"So That You Would Not be Tongue-Tied": Mapping Language and Race in Poot-World War II U.S, through the Figure of the Bilingual Child

Abstract

This essay examines the figure of the bilingual child, prominently featured in the debates on bilingual education in the 1960s, to limn the shifting relations of language and race for the minority subject in post-World War Ⅱ U.S. An example of progressive educational reform, bilingual education aimed to transform the negative perception of bilingualism, as a linguistic handicap, to a positive model of hyphenation, I locate the figure of the culturally deprived child, popular in the mid-twentieth educational and social discourse, as a precedent to the figure of the bi lingual child to s how the underlying significance of race in the cultural construction of the bilingual child, In the first section 1 read Erik Erikson's discussion of minority children's identity format ion in Childhood and Society (1950), his most widely read text in child psychology, as a psychological explication on cultural deprivation, I draw attention to how Erikson's articulation of the minority child's identity crisis at once highlights the structural inequalities that plague minorities and shores up a sense of normative American identity, I read Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior (1976) in the second section as a text that resonates with, yet, is different from. Erikson's understanding of minority children in its representation or the bilingual child, The racial implications in the figure of the bilingual child, oblique at best in the debates on bilingual education, are made explicit when viewed through Erikson's delineation of minority children's identity crisis and Kingston's representation of the bilingual child.