{"id":12051,"date":"2011-01-08T12:51:11","date_gmt":"2011-01-08T19:51:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12051"},"modified":"2011-01-08T12:51:11","modified_gmt":"2011-01-08T19:51:11","slug":"arizona-orders-tucson-to-end-mexican-american-studies-program-nytimes-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=12051","title":{"rendered":"Arizona Orders Tucson to End Mexican-American Studies Program – NYTimes.com"},"content":{"rendered":"

As often happens, the\u00a0Times <\/em>used different headlines for the print and online versions of this article. The online version reads, “Rift in Arizona as Latino Class Is Found Illegal.” The print version, on the other hand, reads, “Citing ‘Brainwashing,’ Arizona Declares a Latino Class Illegal”–and “brainwashing” is a quote from Tom Horne, the man responsible for the law. You should absolutely go read the article<\/a> for yourself because I think there are things in it that should frighten you regardless of your political leanings, but here are some of the things that stuck out for me.<\/p>\n

To start with, here’s how the Times<\/em> describes the law the Mexican-American Studies program has been cited as violating:<\/p>\n

\n

The Arizona law warns school districts that they stand to lose 10 percent of their state education funds if their ethnic-studies programs are found not to comply with new state standards. Programs that promote the overthrow of the United States government are explicitly banned, and that includes the suggestion that portions of the Southwest that were once part of Mexico should be returned to that country.<\/p>\n

Also prohibited is any promotion of resentment toward a race. Programs that are primarily for one race or that advocate ethnic solidarity instead of individuality are also outlawed.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I don’t think anyone would disagree that an educational program, especially one funded by taxpayers, which openly advocated for the overthrow of the United States would be problematic at best, and, mostly because I am ignorant of the history of the southwest United States and Mexico, I am open to hearing arguments about why suggesting that those portions of the US that once belonged to Mexico ought to be returned threatens the United States in its entirety–though I also wonder if the Arizona legislators responsible for passing this law have a similar stance towards talk about land reparations in other parts of the world, where territory has been acquired by one nation through military action and returning that land, or at least part of that land, is understood to be the just thing to do. More, I am specifically not using the example of how the US took land unjustly from the Native Americans because I know that even the suggestion that true justice would require returning that land, even while acknowledging that such a thing is not really possible, would be considered by some tantamount to admitting that the US was founded largely by expropriating, often by force, the land of others.<\/p>\n

What really disturbs me about this description of the Arizona law, and what I think should frighten anyone, regardless of their political stance, is contained in the second paragraph. A course which has as one of its learning objectives the understanding that white people are evil would of course be objectionable and should of course be taken off the books immediately, but how does one teach about racism in the United States without teaching that the lion’s share of racial hatred and discrimination has been in one direction, from white people (and overwhelmingly white Christians at that) towards people of color? And how does one teach that without engendering some anger and, yes, resentment on the part of people of color towards white people and the institutions of white supremacy? But what really frightens me about this component of the law is that it makes the educator\/educational institution responsible for the emotional effect a class will have on the students who take it. If teaching students about the injustices of history, especially injustices perpetrated against them and their people, is not supposed to make them angry, what other emotions might the government want to manage in the classroom? What other topics might come under a similar kind of scrutiny?<\/p>\n

And what the hell does it mean that a program should not advocate for ethnic solidarity? Or, rather, that it ought to advocate for individuality as opposed to<\/em> ethnic solidarity–as if those two things were mutually exclusive? When I taught a class in Asian American literature, there was no way, of course, that I could stand in front of the class and include myself in the Asian American experience that literature articulates, but was I teaching about an ethnic American historical experience that the Asian American students in my class had in common? Yes. Does the fact of that experience suggest that those students are part of a particular history and that there might indeed be an ethnic identity–which implies solidarities of all kinds–that emerges from this history to which these students can lay claim? Yes. Does that claim obviate any sense that these students are still individuals within that identity? No. Does that identity somehow deprive students, by definition, of the individualism that is such an important part of United States culture? No.<\/p>\n

Interestingly, of course, similar programs for Black, Asian and Native American students have not been found to violate this law, and I would be willing to bet that at least one of the texts found to be problematic in the Mexican-American Studies Program, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed<\/em><\/a> by Paulo Freire, is taught in some of those other programs as well. (The other book cited in the article as having been found problematic is Occupied America<\/em><\/a>, by Rodolfo F. Acuna.) Indeed, reading the article, it’s hard not to conclude that this law is more about the hurt feelings of Tom Horne, Arizona’s newly elected attorney general and formerly that state’s superintendent of public instruction. As the Times<\/em> puts it:<\/p>\n

\n

Mr. Horne\u2019s battle with Tucson over ethnic studies dates to 2007, when Dolores Huerta<\/a>, co-founder of the United Farm Workers<\/a>, told high school students there in a speech that Republicans hated Latinos. Mr. Horne, a Republican, sent a top aide, Margaret Garcia Dugan, to the school to present a different perspective. He was infuriated when some students turned their backs and raised their fists in the air.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

At the same time, it’s also hard not to see Arizona’s law as part of a trend towards sanitizing the racial history of the United States and removing from the classroom–and therefore, potentially, from the public discourse that emerges as the people taught in that classroom become the leaders of our society–any sense of controversy or conflict over that history. Regardless of Alan Gribben’s intentions, for example, this will be one of the results of his Bowdlerized version of Huckleberry Finn<\/a>, and it’s hard not to see a sanitizing motive in the Republicans’ decision to leave out of their reading of the US Constitution<\/a> those passages that refer to slaves as “three fifths of all other persons” or to things like prohibition; just as its hard not to see this motive in at least some of the changes the Texas school<\/a> board has de facto imposed on the educational institutions of our nation through the changes it adopted to its social studies curriculum.<\/p>\n

So much that is good about this country has come about because people were willing to teach and to learn the difficult parts of our history and to struggle for rights and inclusion because they were angry and resentful over the injustices they and those like them suffered. We do ourselves a disservice by trying to pretend those struggles never happened or that they did not happen they way they did or by watering down how we teach them so that the stakes do not appear to be as high as they were.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Cross posted on The Poetry in The Politics and The Politics in The Poetry.<\/a><\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As often happens, the\u00a0Times used different headlines for the print and online versions of this article. The online version reads, “Rift in Arizona as Latino Class Is Found Illegal.” The print version, on the other hand, reads, “Citing ‘Brainwashing,’ Arizona … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}