PAUSD’s ethnic studies must celebrate the pursuit of knowledge and multicultural history to effectively confront injustice.
Written by Benjamin Vakil
There’s a new class that every student at Gunn — and all public and charter high school students in California — will soon need to take: ethnic studies. The course will serve as an introduction to the experiences of four minority groups in the U.S. (Black Americans, Latino/Chicano Americans, Asian Americans and Native Americans). Starting last year, the Israel-Hamas war has brought ethnic studies into the limelight as a powerful tool that can be used to examine and evaluate systems of oppression and resistance, with its ideological apparatus ebbing and flowing in the American consciousness. The discipline encourages the spirit that has been seen in the clamorous campus protests in response to the war. Kicking off immediately after Oct. 7, 2023, and gaining more media attention starting in April at Columbia University, solidarity encampments nationwide have demanded a ceasefire in Gaza and divestment from Israel-affiliated institutions.
The movement’s values, whether or not rightly so, are unquestionably informed by sentiments of social justice, decolonialism, liberation, and responses to injustice and oppression — values fervently investigated in ethnic studies. In such context, it is important to note that ethnic studies is neither a paragon of restorative justice nor a subversive Commie plot. Rather, the course necessitates the inclusion of diverse voices and a willingness to accept its inherently ideological nature. To be clear, ideologically infused courses are not inherently evil: We want our students to uphold our values, and we teach them to pass those along. Even so, upholding historically rigorous, fair and balanced teaching standards in our schools is vital as we evaluate our ideological paradigm on its merits — students and families deserve nothing less.
On strike for ethnic studies
Ethnic studies originated in California in the late 1960s when the state, like the rest of the nation, was awash in political turmoil with the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. At San Francisco State University (then San Francisco State College), the Third World Liberation Front was formed by a coalition of predominantly minority students to protest systemic underrepresentation at the school. They initiated a student strike consisting of fractious protests and social disruptions full of revolutionary zeal, demanding — among other things — that the college form a school of third-world studies. Administrators were eventually forced to relent, coming to the table with students and compromising to create a department of ethnic studies.
These idealistic young strikers certainly raised several profound points. They eloquently articulated the disconnect between scholarly activities and the world outside the campus, noting that “(a Cantonese woman from Chinatown) cannot explain to the scholar that she is dying of tuberculosis because she speaks a ‘street language’ while the scholar mutters classical poetry in Mandarin.” While there is nothing wrong with academics’ focusing on such subjects as classical Mandarin poetry, students who are passionate about social issues should be given an outlet to explore and intellectually engage with them. As much as it is a place for academic intrigue, college is also meant to prepare students for life outside campus walls. In San Francisco State’s disregard for its surrounding ethnically diverse community, the school was clearly falling short.
Yet, while some of the students’ ideas were commendable, their ideological justification was more than a little hard-edged. Organizers borrowed heavily from the rhetoric of anticolonial revolutionaries of the global south, idolizing despots like Mao Zedong or Che Guevara, casting an uncritical eye on their “anti-imperialism” and taking on a distinctly nationalistic (or rather “internationalistic”) tenor. The strikers proudly co-opted a version of guerrilla warfare on campus, seeing an intrinsic connection to their movement. Tactics — which included blowing up toilets and taking over classes — employed maximized disruption. As Jason Ferreira — the chair of the Race and Resistance Studies department in San Francisco State’s College of Ethnic Studies — said in a 2018 interview, “The logic was: If we can’t have the education we want, you’re not going to get the education that you’ve been getting.”
Architects of the strike envisioned ethnic studies as a radical conveyance against all systems deemed oppressive. They contended it should not reflect Western academia but rather wholly reject it. Activist Stokley Carmichael stated that black studies must not “use the same methodology the white man uses, but a different methodology to communicate with us. Different ideology means an ideology brooding in black nationalism.” College, strikers professed, should be a militant boot camp for activists to affect radical social change. Their single-minded pursuit was powerful, but their rhetorical one-sidedness goes against academic ideas of self-introspection and lively debate. And therein lies the problem: Ethnic studies is fundamentally a discipline entrenched in activist thinking.
