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Racism and Education, Languages and Culture

Welcome to The 5-Week Linguist Show. If you want to learn a language or you teach a language, you’ve come to the right place. Join Janina each week for tips, resources, and advice for making engaging language learning happen anytime, anywhere.

Welcome to The 5-Week Linguist Show. Today, I’m going to talk about something pretty serious that’s going on in the world and I just want to share a really personal story and my very humble opinion about what can be done.

So today, I want to talk about racism, education, language, and culture and I know that the language teaching and learning community, we’re so open. We live and breathe acceptance and other perspectives and understanding other people’s points of view. It’s just part of who we are and it’s part of what we try to instill in others through languages and I wanted to share a really personal story and it’s uncomfortable for me and I think you’ll understand why when I finish or get towards the end and perhaps you could do a little bit more research. If you choose, I’ll provide you with some links about what’s going on.

So one thing that really surprises people when they get to know me is my background. So my parents come from two extremely different backgrounds. They met at college. They went to Boston university as undergraduates and my name, my first and my last, are Lithuanian and I’ve got blue eyes and I’m very fair. So it always comes as a surprise to people when I share who my grandfather was and it’s my biological grandfather. It was my real grandfather. There’s no adoption going on.

My grandfather was someone named Benner Turner and Benner Turner was born in Georgia as the grandson of slaves and when his father was born, soon thereafter his parents, my great-grandfather’s parents were born into slavery and they had to actually give away all of their children. They just couldn’t … There was no way that they could even feed anyone besides themselves and they got people to take in their kids, et cetera, and my great-grandfather was the oldest and he was old enough to work and the job that he got as a teenager was being a porter on the railroad and it was going back and forth between Atlanta and Washington D.C.

Apparently, he was very popular and he was very bright and many wealthy people who traveled between these two regions gave him books and so he studied and these wealthy people that heard, getting to know him in their travels and finding that he would read every book that they would give him, decided to sponsor him to go to Howard University and he became a doctor and moved back to Georgia and there, he treated the African-American community.

But he made a ton of money and became extremely wealthy because apparently he was the best doctor around but the white people didn’t want to be seen coming to him and they would pay him all kinds of money to keep things like … things that they didn’t want people to know out of the public eye and he took that money and he opened pharmacies and became, as I said, very wealthy particularly for someone who was born to people born into slavery.

He had my grandfather, my mother’s father, and it was his dream to take this money and to do something about racism and when my grandfather was 12 years old,...