Arizona Moves to Ban Ethnic Studies Program

Photo: electtomhorne.com

By TATIANA LAM

January 17, 2011

Arizona has proven to be a battlefront for immigrant rights activism this year.  Though SB 1070 – which would have sanctioned racial profiling in order to publicly identify undocumented subjects – was met with nation-wide opposition and a preliminary injunction from the Department of Justice, another law, HB 2281, was implemented on January 1. This piece of legislation, authored by Tom Horne on his last day as Arizona School Superintendent (he is now state Attorney General) and signed into law by Governor Jan Brewer, would cut 10% of the state’s funding for ethnic studies programs.

The statewide law would specifically jeopardize the Tucson Unified School District, which teaches a predominantly Latino student body about the history of people of color in the United States. According to Truth-Out.org, 56% of Arizona’s public school population is Latino. Though Horne professed in an interview on CNN last May that ethnic studies programs preach “ethnic chauvinism,” Tucson’s district officials maintain that their curriculum doesn’t tilt the playing field, but level it, discussing heretofore ignored or insufficiently recognized contributions that people of color have made to the legal development of the United States, especially during the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement.

Horne’s objection to the program is attributable to a tradition of nativist fear.  Thus, while he made the comprehensible claim on CNN that this law would teach students to “work hard [to] achieve their dreams, [not] that they’re oppressed,” Horne also accused Tucson’s Raza Studies program of advocating a “radical separatist agenda.” Laws like HB 2281 serve to hinder the national unity Horne claims to advocate by expunging the achievements of people of color from the public consciousness.

Events like the 1968 East LA Walkouts, which were organized by Chicano students, are a good example of the kind of history that is often lacking in public school textbooks, and the kind of history that demonstrated the need for exactly the ethnic studies programs that are now under threat. Prior to these protests, the law allowed teachers to physically beat Chicano students for speaking Spanish in school. This draconian policy was supplemented by a history curriculum that behaved in a more insidious way: it erased the presence of these students’ ancestors from the American narrative. When students organized, they fought not only for Chicano studies, but also for African-American studies, Native American studies, and gender studies. All of these diversity programs would be imperiled by the precedent of the new Arizona law. Concealing the historical presence of different ethnicities from our textbooks will only lead to Horne’s squawking point: the separation of races. Being able to see a face like one’s own in a history textbook makes one feel as though one can participate in developing a country’s infrastructure, rather than being forced to dismiss or evade it.

As was the case for SB 1070, this legislative ban of ethnic studies has the potential to become viral. In fact, Arizona’s law emulates an earlier Texas law. In March 2010, the Texas Board of Education restructured its curriculum to eliminate from public school history lessons the Declaration of the Seneca Falls Convention, suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt, United Farm Workers like César Chavez, and even a segment on Thomas Jefferson (because of his espousal of the separation of church and state). To excise the voice of women, people of color, and dissidents from our textbooks is to teach an incomplete history that fails to acknowledge our successes as well as our failures. Chicano studies and gender studies do not intend to idealize certain populations or to incite separatist movements, but rather to acknowledge minority communities’ integral role in the development of the community at large, and to help all students to comprehend our heterogeneous, contradictory, and sometimes tragic common history.

Superintendent Horne has given the Tucson Unified School District 60 days to comply with the law, or to appeal it. The district, which has chosen to continue its Raza Studies program, could lose $36 million from its statewide funding for its insubordination, according to Alter-Net.org. Eleven Tucson teachers, along with civil rights attorney Richard Martinez and a group called Save Ethnic Studies, plan to appeal the bill in court.

Tatiana Lam is a junior in Yale College.