House of Eratosthenes

I think I finally figured out what bothered me about this. It’s not that it is a negative thinly disguised as a positive — although it is exactly that. When you say a thing is “all-(blank),” you are saying something that is oppositional to (blank) has been declared an undesirable agent, and providing reassurances that the thing has been cleansed of that corrupting agent. In this case, the corrupting agent is people…

But no, what really bothers me is the substance. It’s been hard for me to define what’s distressing about it, because the substance is left undefined. That this is an asset to Sacramento, is just sort of…implied. On how the asset actually is an asset, the article is silent. We’re talking about “KBTV, Sacramento’s all-ethnic TV station.” What — exactly — is the point to this channel? Can the mission statement be presented in plain terms, using active-voice, without straying into something nasty?

Ben Reyes, a Sacramento graphic designer, spent a recent Saturday night curled up in front of “Star In My Heart,” a Korean soap opera dubbed in Spanish.

“Star In My Heart” can be seen weekends on KBTV, Sacramento’s all-ethnic TV station.

“It’s a good family drama, the way American soaps used to be,” said Reyes, 45, who’s of Mexican, Greek, Seminole, Jamaican and Arabic descent.

Like Reyes, KBTV Global Television reflects the Central Valley’s many flavors with programs in Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Spanish, Hindi-Punjabi and Hmong.

“We are the face of California – it does not have a color,” said advertising director Edgar Calderon, a Nicaraguan immigrant. “We are a bridge between different communities – we are the community.”

Unlike other ethnic stations available to Sacramento viewers, KBTV mixes locally produced shows with nationally and internationally syndicated programming. Some local shows are produced by station staff; others are by local producers who buy airtime and sell their own advertising.

Calderon, who says he watches “Star In My Heart” for “the good-looking señoritas,” said KBTV’s viewers range from teens who tune in for music to “older folks who are great fans of news and cultural events.”

The station was born in 2005 when former newspaper executive Frank Washington and a group of investors bought the station for $1.5 million.

“I was inspired to do this when I found out there was this huge Russian-speaking community here I didn’t know about,” Washington said. “This is a way to open conversation and provide some understanding of who these people are and what they’re about.”

I just don’t understand how a huge Russian-speaking community is assisted by a resource dealing in Mandarin, Cantonese, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Spanish, Hindi-Punjabi and Hmong — nor will the article explain it to me. Seems to me some kind of line has been crossed; there’s an agenda dealing more with exclusion than inclusion.

The headline to this story, as it appears in the Sacramento Bee front page, is “ALL-ETHNIC TV HAS GLOBAL VOICE.” Sorry…speaking as a six-foot straight white guy with ten fingers and ten toes — maybe my opinion isn’t wanted here — my initial impression is that a global voice would be truly inclusive. Something that facilitates easy communication amongst a variety of cultures, both now and in the future. If an immigrant family comes here, some of their members need some individual counseling in order to learn English faster and they receive this assistance…THAT would be in keeping with a “global voice,” to me.

The glimmerings I get from this story are that “ethnic” is some kind of polished diplomatic slang for “Not English-Speaking and White.” And it’s tough for me to see how you can bring such a product to market and find consumers who are demanding it, without involving negativity and prejudice somehow. If I’m here in Sacramento and I’m Russian and I speak Russian, and I’m too lazy to learn the native language of the country…I want Russian. Right? Same goes for Mandarin, and everything else on the list. Some fruit-salad of “all ethnic” isn’t going to do me a whole lot of good.

Not unless my problem has more to do with personal likes & dislikes, than with language barriers. As in, those darn English-speaking American white people, I just want to get away from them when I watch TV in my own home.

I dunno. Maybe I’m reading too much into it. Maybe “all ethnic” stuff is the pathway to racial harmony after all.

But if that’s the case, then can someone please explain to me the thread (of nine comments, as of this writing) that appears under the story on Sac Bee’s website? I’ll save you some time: It’s a whole lot of finger pointing about who is & isn’t being a racist. You know, I didn’t make it that way. I didn’t even participate. But I honestly don’t know how a different result can come from a story like this. It contains zip, zero, zilch, nada definition for the word “ethnic” and it’s up to the reader to presume the E-word is a reference to all cultures present in the Sacramento area SAVE ONE.

I don’t know for sure that that is the intended meaning. But one thing I do know for sure, is that the story promotes the use of lots of different languages in a community as a good thing.

You know, the last time I recall the use of Sacramento’s zillion languages being promoted as a good thing, was the occasion of that goofy Time Magazine article that conferred a “most diverse” award on us.

