I totally agree that we should end the "non-debate" in Ethnic Studies as suggested herein by San Diego State University Dr. Roberto D. Hernåndez. It has a 50-year history, even as it represents 50 years of struggle for it.
Moreover, it's for ALL students and not just Black and Brown ones with research showing that it benefits all in terms of higher achievement and college-going rates. Plus, it helps our BIPOC youth feel for once a sense of belonging in the curriculum as part of the grand American narrative.
So this isn't just for California, but also for Texas and all of our states, too.
If you're in Texas, do lend your support to HB 1504 authored by Texas State Rep. Christina Morales. You can read the actual bill in my earlier post where it makes Ethnic Studies count for high school graduation in Texas.
Stay tuned to this blog, too, as I'll be covering HB 1504 over the next few months given that the Texas State Legislature is currently in session.
-Angela Valenzuela
#EthnicStudiesNow
Opinion: Experts have shown ethnic studies’ value for 50 years. It’s time for California to listen.
Hernández, Ph.D., is an associate professor of Chicana and Chicano Studies at San Diego State University and lives in La Mesa.
In recent years, the various academic disciplines of ethnic studies — Chicana/o studies, Africana/Black studies, Native/Indigenous studies and Asian American studies — each celebrated their respective 50th anniversaries. Each is unique and internally diverse in its own right — with distinct intellectual and theoretical genealogies and debates, as well as teaching methodologies and subjects of study. Yet what is shared by all is a grounding in concerns raised by the various social justice movements of the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, they are part of the achievements (and unfinished business) of civil rights in the United States.
Achieved through intense campaigns and protests for relevant education, ethnic studies began rooted not solely in the struggles of negatively racialized and marginalized communities, but in the intellectual contributions of those absent from core curriculums. It was aimed not only at making visible erased and subjugated histories, but also at working to ensure knowledge produced about racialized communities was in the service of improving the lived experiences and life chances of those communities. From the start, it has been a diverse, collective, communal, intergenerational and transformational endeavor.
To be clear, ethnic studies is much more than just an additive fix, or the inclusion of the histories of different racial/ethnic groups into dominant mainstream narratives. Ethnic studies is about the understanding of sociohistorical processes of racialization and other forms of domination, in order to not only challenge said processes but to collectively build a different way of existing in the world free of the various -isms that continue to divide us.
Importantly, students who have gone through such programs have excelled in their various academic and career paths, often proclaiming, among other things, that ethnic studies saved their lives as for the first time they felt reflected in the course material and became more invested in their own education, which heretofore had often been alienating and seemingly irrelevant to their daily lives. Some have gone on to become educators, artists, doctors, community-based leaders and even successful politicians.
In San Diego, individual high schools have had variations or brief iterations of ethnic studies classes since the 1970s. As a high school student, I was involved in an effort that brought Chicana/o studies to Southwest High School in the 1990s. It was instrumental in my own success, which includes receiving three degrees from UC Berkeley, the top public university in the world. While the above may seem anecdotal, dozens of studies have substantiated the claims.
Fast forward 50 years, and the above fields of study have weathered several storms yet remain most present in colleges and universities. In California, Assembly Bill 1460, signed into law last year, established an ethnic studies graduation requirement for all California State University campuses.
Similar efforts have succeeded at passing landmark civil rights legislation to include ethnic studies curriculum at the high school level here and in other states, yet implementation of both has met other hurdles.
In one example in Tucson, Arizona, a Mexican American studies (MAS) program began to draw the attention of critics in the early 2000s. At issue was high dropout rates that were being reversed. In other words, students taking ethnic studies courses began graduating and being admitted to college at higher rates than those without ethnic studies courses. Ethnic studies was yielding results, and this ironically led to calls for the program to be eliminated.
Arizona’s House Bill 2281 in 2010 did just that, despite an embarrassing independent study, the Cambium Report, commissioned by bill proponents to prove the ineffectiveness of MAS, that ultimately yielded results to the contrary, confirming the effectiveness of MAS. Several lawsuits later — one of which I helped co-write an amicus brief for, the Acosta v. Huppenthal case, as a board member of the National Association for Chicana and Chicano Studies — the MAS program has been reinstated but is only a shell of its former self.
A decade later, much research has confirmed our anecdotal evidence and lived experience as ethnic studies educators, most notably a 2011 National Education Association study examining “The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies” by Christine E. Sleeter.
It is thus high time we end the nondebate and implement an ethnic studies curriculum in California’s K-12 schools and its colleges and universities that is guided by the very same ethnic studies academic and community content experts who have been at the heart of ethnic studies for 50 years.
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