New Haven Bookstore Outlaws Spanish, Humiliates Itself

New Haven, Connecticut -- usually a community very welcoming of immigrants and diversity in general -- is the unexpected home to a new incident of flagrant discrimination. The Atticus Bookstore and Cafe, situated on the outskirts of Yale University, recently barred its workers from speaking anything but English on the selling floor and behind the check-out counter, sparking outrage throughout the community and the city at large.

After encountering too many employees sharing a common culture and language, the bookstore's management decided to curtail the amount of diversity and camaraderie in favor of pleasing a customer pool it assumed to be only welcoming of an English-speaking workforce. I guess this would be the same customer pool that is outraged upon hearing Mandarin spoken by the employees of a Chinese restaurant, or one that is enraged by a baseball star who, within the uniquely American confines of our national pastime, devolves into a de-facto translator for a teammate in the midst of a nationally televised interview. If baseball has to be translated, surely the end is near.

Clearly, the management at Atticus Bookstore has no patience for un-American activities. The official notice it gave to its workers, in its clear yet dispassionate tone, lays out the new rule of law for those pesky foreign workers:

"Here we speak English: effective immediately the official and only language spoken on the floor and behind the counter is English. Spanish is allowed in the prep area, the dishwasher area and the lower level. Let’s make our customers feel welcome and comfortable"

Not surprisingly, many of the employees and community members were outraged by the provision, and immediately notified their family members, friends, and the local media. Now, facing increasing scrutiny and criticism, the Atticus Bookstore management has sheepishly put its recent policy "under review," presumably as a precursor to lifting the policy altogether.

Regardless of the management's decision, the matter raises several questions. Why would a business, generally respected within its community, commit this affront upon the rights of immigrants? What is it about witnessing the idiosyncrasies of another culture that provokes such an unwarranted reaction? Sure, a customer who visits a store where employees conversing in a language inscrutable to them might be put off by the encounter -- but wouldn't that same customer, with an equal lack of knowledge of professional sports, be put off and alienated by a pair of employees discussing the NFL playoffs? Should the same business target sports discussions with the same tenacity as those conducted in Spanish or any other language?

To anyone who has been abroad for a good amount of time, it becomes clear why the workers at Atticus Bookstore conversed in Spanish in such frequency as to rile up the passions of upper management. To be away from home is a terrible and lonely thing. Everything is alien, everything strange and new and confusing. To look for someone who relates to your confusion, who you can understand and bond with and immediately converse with is a universal human reaction. (Why else would this be necessary?) So why is it that we too often attack this reaction with such unveiled contempt?

Photo by: Aaron Gustafson