The employer begins a sentence “If you can do the job and communicate
with me” and then pauses. That pause signals the speaker’s reaching for a
phrase that will qualify and restrict the first part of the sentence. “If you
can communicate with me and do it effectively” could be read thus: There
are two necessary qualifications if you want to work with me. You have to
be able to do the job, and you have to be able to make me understand you.
Thus the employer is anticipating communication breakdown and handing
the responsibility for successful communication to the worker alone. This
is, in itself, not a violation of any law; an employer may reasonably
require that an employee be able to communicate with him or her. What is
interesting about this exchange is the tone.
Racism is often expressed in this off-hand way, just as the
rationalizations offered are usually pretextual, and the logic spurious. As
in this case:
He told me quite frankly that he would never hire anyone with a
strong foreign accent, and especially not a Mexican accent. I asked
him why. His only response was, “That’s smart business. I have to
think of the customers. I wouldn’t buy anything from a guy with a
Mexican accent.”
(Spicher 1992: 3–4)Whether or not it is actually smart business to willfully ignore the needs
and wants of a population of many millions of consumers is doubtful.
Nevertheless, this anecdote is more useful than any number of statistics,
because it makes some things painfully clear: the degree of accent is
irrelevant when the focus is not on content, but form. The businessman
cannot conceive of a middle-class, Spanish-speaking population with
money to spend, and therefore the entire Mexican American population is
worthy of rejection.
Education in the Southwest
There is a long and well-documented history of discrimination toward
Spanish-speaking populations in the Southwest. Some of the most
destructive policies have been practiced in education,^14 where Mexican
children were routinely segregated into poorly staffed and overcrowded