The first week back to school in the New Year. Kids return from their holiday vacations excited to see their friends, but far less enthusiastic about the reading and writing that awaits them in the classroom. This January, students in Arizona will likely be even less enthusiastic with the curriculum that awaits them. That’s because K-12 education is now legally mandated to be whitewashed thanks to a new, anti-cultural-diversity law.
The law, HB 2281, was passed around the same time as SB 1070 (that demands that police stop anyone who “appears” to be an illegal immigrant). HB2281 prohibits courses that
promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”
It is the last requirement that ends any classes that teach U.S. history, literature, and civics from non-dominant (that is, white) perspectives. Mexican-American history, Chicano literature, and other courses designed to explore the complexity of our nation, which also, not coincidentally, help make nonwhite students feel represented by the curriculum, are now illegal. According to the National Association for Multicultural Education (NAME), the sort of multicultural curricula adopted by Arizona schools substantially improved the academic success and graduation rates for Chicano/a students.
The end to multicultural perspectives is a real loss for the nonwhite students in Arizona, but it is also a huge loss for dominant culture students who will also be schooled in ignorance and a sadly flattened understanding of our world. As part of this flattened understanding, students in Arizona will be subjected to the lie that history and culture can be taught without a point of view, that dominant points of view should remain unmarked, and that it is best just to memorize facts rather than analyze epistemologies. As NAME points out,
Standard U.S. history texts construct the story of the United States based on the experiences of Europeans and white Americans. Although North America was populated long before the British set foot on the continent, and although Spanish settlements preceded British settlements, typically the story in U.S. history texts starts in Europe, moving from British settlements on the East Coast, westward. To be sure, texts include American Indians, Mexican Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans, but only as they relate to the larger story dominated by white people. In fact ... one can view the texts as teaching white ethnic studies. ... If we take this law seriously, white-dominant curricula should be outlawed as well.
If only the people in charge of Arizona schools, like outgoing school chief Tom Horne, could understand that all knowledge is situated. Alas, Mr. Horne is using his last day in office to declare Tuscon School District’s Mexican-American studies program illegal and threaten the school district with the loss of 10 percent of its state revenue (about $15-million). Mr. Horne insists he is on the side of education and racial justice.
“My ultimate goal is that in taxpayer-supported public schools, students will be taught to treat each other as individuals and not on the basis of the race they were born into,” said Horne, who has long said that the program promotes ethnic chauvinism. “What I’m dealing with here is among my most passionate and deeply held beliefs going back to the civil-rights demonstrations of my youth.”
Despite Horne’s claim to being a civil-rights advocate, he is generally seen as a right-wing ideologue behind much of the anti-immigrant sentiment and legislation in Arizona, legislation increasingly described as Juan Crow laws. Indeed, Horne claims students in Mexican American studies classes are “rude” even as he admits he himself has never been in any of the classrooms. What Horne really means is that he, as a white and conservative man, does not want to situate his own body in a variety of race and gender privileges that mark him as “smart” even as they mark students in ethnic-studies courses as “rude.”
And that isn’t just about ignorance. It’s about power. Or as Eve Sedgwick described such willful ignorance, it is the privilege of unknowing, a privilege that allows Horne and other whitewashing politicians to destroy a complex curriculum for a complex world.
(Image of Tom Horne from Tom Horne for Attorney General website)
