Gabriel Winant: Arizona Prohibits "Hateful" Ethnic Studies Classes
[Gabriel Winant is a freelance writer and graduate student, currently living in the United Kingdom.]
When did Arizona get so mean? As if what they've done already isn't bad enough, Gov. Jan Brewer and the state legislature have just passed a law forbidding state public schools from teaching ethnic studies courses. Or, as they put it in the new legislation, students "should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people." A promising start there. I'm glad we're finally rooting out the Mexican Klan meetings in middle schools.
Apparently, state education chief Tom Horne (unsurprisingly, a current candidate for attorney general), is behind this, and he's especially incensed about one textbook in particular. "Occupied America: A History of Chicanos," by Rodolfo Acuña, has really gotten his goat. "To begin with, the title of the book implies to the kids that they live in occupied America, or occupied Mexico," Horne told the Los Angeles Times. You have to love a guy whose argument literally seems to be that we should judge the book by its cover.
So the complaint is that ethnic studies in general, and Chicano studies in particular, teach hate. In a moment of truly dazzling irony, Horne said, "It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it."
The logic seems to be that any time brown folks get together in groups to talk about their identity and history, they must be plotting against white people. Maybe something here sounds like the old South, but I don't think it's the students and teachers....
Read entire article at Salon.com
When did Arizona get so mean? As if what they've done already isn't bad enough, Gov. Jan Brewer and the state legislature have just passed a law forbidding state public schools from teaching ethnic studies courses. Or, as they put it in the new legislation, students "should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people." A promising start there. I'm glad we're finally rooting out the Mexican Klan meetings in middle schools.
Apparently, state education chief Tom Horne (unsurprisingly, a current candidate for attorney general), is behind this, and he's especially incensed about one textbook in particular. "Occupied America: A History of Chicanos," by Rodolfo Acuña, has really gotten his goat. "To begin with, the title of the book implies to the kids that they live in occupied America, or occupied Mexico," Horne told the Los Angeles Times. You have to love a guy whose argument literally seems to be that we should judge the book by its cover.
So the complaint is that ethnic studies in general, and Chicano studies in particular, teach hate. In a moment of truly dazzling irony, Horne said, "It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it."
The logic seems to be that any time brown folks get together in groups to talk about their identity and history, they must be plotting against white people. Maybe something here sounds like the old South, but I don't think it's the students and teachers....