A look at postmodernism
The strikers’ positions of radicalism and Western skepticism intimately tied their lobby to the emergent philosophical movement of postmodernism pioneered by the likes of French philosopher Michael Foucault. Much like our radical student activists, postmodernists are interested in deconstructing power and oppression, believing that truth is relative to one’s culture and not universal. According to them, the belief in facts as universal truths is merely a manifestation of power and authority. Postmodernists, then, are less concerned with facts or reason. As literary critic Christopher Butler writes in “Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction,” “Postmodernists tend not to be well informed of current practices in science and religion” and are “not particularly interested in empirical confirmation and verification in the sciences.” They instead see it as their duty to be the resistor, the disruptor, the brave dissident against social domination — “even to ‘consensus.’” This doctrine of relativity allows sleight-of-hand reflexivity of argument that can dismiss contravening ideas as no more than a rival narrative, inhibiting the free confrontation of thought. Preferring to define oneself in bellicose opposition to the perceived norm creates an echo chamber.
One important postmodernist assertion that is integrally entwined with ethnic studies dogma is that Western concepts of academic knowledge are white supremacist ideologies. Postmodernists and ethnic studies academics are highly skeptical of this framework of academic thought as it relies heavily on universalizing ideas developed during the Enlightenment — particularly reason, observation and debate.
Granted, it is not hard to see why one might be wary of some of these Western concepts, as there certainly is a long, abominable history of Western academics’ being complicit in justifying and abetting colonialism, oppression, and white supremacy. Whether or not all of his positions hold water, postmodernist literary critic and founder of postcolonial studies Edward Said accurately pointed out in his polemic “Orientalism” that Western portrayals of the East — the so-called “Orient” — were exceedingly one-dimensional and prejudicial with their notions of mysticism and savagery.
For all the focus that postmodernism has on the dispossessed, however, the corpus of Enlightenment-era rationalism can and should still be applicable to the cause of human progress. The Enlightenment was integral in rejecting the evils of colonialism by developing concepts of national sovereignty, human rights, self-determination and democratic government. For instance, the French Revolutionary era “Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen” expanded the idea of human rights by rejecting traditional narratives of absolute monarchy and religious supremacy. In other words, the Enlightenment works.
That said, the Enlightenment mindset should not be viewed as some domineering narrative. Instead, it must be viewed as an emulsion, a philosophy that ever challenges itself to find the best and most valuable insights through said discussion, reason and observation. While postmodernist ideas should be welcomed to the village pump, they must also be ruthlessly evaluated on the merits of their intellectual and humanistic nature, not by their epistemological relation to the Western canon. Then, we must incorporate into the framework of knowledge the ideas that work and reject those that do not. Anything else is not in the honest pursuit of knowledge.
Ethnic studies today
The current ethnic studies requirement was California lawmakers’ second attempt to implement such a standard. On Sept. 30, 2020, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed A.B. 331, which required California high schools to institute an ethnic studies graduation requirement based on a model curriculum developed and approved by the California Department of Education. In his veto message to the State Assembly, Newsom stressed that although he supported ethnic studies, he found the model curriculum “insufficient.” To write the model curriculum — which was ordered in a previous law, A.B. 2016 — the CDE had recruited leading ethnic studies scholars who brought the postmodernist activist views of the discipline to the table. Controversy erupted over the fairness of the doctrine in the curriculum, and while Newsom's criticism of the controversial framework was muted, others were more forceful. They pointed out the absurdity of a curriculum based on “hxrstory,” an etymologically suspect neologism of the word “history” (ethnic studies’ love of the letter ‘X’ may be second only to Elon Musk’s) and criticized the curriculum’s prominent one-sided rebukes of capitalism.
After many rewrites, the model curriculum that eventually became the basis for A.B. 101’s mandate settled on a formulation around four themes: Identity, History and Movement, Systems of Power, and Social Movements and Equity. This curriculum closely mirrors its higher education counterpart’s emphasis on essentialist thinking and its focus on the four races central to ethnic studies (the centrality of these four disciplines primarily stems from the groups participating in the 1968 strike). The current framework, however, does forgo a lot of the formative rhetoric based on resistance and an endorsement of often violent, militant protest figures and movements. It leaves out the convoluted language and criticisms of capitalism, as well as some of the anti-meritocratic sentiments common amongst practitioners of the subject. As such, the original authors — feeling that their version was truer to the discipline — created the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium to promote their “uncensored” curriculum.