70 Languages, One System
Three weeks ago, Yun Qian (Cindy) Zhong, a sixth-grader assigned to Randy Helms’ homeroom, walked into William Land Elementary School for the first time. She had all the gifts of a model student—intelligence, friendliness and an eagerness to learn. There was just one problem: Zhong, an immigrant from Canton, China, didn’t speak a word of English.

Helms didn’t panic. His students and their parents hail from as far away as Vietnam, Mexico, Germany, Portugal, Panama and, fortunately, China. By the end of Zhong’s second week, Helms, with help from the Cantonese-speaking students in his class, had taught Zhong to count past 10 as well as to answer yes and no to questions translated for her.

A William Land education doesn’t come easy. The school is located in a poor community downtown (90% of Land’s kids qualify for free lunch), the classes are big (Helms alone teaches 32 students) and language barriers are routine (many kids’ parents speak no English). Kids are tested for English proficiency within 30 days of enrolling; most score from 1 to 5 out of a maximum of 10. Across Sacramento, educators face similar challenges. How does a school district of 53,400 students communicate with a parent group that speaks more than 70 languages? And perhaps even more pressing, how much do cultural differences contribute to the fact that Latino and African-American children do not perform as well on standardized tests as white and Asian kids in the city’s integrated schools?

The whole article read like that. When the time came to fixate on the advantages and challenges of such a diverse community, the facts rained in heavy on the challenges and very light, to be charitable about it, on any advantages. With the investment of a great amount of effort, a girl might be brought up-to-speed on a very utilitarian use of English, and it was already time to hand out the applause and cigars. With much hard work still ahead.

And you know, I’m sure the applause is deserved. But this is not the story of a strength, it’s quite the opposite. It’s a handicap. It’s an overburdened public resource with too many languages in it. To celebrate this, is just bizarre. It’s like a recovering alcoholic throwing a house party to celebrate, not the fact that he’s been clean for a year, but that he became an alcoholic in the first place. Or a cancer patient throwing a bash not to celebrate that she’s still among the living, but the anniversary of discovering her first tumor.

When Armstrong & Getty pursued exactly that train of thought, our illustrious mayor sought to engage a letter-writing campaign to invite the FCC to clamp down on them. One of the things I remember them saying, was something I thought was pretty reasonable — you are “nuts” if you think it is a good thing, or any kind of “progress,” to have seventy languages in one school. Apparently, that was enough for Heather Fargo to try to get ’em off the air. Huh, that’s funny. This was about a year after the September 11 attacks. Ever since that time, I keep hearing how “dissent is patriotism” and that the War on Terror is responsible for the death of freedom of speech, and a whole mess of other constitutional liberties that are supposed to be in peril.

It doesn’t look that way from where I sit. I’m seeing the biggest shot of Orwellian nonsense coming in from the P.C. side of things, and in late 2007 I perceive it to be rounding a corner. Exclusion is inclusion, fragmentation is cohesion, umptyfratz-many languages is wonderful intra-community communication, and “ethnic” is double-plus good.

But most of all, I worry about this message that hatred is love. Half the stuff I read in the paper, it seems at times, if you were to simply take all the skin colors mentioned and reverse them it would be noxious bigotry of the kind no reasonable mind could possibly deny. I’m still trying to keep an open mind. But it looks like the folks who make the decisions about what kind of messages are to be put out about this stuff, and how much of a boost the messages get as they travel far & wide — they don’t seem to want the “common people” to share thoughts and ideas easily. They seem to want to be leaders of masses that are fractured, living in distantly different communities, unable to reach across the boundaries, prone to confusion and language barriers as thick as can possibly be managed. It’s like our municipal, county and state leaders have something to hide, and they know a “diverse” electorate that speaks a hundred different languages, will have a tough time catching on to whatever shell game is being played.

I know, I shouldn’t think stuff like that. But I just can’t shake the thought out of my head. If I had a magic wand, and I waved it, and tomorrow morning everybody would wake up wearing exactly the same skin color they already have…but suddenly speaking ALL THE SAME LANGUAGE — would this cause a panic? Would someone possessing great amounts of power have a lot to lose from such a thing happening? I dunno. I’ve had the feeling that that is the case, before; I have it still, after reading this “story”; after living in this city for a decade and a half, it seems I should have been able to shake it by now — were there nothing to it. But in the meantime, I read about this local push to drop academic standards so that the kids in these schools can graduate, with anemic grasps on things like…language and reading comprehension.

I’m afraid we’ve all been feasting on something very nasty and toxic for a very long time, in large doses. And we’re just getting sicker and sicker on this steady diet of whatever it is. I know it doesn’t have a lot to do with “color-blindness”; that’s a pretty easy thing to define, and it is certainly not what I see in front of me here.

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All-Ethnic TVMonday, December 17th, 2007

All-Ethnic TV
Monday, December 17th, 2007