajun academics trying to cast themselves as oppressed by a white anglo hegemony alongside blacks- my grandfather told me "my parents spoke French, but they never wanted to teach me". For the same reason you tend to see occasional books talking about how Cajuns were more likely to intermarry with blacks or whatever- being oppressed is fashionable, and LSU academics who got French department sinecures through nepotism and themselves speak standard, not Cajun French want in on the grift.

Actual working class(the vast majority) Cajuns are more likely to point to anti-Catholic or class biases as reasons for their poverty, and are often not shy about criticizing lazy or dysfunctional friends and relatives, with the implication that those prejudices are much reduced and so there's not a lot of excuse for not succeeding.

stopped teaching their children French because they wanted them to make more money as adults rather than be stuck in the rice fields subsistence farming.

I don't follow. Why would that make them stop teaching them French instead of starting to teach them English?

TR giving a speech on the topic:

I stand for straight Americanism unconditioned and unqualified, and I stand against every form of hyphenated Americanism. I do not speak of the hyphen when it is employed as a mere convenience, although personally, I like to avoid its use even in such manner. I speak and condemn its use whenever it represents an effort to form political parties along racial lines or to bring pressure to bear on parties and politicians, not for American purposes, but in the interest of some group of voters of a certain national origin, or of the country from which they or their fathers came.

Americanism is not a matter of creed, birthplace or national descent, but of the soul and of the spirit. If the American has the right stuff in him, I care not a snap of my fingers whether he is Jew or Gentile, Catholic or Protestant. I care not a snap of my fingers whether his ancestors came over in the Mayflower, or whether he was born, or his parents were born, in Germany, Ireland, France, England, Scandinavia, Russia or Italy or any other country. All I ask of the immigrant is that he shall be physically and intellectually fit, of sound character, and eager in good faith to become an American citizen. If the immigrant is of the right kind I am for him, and if the native American* is of the wrong kind I am against him….

…Now for our own citizens. We represent many different race strains. Our ancestors came from many different Old World nationalities. It will spell ruin to this nation if these nationalities remain separated from one another instead of being assimilated to the new and larger American life.

The children and our children’s children of all of us have to live here in this land together. Our children’s children will intermarry, one another, your children’s children, friends, and mine. Even if they wished, they could not remain citizens of foreign countries….The effort to keep our citizenship divided against itself by the use of the hyphen and along the lines of national origin is certain to breed a spirit of bitterness and prejudice and dislike between great bodies of our citizens.

Long before Anti-immigration nativist sentiment was based primarily on conversations about the white race, it was based on questions of Christian denomination, on language, on a fear of factionalism within the country. Nativist Americans were hesitant to trust any immigrant who maintained cultural, linguistic, or ethnic distinctiveness.

Once everyone speaks English, what benefit is there to also speaking French? My maternal grandparents spoke cajun French at home growing up. Would my mother have gotten any significant utility out of being raised bilingual?

Because natal bilingualism was not understood to be completely possible in the 1940's.

I don't believe that. There were bilingual regions in the world way before that.

As a former ESL teacher, I can tell you that well into the 1980s and 1990s, it was common for schools to discourage ESL students from speaking their native language at home, and for immigrant parents to basically not teach their kids to speak it, because it was widely believed that this would inhibit becoming fluent in English.

Now we know that this is the opposite of true, but bilingual education really wasn't well understood, even in places where you could see kids growing up bilingual.

I think I heard this theory in the past, but I heard it exclusively from Americans. That fact makes the "we totally weren't trying to stamp out your culture, guys" theory look a bit suspicious, rather than argue in it's favor.

It was also the norm across a lot of Europe for a long time. My hometown in Europe switched from a local dialect of a minority language to the national language in about one generation, for this reason.

That doesn't mean Cajuns in the 40s knew that. I had an immigrant teacher from Latin America in HS who told me how his parents spoke only English at home to Americanize the children better, so that by the time he was an adult he couldn't speak Spanish.

If you are a peasant under Jim Crow in the rural southern US, you are unlikely to know about them. And to be clear, it was the mainstream narrative in the USA that simultaneous bilingualism was undesirable and barely possible.

And to be clear, it was the mainstream narrative in the USA that simultaneous bilingualism was undesirable and barely possible.

Yes, it's almost as if someone decided to stamp out all competing cultures on the territory, make it look voluntary, but wasn't shy about using the paddle if someone was being stubborn.

Well yeah, obviously there was top down assimilative pressure and obviously there were kids beaten for speaking French. But these weren’t Native American residential schools here- the English only assimilationism failed when it was all stick. Yes, a lot of the carrot was on the basis of false narratives being fed by educated people to subsistence farmers. But it’s important to note that this wasn’t a pack of lies being fed to the backwards peasants to get them to cooperate in their own cultural dissolution or whatever narrative some academics are pushing- aside from French, Cajun culture is doing fine, and the Cajuns themselves wanted their kids to speak English with a normal American accent rather than as a second language while the educated people they turned to for help happened to hold false beliefs about how to do that, but those false beliefs were the expert consensus of their day and applied literally everywhere.

Experts hold false beliefs for non-malicious reasons all the time, eg face masks stop Covid.

but those false beliefs were the expert consensus of their day and applied literally everywhere.

I honestly doubt that. The idea that bilingualism is somehow bad could be seen in the wild until pretty recently, but in my experience was limited to the Anglos, and might even have been mostly an American thing. Maintaining it requires a huge amount of anti-curiosity, and blindness to other parts of the world.

Experts hold false beliefs for non-malicious reasons all the time, eg face masks stop Covid.

Sure, once an idea gets rolled out from the top, it tends to get repeated in good faith by the lower strata of society. It seems that this is how Anglos have always done it.

but in my experience was limited to the Anglos, and might even have been mostly an American thing

There were not ‘experts’ involved who were not Anglo-American. And as you point out, once those experts float their idea it’s repeated in good faith by lower strata in society- which both the Cajuns and the lower rungs of the Catholic Church that were their source for expert opinions most assuredly were.

Yes, in retrospect raising their children bilingual was probably the right move, but this was not at the time obvious to anyone with the power to stop what actually happened.

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