Where What’s Personal Meets What’s Public — Blaxicans and Hinjews

Blaxicans and Hinjews — A Language for the Lives We Lead

By Alden Bumstead
Special to Poynter Online

Richard Rodriguez is an angry man, and anger can be, as on this occasion, entertaining, inspiring, and thought-provoking. This was not a talk about the nuts and bolts of the craft of journalism or narrative writing. Rodriguez went after the large questions, and more than some of the other speakers I saw, delivered the goods on the title of the session.

Rodriguez focused his anger on the nature of public discourse in America. All of his anecdotes, many of which were pretty funny, circled around to illustrate the vacuous nature of the language used by politicians and in the news media to describe American life today.

Language describing ethnicity and “minorities” (a word he dislikes) does not fit the lived experience of those it purports to describe. Politicians, he says, are “talking about America up here [gesturing vaguely upwards], but down here at the level of biology, I exist and I don’t fit this language. It doesn’t fit me.”

He pointed out that public discourse confuses ethnicity, race, and culture (for example, “black” and “Hispanic” are not equivalent categories), and generally ignores class entirely. Our need for categories and labels leads us to discuss “black” people, “Hispanics,” and “white” people, as though these were not problematic terms.

If we listened to the people for whom these labels were used, down “at the level of biology” and of lived experience, we would find “Blaxicans” and “Negropinos.” We would find the children of a Hindu man and his Jewish wife who call themselves “Hinjews.” In essence, what’s personal does not meet what’s public at all in what he calls the “empty conversation” of American politics and public life.

Journalists, according to Rodriguez, are part of the problem. He criticized “the failure of journalism to challenge the public language,” and called on journalists “to be adversarial not politically … but to be adversarial linguistically — to say to the politician, to say to the public official, what does that word mean? … What are you saying?”

The talk was complex enough to leave me with some questions. Rodriguez could have been more explicit about how and why a term like “Hispanic” is such an enraging label for him. It is, after all, a controversial position, and other people who get called “Hispanic” disagree with him (he referred to this with some bitterness). And how do we know when a label is acceptable?

“Blaxican” is better than “Hispanic” presumably because it is more specific and because it was invented by the people it describes (whereas “Hispanic” was a term invented by Richard Nixon, Rodriguez tells us); but even “Blaxican” can’t cover the complexity of many ethnic identities today. Aren’t all ethnic or racial labels finally reductive in the case of any individual?

The usefulness of labels is that they describe patterns of discrimination that continue to exist. If we chuck out the labels, how do we then describe or analyze the discrimination? Telling more and more varied stories, as he advocates, is an essential part of the answer, but still only part, it seems to me.

Moreover, I wanted a better response to the truly excellent question asked by one of the audience members about working against the “insularity of citizenship” in the readers of her newspaper — the reader surveys that indicate an overriding interest in “my home, my family, my dog.” To me, this is perhaps the most serious problem for American public life and American democracy today.

Though Rodriguez is sure that people are “hungry for ideas,” newspapers and magazines have reader surveys suggesting that the ideas they want are about how to repaint the bathroom. I would have liked to hear more of Rodriguez’s ideas on that seeming contradiction.

On the whole, however, I think we should all take to heart Rodriguez’s challenge to examine the language used to describe America, to look for what it leaves out, and to find new language to fill those gaps.

Alden Bumstead is a freelance writer in Providence, Rhode Island.