In addition to it's "Show Me Your Papers" law, where anyone in Arizona who is brown and/or brownish can be stopped and asked to identify him/herself to prove they are in the state legally, and in addition to Arizona's new ban on ethnic studies, we now have the trifecta of bigotry:
No teachers with accents allowed in the classroom!
Do we see a pattern here, and is it a pattern that targets certain ethnic groups?
Jonathan Zimmerman of the Atlanta-Journal Constitution asks the reasonable question: "But why should the state police accents? ...most immigrant teachers today have full command of the English language. They just pronounce it differently."
Nice job, Arizona. In your state, if Albert Einstein were alive, you would bar him from teaching science; Luciano Pavarotti, were he still living, could not give a lecture on Italian opera; Arnold Schwartzeneggeer cannot teach a civics class; and Henry Kissenger would not be able to expound on international relations [well maybe that's not so bad].
Zimmerman continues:
"After World War II, similarly, black teacher applicants were often turned down because of their accents. As historian Christina Collins has found, examiners rarely made explicit reference to race in their decisions. Instead, they downgraded African-Americans for using so-called “regional” speech. In one notorious case, two rejected black applicants were told that they “speak with a Southern accent” — although neither had ever been to the South!
To be fair, there were — and are — distinctive African-American language patterns. But if a state today tried to keep out teachers with “black” accents — or ordered schools to keep those teachers away from students who shared the same speech habits — we’d call the effort what it is: bigoted."
I propose that Arizona complete its determination to rid itself of everything ethnic and of color. That would mean changing its name, since the root of the name Arizona is from the Spanish interpretation of "arizuma," an Aztec Indian word that means "silver-bearing." It's also based on the Pima Indian word arizonac, meaning "little spring place." Many state names trace their origin to native American Indian languages.
"Arizona" seems a bit too colorful a name for a state that appears to want to scrub itself clean of any tinge of ethnicity and brownishness.
May I suggest this as a name more representative of what Arizona wants to be:
NEW BALDONIA*
*"balde" is the old English word for "white."
