How About Swahili?

Reaching for the votes of the city's 600,000 Puerto Ricans has become a major preoccupation of New York politicians. Puerto Ricans already cast enough votes to tip a close citywide election, and probably a lot more of them could vote if they were not disqualified by the state's literacy requirement. Last week Democratic Mayor Robert Wagner proposed a way to get around this inconvenient barrier to bigger Puerto Rican turnouts at the polls. If literacy tests could not be abolished entirely, he said, it was "obviously right" that Puerto Ricans should be allowed to take theirs in Spanish.

What was really obvious, however, was that Wagner was talking like a politician, not like a responsible public official. In the U.S., a literacy test for voters has no meaning whatever unless it is a test of literacy in English. The laws are written in English, the governmental councils deliberate in English, and the newspapers and magazines that have substantial journalistic resources for searching out truth are published in English. Understandably, Wagner's suggestion aroused protests. Huffed the New York Times: "If Spanish-speaking persons are permitted to qualify in that language, what logic would justify denying similar exceptions for those who speak French, or Swahili?"

A literacy test in Spanish, moreover, would be a disservice to New York's Puerto Ricans themselves. Their advancement to their potential economic, social and cultural levels as inhabitants of New York depends upon their becoming literate in English. A special literacy test, far from lifting the Puerto Ricans' language burden, would only help perpetuate it.

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