According to the group’s founding story, a coalition of educators of color labored to create a model high-school ethnic studies program true to their discipline: Privileged voices rose in opposition to “rightwing political lobbyists” who “organized an ‘all lives matter’ movement, implicitly and explicitly attacking the Critical Race Theory that underlies Ethnic Studies as a discipline.” Moreover, the liberated group posits that “the CDE disbanded the (Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Advisory Committee) and shut them out of the process,” ending in a model curriculum that the consortium calls “a watered-down version of multicultural United States history.”
While an engaging narrative, the implication that the founders of liberated ethnic studies are anything less than part of the California establishment is arguable. After all, they were handed a mandate to write a curriculum by the state government under the auspices of the by-definition-official CDE. Even when they squandered that mandate, perhaps inevitably, by designing a radical curriculum, they still were able to set up a successful organization to promote liberated ethnic studies in collaboration with people in power at the California State University and California Community College systems, as well as representatives from a myriad of the state’s largest and most powerful school districts. While there is certainly a grassroots impetus to this power dynamic, it still tells a story of amassed institutional power.
Case Study: the Jewish experience
One significant shortfall of ethnic studies as a whole, and one that arguably inhibited the first draft for a high school curriculum from succeeding, is its treatment of the Jewish experience. Jewish people are not included because they are deemed to be the oppressors, the settler-colonialists and the Zionists. The lens of ethnic studies, however, is ill-equipped to deal with complexity, and the agenda-driven approach often applied to the issue can obfuscate a long and nuanced history while providing no realistic solutions or room for discussion. While focus on the Israeli government’s deficiencies is warranted, ethnic studies can take on a distinctly hardline tenor, perpetuating anything from microaggressions against Jewish Americans to direct attacks on their identity. As social justice researcher Daniel Ian Rubin puts in his essay “‘Liberated’ Ethnic Studies: Jews need not apply,” “(American Jews) are often ostracized for believing that Israel even has the right to exist.” It does not have to be this way, however: The formation of Jewish identity can be viewed as a struggle against oppression, whether by the Romans, British, Germans, Spanish, Arabs or any other dominant society.
In the context of ethnic studies, Jewish people are privileged because of their “whiteness,” with Tracy Castro-Gill — the executive director of Washington Ethnic Studies Now, an advocacy group promoting ethnic studies in Washington schools — saying, “white Jewish people insisting on being included in a curriculum that has never been about them reeks of white privilege.” This dismissal hides the long and torrid history of antisemitism and exclusion of Jews: In the U.S., Jewish people have been segregated from public accommodations and employment and been denied housing through restrictive covenants. They have had their synagogues bombed and made to be “other.” Even today, they have the highest number of hate crimes committed against them per capita. Like the four minority groups ethnic studies centers around, Jewish people also lack representation in classroom curriculum, with discussions of their experiences often confined to the Holocaust. That said, resistance from the dominant ethnic studies perspective remains, and the Jewish narratives that wound up in the final draft of the high school curriculum were, by and large, planted there by outsiders to that orthodoxy.
PAUSD and ethnic studies
In a community that values quality education as much as we do, PAUSD has inevitably had some controversy with its implementation of ethnic studies, and we must continue to ensure that our curriculum is fair, balanced and illuminating for all our students. This necessitates a certain distance from the revolutionary cauldron that fired ethnic studies — doing otherwise would be antithetical to good academic pedagogy. Teaching “real” ethnic studies enforces a very strong thesis that we need to break down the system because it is intrinsically based upon despotic colonial subjugation. Ninth-grade students who have not encountered a high school-level history class are ill-equipped to critically analyze the evidence behind this thesis. If they cannot accomplish that analysis freely, openly, thoughtfully and with contradicting viewpoints, the class cannot be much more than simple indoctrination.
So, PAUSD’s ethnic studies should emphasize enlightenment scholarship and encourage the celebration of multicultural history, which the liberated model rejects. This does not mean we avoid any uncomfortable topics in our curriculum. On the contrary, in the boundless pursuit of knowledge, we must promote inclusion and confront head-on all of the injustices experienced by those from all corners of the world (which we can do by differentiating our now one-semester-long world history class to offer more history in breadth and rigor to those who desire it). Of course, as PAUSD has stressed time and again, our ethnic studies course will necessarily be limited in scope and impact. While there may not be an easy solution to the logistical exactitudes of implementing a controversial state mandate, in the spirit of vociferous inspection, we must always ensure we hold each other true to ever-improving best practices.
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