Oh But He DID
June 21, 2007 10:43 PM | 0

 

This afternoon, I was thinking about this one uncomfortable moment at summer camp.

The director of the camp had just given us a little talk -- we were about 100 campers at an artsy residential program at Wesleyan -- about how great multiculturalism is. She asked how many people were bilingual, and a couple people raised their hands. She asked them, one at a time, what those languages were, and at first they were pretty unique -- Japanese, Portugese, Malay. Then a couple people started raising their hands for French and Spanish, and it was obvious that they were just talking about the "can we buy a soda please" foreign languages that they'd picked up in high school classes. As soon as the crowd realized that they could raise their hands for having taken French I, everyone was suddenly boasting bilingualism. It was a little awkward -- the director couldn't say, "I think that's enough now" and stop calling on people, so we just had to sit and listen to every single snooty Connecticut suburban teen get called on and say "Spanish."

Then she called on one kid, a little mousy pale boy named Noah on whom I had a crush, and he said, "ebonics," and that was the end of that.

In response, one of the black students then yelled, "oh no you diin't!"