I recently read a piece of legislative hubris from Arizona that purports to ban ethnic studies in public schools. More disturbing than outlawing instruction in the histories, philosophies, literatures, and accomplishments of nonwhite peoples is the alarming effect the Arizona legislation has had on the news media—which has the social power to define reality for others and compel them to believe it.
The legislation I am referring to is HB 2281. Now law, it prohibits four kinds of courses: those that promote the overthrow of the United States government, those that promote resentment toward a race or class of people, those designated primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group, and those that advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals. Nowhere does the legislation mention ethnic studies.
But ethnic studies is, indeed, anchored in the histories, traditions, literatures, and philosophies of American people of color and their diaspora. The field also supports social justice and equality for all. Thus the law indicates a fundamental misunderstanding of the history, development, and role of ethnic studies. It is not, and has never been, about pitting “us against them.”
Moreover, nowhere does the Arizona legislation exclude what is too often not considered ethnic studies: white studies, the courses and classes anchored in the histories, traditions, literatures, and philosophies of white America and its diaspora. While recent scholarly work examining the social construction of whiteness has explored notions of how it has been conceived, imposed, and expressed in different eras, traditional school courses have often implicitly or explicitly promoted the supremacy of white people over others and disparaged people of color. Those courses rarely teach social justice or equality as an explicit part of the curriculum.
Yet proponents of the law, some of whom admittedly have never taken an ethnic-studies course or ever learned about the field, told the news media that its description accurately reflects the nature of ethnic studies. The news media, in turn, accepted the inference, without question, that the characterization was correct. The intent to disparage ethnic studies was probably more unconscious than malicious, and therein lies the real power of institutional racism.
In this case, the Arizona law, like the revision of Texas’s history textbooks, which many respected historians believe distorts history—to, for example, extol the Confederacy and diminish the civil-rights movement— is an act of racism at its most subversive. It focuses on groups of people by race or ethnicity and damages them by disallowing accurate teaching of their cultural and intellectual heritages, while allowing instruction that, paid for with public money, values white people and provides derogatory content about people of color. The Arizona law does that without ever naming its deed. It counts on inference to make clear its true meaning.
Understanding how that unconscious implication is evoked by political rhetoric is something we should all consider as other states, as seems possible, follow with their own attempts to cut back ethnic studies—at both the school and college level, where some programs have already been undermined by budget cuts. Perhaps we should also ask one question not anticipated by the news media, political pundits, or Arizona legislators: Is white studies in violation of HB 2281? Examining that possibility might quickly sober the debate.
Still, ethnic studies has succeeded in establishing itself and inspiring new voices in academe that have influenced the telling of a fuller American story. Women’s studies, LGBTQ studies that focus on those people who do not identify normatively as heterosexuals, and disability studies similarly affirm and empower Americans who would otherwise remain disenfranchised. So-called people’s histories or narratives, like those written by the historian Howard Zinn and the author Studs Terkel, provide the stories of America’s working and underclass people, while cultural studies attempts to unpack whiteness, sometimes restoring the voices of European-Americans who are not descendants of Anglo-Saxons.
Ethnic studies has played a role in those scholarly changes despite relentless indoctrination that misrepresents its core values. Indeed, directly as a result of the challenge posed by ethnic studies, even the most elite and resistant Anglo-Saxon academic canon has gradually changed to include some references to other American voices. The shift in academe and in popular culture, imperfect and incomplete, has not eradicated racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and other forms of oppression—but it has minimized much of the most blatant and, yes, deadly forms as practiced a half-century ago, when the field was born.
Individuals, nations, even academic disciplines have not always lived up to their highest values, but ethnic studies and the multiethnic movement that gave it birth have challenged academe and society to do so. For those of us old enough to see the movement pass from the back of the bus up to and through the front door of the White House, we understand the fear that was generated when we demanded to enter America’s great universities—we, the people of color, the women, the poor, the working-class white people. We again recognize the fear generated today by those who would continue to miseducate us.
Yet we have also seen America’s ability to push through dark periods, both despite the challenge and because of it, to a period of greater enlightenment and a more perfect approximation of our most treasured values. Ethnic studies will remain a leader in that transformation. It gladly embraces the responsibility to foster hope in the face of adversity.
