The Boston Globe reports that Boston City Council President and likely future mayoral candidate Michael F. Flaherty has arranged a weekly two-hour Spanish language instruction class for fellow council members and their staffs. The idea being elected officials should learn to speak the languages spoken by immigrants to the United States who cannot be bothered to learn how to speak English. It sounds like Spanish is just the start, in multi-lingual and "cultural competency" training for Boston councilmen and their staffs.

If the course is a success, Flaherty said, the City Council could consider putting money in next year's budget for more Spanish lessons -- or, possibly, a course in another language, he said, such as Chinese, Russian, or Vietnamese, languages spoken by thousands of other Bostonians.

.....''There is a big difference between speaking a language, which I think is a good first step, and cultural competency," said (former council candidate Gibran) Rivera, .....who works for The Public Policy Institute, a Boston organization that helps nonprofits to build political clout. ''It would be better if councilors who represent Latino communities had Latino people on staff who have the cultural competency to communicate with and understand the experiences of these communities."

Caprice Taylor Mendez, director of the Boston Parent Organizing Network, said the City Council should also offer translation services to make its hearings and weekly meetings accessible not only to Spanish speakers but also to other immigrant communities. The council, she said, could learn from the Boston public schools, which had Haitian Creole, Cape Verdean Creole, and Spanish interpreters available at its first school budget hearing this year.

So-called "cultural competence" is the latest diversity industry scam to undermine the notion of a common public weal united around a common national language, common standards of citizenship, and common standards of civic engagement - such as straightforward communication in the native language about the common good.

Every time I hear some diversity-geek preen, "We have 73 languages spoken by students and their parents in our school system," I just cringe. Citizenship means getting a handle on the lingua franca. The proper role of government does not include teaching public servants to conduct business in the languages of immigrants who consciously decline to assimilate. The people who should be taking classes are the immigrants who can't speak English.

Unaddressed in the Globe's fatuous puffery is this: Behind Flaherty's patronizing plan to have Boston's city councillors and their staffs learn Spanish is a dagger aimed at low-English-proficiency Hispanic Bostonians. In reality, those immigrants will have far greater effect pulling the levers of government if they learn to speak English; if they learn to talk to others - in English - about tax appeals, storm drains and bike lanes, peak-hour tolls and health inspectors, new bus routes, airport flight patterns, The Big Dig, government audits, ombudspersons and civil service exams. As opposed to depending on merciful mediation from Spanish-speaking staffers or pandering politicos speaking pidgin Spanish.

Without mastering the real language of government and due process here, all that non-English-speaking Hispanic Bostonians dealing with City Hall are going to get is s*** and shinola. The type of cheap symbolism proferred by Councillor Flaherty is antithetical to their best interests. I surely hope they're smarter and more ambitious than he thinks they are. Worse still, this same sort of poisonous condescension, a true bigotry of low expectations, has enveloped the dialog around low achievement by Hispanics in K-12 public education. Democratic-voting Hispanics, blacks: white liberals are NOT your friends. Their game is the politics of personal virtue, and your role, as they really see it, but would never dare admit out loud, is to help them feel better about themselves. As far as most of your Hispanic and black brethren holding public office, I wish I could say they had more noble motivations than these callow white opportunists. But I can't.

At least in the U.S., race hustlers of any color can succeed.

TECHNORATI TAGS: BOSTON CITY COUNCIL, SPANISH CLASSES, MICHAEL F. FLAHERTY, ASSIMILATION, CULTURAL COMPETENCE