After
reading Aria by Richard Rodriguez, I was reminded of a few different articles
and discussions we had in class. One particular article was read Privilege,
Power, and Differences by Allan G Johnson. In this article it talks about how
racism still exists, it’s just in different forms. In our current society men
rule the house hold and are typically the bread winners. In the article Aria, Richards’s mother, a
Spanish speaking women becomes the spokesmen of the family. Richard’s mother
was the individual who was went through to communicate with her husband. This isn’t
typical in our current society, and the fact that Richard and his family
eventually talked around their father because he had said so little over the
years. According to Johnson’s article, the typical man would take initiative
and be the voices of the family, not letting anyone talk around him, but to
him.
When attending
school Richard also experienced discrimination. One form of racism like women
and men in the work place is when a student is bilingual. Some teachers target
students like Richard in the classroom because they don’t speak English, making
the student feel very uncomfortable and little to no confidence in themselves. Due
to the fact that Richard would have been labeled as a child with a “learning disability”,
he was made to feel as though there was something wrong with him and he wasn’t like
the other children. Johnson has said that English is the dominant language, and
that if you are unable to participate in what dominants, then you are
discriminated upon.
This
article also relates the Lisa Delpit, Other People’s Children. Delpit talks about how power is in the
classroom, for Richard he is able to experience how English dominates in the
classroom. The importance of being an individual is completely stripped by
taking an individual’s language away from them and enforcing the language the
public society spoke. Deplit speaks of the idea of embracing the idea of different
student’s cultures and languages instead of making students feel like there is
something wrong with them because they speak a different language. Richard was
told from the beginning of school that English was the ‘public language’ and he
needed to know it. By the time Richard was older he had become completely Americanized
and had no longer recognized when individuals spoke English. He had completely lost
his Hispanic culture, and no longer felt comfort when hearing Spanish words
spoke. It is safe to say that, Delpit and
Rodriguez would believe that teachers should embrace students who are bilingual
and schools should teach other langue’s at a younger age because the students
will learn and understand better.
