Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and her state legislature may have one-upped Texas governor and Texas secessionist Rick Perry's general puerility by dealing the unfortunate residents of the (not so) Grand Canyon State two consecutive and particularly egregious blows. As if Arizona's new anti-immigration law, which the governor tells us will not amount to racial profiling, weren't enough on its own to reflect the racial and ethnic fears and intolerances of a vociferous bloc of Arizona residents, now comes a new bill prohibiting the teaching of ethnic studies courses in public high schools.
Brewer and head of State schools Tom Home argue that ethnic studies courses cause racial hatred and resentment, and teach non-white, predominately Mexican-American students to hate white people. On this basis they will abolish these courses.
PMB doesn't intend for this post to be a thorough discussion of the merits and problems of ethnic studies curricula, as such a discussion would be both longer and more complicated than he has time for at the moment. PMB will say, however, that though ethnic studies courses, taught in certain ways and with certain objectives, can certainly result in race-based resentment, there are two relevant counterpoints:
1) As with teaching virtually any body of knowledge, there are counterproductive ways to proceed and there are productive and laudable ways to proceed. Simply because course material is about a particular ethnic group, its history, literatures, languages, etc., doesn't mean that teaching such material amounts to racial or ethnic favoritism, or an unproductive mode of 'solidarity-promotion,' as the proponents of this law fear. This material can be and in fact is taught responsibly and productively, and has been for a long time. Simply arguing, as the governor and her henchman do, that anything ethnic-studies related is by definition inflammatory because it concerns ethnicity-based knowledge is ludicrous. Not to state the obvious (but sometimes one has to when dealing with ignorant politicians), but the VAST MAJORITY of history, literature, etc., taught in US schools is already refracted through a white, Anglo-European ethnic lens. This makes sense, of course, given the history of the country. But we wouldn't dare argue that the teaching of Shakespeare or Milton or Rousseau over Borges or Garcia Marquez risks rousing a dangerous and disruptive white solidarity. When educating young Mexican-Americans in Arizona, however, certainly allowing them to identify ethnically with some Mexican or Mexican-American writers or histories alongside the rest of the standard Eurocentric curriculum isn't exactly a militant exercise aimed at causing hatred of white people.
2) We must be careful not to confuse transmission of knowledge with advocating ethnic or racial separatism. Tom Home compares the ethnic studies courses to the Old South; but this is like saying that one who teaches or learns about slavery is also advocating for it. Of course that's ridiculous. Categorizing knowledge along ethnic or cultural or linguistic lines, as we often do (you wouldn't accuse your Spanish teacher of being anti-English-language or anti-American for teaching you Spanish, would you?) reflects a tendency to heuristically separate histories and knowledge fields in a certain way, and not a tendency to ratify the separation of actual people in such a way.
PMB is skeptical, further, that these courses are really having the extreme effects on race relations that proponents of the new bill suggest (this is in part due to a lack of trust in people who invoke slavery and segregation in comparisons with teaching Mexican-American kids about their ethnic heritage, no less in school districts that are about half Mexican-American, demographically).
But the issue to trump all other issues here, I think, has less to do with concerns about ethnic studies and more to do with the relationship between the state (and the state legislature) and the education of children, even in public schools.
Even in public schools, ignorant politicians have no business censoring school curricula until they've thoroughly understood the curriculum and the materials they aim to censor. And even then, one would have to cross a lot of lines to shut down courses that teach kids about their own cultural heritage. PMB is not convinced, in this case, that any of these people know anything about ethnic studies and/or Mexican-American literatures, histories, or cultures. This is transparently a political intervention into the sphere of education, a sphere not at all immune from both internal and external politics, but vastly more knowledgeable and competent when it comes to sorting out its own political, pedagogical, and curricular conundrums. This situation, in which a state head of schools has apparently forgotten, if he ever knew, the value of a broad education, is like a distorted mirror image of the situation in higher education, in which many of those running the administrative show are demonstrating utter cluelessness about what actually goes on in the classroom, how, and why.
