When I was younger (well, any day in the past is when I was younger, but stay with me here), I worked in an environment where many of my co-workers did not have English as their first language. The most common language they spoke was Portuguese. Because I’m curious about things I don’t know, and because I really wanted to be able to talk with them and understand them better, I decided to add classes in Portuguese to my college courses. I took a year of Portuguese hoping to get familiar enough to be able to listen to them, and perhaps even to have a real conversation.
I remember at one point I had a dream where I was speaking in a language effortlessly, being with my friends and talking with them, and it all made sense—except I didn’t know what I was actually saying. In my dream I was speaking Portuguese, but in my dream I also (oddly) was not really speaking anything that was rational. It wasn’t gibberish. It was not anything that was connected to my brain. It was just sounds.
I woke up frustrated. I so wanted to be able to speak, and speak fluently. I tried so hard to memorize my nouns and verbs, memorize my clauses and conditions, memorize the endless exceptions to rules and guides because, as in any language, the rules of the language come after the fact of the language. (A language where the rules come before the fact is Esperanto, which I studied in grade school for fun. It’s regular and it is boring.) I got to where I could read Portuguese at a primary level and understand a patient adult talking slowly in simple phrases. And I remember at one point looking at a book written in Portuguese, and wanting so badly to just be able to read it.
But the wanting did not bring about comprehension. What brought about understanding was the hard, hard work I put into memorization, repetition, halting conversations, listening to primary resources speaking Portuguese, and giving myself the freedom to try and fail, over and over. Lucky for me I did not try to impress my friends with my Portuguese—after a year I was able to catch about ten percent of what they were saying. I didn’t speak much because I wasn’t quite thinking in Portuguese. I crawled up that ladder of comprehension and ability. Had I kept at it, perhaps I would have become fluent and would have more under my belt than just some skills in English with a smattering of German and a dictionary’s understanding of Latin.
I thought about this in my struggles to dive into racism, into understanding my world, into what it is I need to do—and to be honest, a lot of times I don’t know what it is that I need to do. I flail.
What this story about learning a language is also true here, I think, about learning how to dive into racism to understand it, to be able to better recognize and acknowledge it, and even what seems obvious—to learn what it is I need to do to fight against it, to be positively anti-racist.
I’ve worked hard for ten years, and the more I work the more I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface. The more I feel like I’m still at the declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs. The more I feel like I can fill in a word or two in a primer text. I want to learn this, so badly, so that I can have conversations. Not conversations about racism. That is kinda boring unless we’re talking strategies and analyzing occurrences. What I want is to have conversations where I’m so adept at this recognizing-and-resisting racism thing that I can have actual connected times with my friends, not making stupid mistakes and not stepping on toes, because I naturally just understand. I want to be fluent in anti-racism in the same way a person born in the Lusosphere would naturally speak and enjoy the Portuguese language.
So this is my ten-year anniversary, and I can look back and see how far I’ve come in my efforts. In some ways, I’ve learned a lot and done a lot. In many more ways, I’m still barely past the starting line.
I’m here to work at it, though, until I cross that finish line.
One day I’m gonna speak fluently, and one days I’m gonna have those free and open conversations.
Stay tuned. This it “to be continued.”
I learned conversational Portuguese on the job as a U.S. Air Force Weather Officer at Lajes Field, Terceira, Azores, Portugal, 1971-73. In previous comments I covered the extreme fascism, the murderous colonialism, grand inquisitors, slavery, and plunder carried back to that island from the Americas and Africa.
I can answer Jeopardy questions in Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian, because I heard it when we travelled in Europe. But not French the way Alex Trebec speaks it.
Here is link to a New Mexico Keres Pueblo dialect that goes forward with the language of love. My daughter produced the video for the William K Kellogg Foundation last November. Do not share it on Facebook or other social media.
[link deleted by the blog owner: I’ve removed this link because you state that you do not want this shared, but this blog and these comments are entirely public. This is obviously not a case of you revealing private information, but of what I think is a misunderstanding of how this blog works. I’ll restore this comment’s link if you ask me to, or you can, if you edit your comment and re-insert the link yourself, but I want to be sure you realize that everything you post here is public. This isn’t to scare anyone off—I just want to be sure that everyone understands this before they post or comment. And yes, you are a blog “author” so you can contribute blog posts as well as comments. You are trusted here to post your thoughts to everyone.]
For myself, I am trying to move away from an “I am racist” identity. Eliminate the anxiety and depression by practicing self-compassion and empathy. Serious health issues in family and neighborhoods are becoming chronic. The Keres love is one way to work on it with children and youth.
The idea of language fascinates me. It is my uneducated belief that a language is not entirely translateable, word-for-word, into another language unless there is some word-for-word literal connection. Even cognate languages, to my experience, have words and phrases that don’t entirely translate as-is, but that must be approximated in translation. Example: Weltschmerz in German is “world-pain,” but it’s more than just that. And while in English it is translated, it doesn’t capture the German-ness of the term.
I admire people who truly pick up another language, especially when it is to the point that they can think in that second or third language.
Thanks for sharing!
In addition to unique “expressions” of culture/regional need (such as the proverbial “Inuits having a jillion words to describe snow in its different states” example), it’s becoming increasingly clear that the language you know doesn’t just reflect your world, but defines it. The words available to you create your understanding of the world as much as they allow you to describe it.
A concept which becomes even more interesting in the context of the language of oppression and “ism” of all types. From the obvious and easy (“A man is aggressive [with a good index], while a woman is a bitch”) and work to the less-obvious (like the linguistic assumptions that make white = default and everything else a deviation)…
https://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/does-language-i-speak-influence-way-i-think
Boy howdy yes.
In my religion there is a concept of “whiter than snow” as being a good thing to have w/r/t one’s soul, compared to the “blackness of sin.” There is “deepest, darkest Africa” that is saved by the good white Dr. Linvingstone and Albert Schweitzer. Imagine having a religion taught to you that tells you that you are not “good” and your skin is an illustration of your “not-goodness.” You are shown a Germanic Jesus with glowing white skin and a white Mary/Madonna and child, and the hazy illumination of the Lord of Heaven is of a gruff old white guy. Sure, every society creates their saviors to look like them, but in this case it’s a double whammy of “you don’t look like this god” and “we look like this god.”
I took some college-level classes a while back in my continuing efforts to complete my degree program (scheduled date is the Greek Kalends), and in one of them we did an analysis of the genetic samples and skeletal remains from the time around 100 BCE to 100 CE. The inhabitants of the Galilee and Palestine were often hungry, suffered from nutritional deficits and nutrition-based diseases (such as rickets and skin-based diseases), and were shorter than expected due to lack of nutrition while growing up. It would mean that the carpenter from Nazareth was likely shorter than we are today, with bowed legs, and scrawny. Not like the healthy white European man in the images we use. We present a Jesus who is ahistorical but who represents a white male that we admire. For us, it works (kinda). For those in other cultures–it’s just wrong. (An interesting side note is that some of the earliest images of Jesus in media are mosaics and illuminated paintings from Ethiopia that show a black Jesus with black disciples. But I digress…)
I do not know that the ideas of white and black have always historically meant what they mean today w/r/t good and bad, but I suspect that part of the delight of the creators of whiteness (as discussed in the chapters I’m leaping ahead in) is to make the connection in the hierarchy.