Five Years Later: Ethnic Studies as Renewal in an Age of Structured Forgetting, by Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

Five Years Later: Ethnic Studies as Renewal in an Age of Structured Forgetting*

by 

Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.

December 29, 2025

Five years ago, I stood at Teachers College, Columbia University, as the Edmond W. Gordon Lecturer, invited to speak on “Liberating Ways of Knowing: The Struggle for Ethnic Studies and the Educators We Need.” Time has passed,but the message has not aged. If anything, it has sharpened—because what was already a struggle over curriculum has become, unmistakably, a struggle over free speech, academic freedom, and democracy itself.

I began that day with land, because land is truth we too often treat as optional. We are never not on Native land. To acknowledge that is not to check a box; it is to practice another relationship to knowledge—one that insists history lives beneath us, not behind us. I've always said that "if there isn't dirt under your fingernails, you're not grassroots enough."

From there, I shared floricanto—meaning flower and song—because education, at its best, is not merely transmission. It is renewal. It is the restoration of spirit, connection, and belonging. We named the feelings the song “Agua de Estrellas” evoked—peace, tenderness, longing, hope—and I remember thinking: these are not “extras.” These are educational indicators and outcomes of a just and worthy education.

What I offered then was not simply an argument for Ethnic Studies as a course. It was an invitation to recognize Ethnic Studies as a different orientation—a framework that refuses the isolated, objectifying logic at the heart of so much assimilationist schooling. 

The Cartesian “I” that stands alone, producing knowledge as if the world were merely an object to be measured, ranked, and managed, is precisely the mindset that makes it possible to treat communities as problems, children as data points, and histories as inconveniences. Ethnic Studies pushes back—not only by adding content, but by challenging the deeper rules: whose knowledge counts, whose humanity is centered, and what education is ultimately for. 

Ethnic Studies pushes back against the Cartesian ego by insisting that learning is not an individual accomplishment detached from context, but a collective practice shaped by memory, power, and care. It recenters the body, spirit, and lived experience as legitimate sources of insight. It affirms that students do not arrive in classrooms as empty vessels, but as carriers of language, culture, ancestral knowledge, and moral imagination. And it asks educators to see themselves not as neutral technicians, but as ethical actors whose work either reproduces or resists injustice.

In this sense, Ethnic Studies is not simply about representation. It is about reorientation. It refuses the idea that schooling should prepare students only to compete, comply, or perform for systems that were never designed with them in mind. Instead, it calls for an education that prepares young people to belong, to think critically, to care deeply, and to act responsibly in a pluralistic democracy.

This is why Ethnic Studies cannot be reduced to a unit, a month, or a box to be checked. Its power lies in its ability to unsettle the assumptions that structure schooling itself—to interrupt the logics of ranking, sorting, and disposability that have long governed public education. And it is precisely this unsettling force that makes Ethnic Studies both transformative and threatening in our current moment.

At a time when Ethnic Studies and DEI initiatives are under sustained political attack—framed as divisive, ideological, or dangerous—the deeper truth is this: what is being resisted is not “identity,” but relational ways of doing, knowing, and being in the world. What is being feared is not history, but the possibility that students might learn to see themselves as fully human, fully entitled to voice, and fully capable of naming the structures that shape their lives.

This is why I shared the work of Academia Cuauhtli (meaning "Eagle Academy" in Nahuatl)—our Saturday academy grounded in bilingual learning, co-constructed curriculum, and community partnership. 

One lesson from that work has stayed with me because it continues to prove true: if you anchor an initiative only in the university, you risk losing it to faculty mobility and institutional drift; if you anchor it only in the district, you risk losing it to organizational restructuring and political turnover. Anchored in the community—the holders of memory, consequence, and continuity—the work sustains.

When I look back now, what feels most enduring from that lecture is not any single policy detail, but a posture: the insistence that education must be a site of relationship rather than extraction; of truth rather than avoidance; of renewal rather than punishment. Five years ago, the urgency was clear. Today, the consequences of ignoring it are unavoidable.

Ethnic Studies pushes back against the Cartesian ego—and against the isolation, erasure, and moral indifference it produces—by offering something far more demanding and far more hopeful: an education rooted in connection and the shared work of becoming fully human together.

Like I always say, "Some day, Ethnic Studies will simply be called 'a good education.'"

Reference

*I draw from Trouillot (1995) who first expressed this concept of "structured forgetting."

Trouillot, M.-R. (1995). Silencing the past: Power and the production of history. Beacon Press.

The end of Affirmative Action most definitely results in a loss of intellectual talent. The lack of a diverse environment is costly both to the college classroom and research, considering the power of diversity to illuminate knowledge that aligns and fails to align with race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. Gothamist author Arun Venugopal interviews author and professor OiYan Poon, who wrote a pertinet book titled, Asian American is not a Color: Conversations about Race, Affirmative Action, and Family.”

Dr. Poon mentions "repressive legalism," a concept developed by Dr. Liliana Garces at UT Austin where interpretations of policy result in over-each encouraging conservative interpretations that are harmful, in this case, to the goal of diversity.

I would also underscore that there are absolutely material consequences when affirmative action, a now-defunct policy tool, goes away. This quote by Poon nails it when she expresses: "There's still a lot of opportunity in higher education, but we can't pretend like there's also not material consequences and inequalities, right?"

Poon's own work is enlightening with respect to what race-conscious admissions mean for Asian Americans across the U.S.  Her research shows that Asian American identity is still in flux, caught between individuals striving to align with whiteness at the top of the racial hierarchy and those advocating for a vision of justice and humanity built through inter-ethnic solidarity.

-Angela Valenzuela

Black enrollment falls at Columbia, top schools after affirmative action ruling. Now what?

By 

Arun Venugopal |Gothamist

Published Sep 21, 2024

Some of the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities, including New York City's Columbia University, have released data in recent weeks on the racial makeup of their newest classes. The handiwork of the U.S. Supreme Court is written all over them.

The share of newly admitted Black students dropped off significantly at the most selective schools, according to the institutions. The enrollment figures are the first since the Supreme Court, in a landmark ruling in June 2023, barred schools from using race as a factor in higher-education admissions decisions.

Some of the reported results: At Columbia, the share of Black students fell from 20% to 12%.

At Amherst College, the share of Black students fell from 11% to 3%.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the share of Black students dropped from 15% to 5% and the share of Hispanic students fell from 16% to 11%.

At the same time, Asian American representation increased at Columbia (from 30% to 39%) and at Brown University (from 29% to 33%), but stayed flat at Harvard (37%) and marginally fell at Dartmouth and Princeton. At Yale, it declined from 30% to 24%.

To help make sense of the new admissions landscape, Gothamist spoke with OiYan Poon, the author of “Asian American is Not a Color: Conversations about Race, Affirmative Action, and Family.” Poon, a proponent of race-conscious admissions, offers advice for students and parents who are at the very center of a college admissions landscape that's very much in flux.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
These results are confusing. But one of the results is that a number of higher-ed institutions have taken fewer Black students. What does this mean to you?

We saw this historically with the University of California, when they ended affirmative action in 1996. It's in some ways communicating to Black students, “We don't want you, as a college.”

We're also seeing, simultaneously, increasing applications to historically Black colleges and universities, which are gems in the ecosystem — underfunded gems. But what we're seeing is really a loss, I think, of intellectual talent among Black students at these predominantly white institutions that are often deemed as pathways to upward mobility.

And I think this is a real challenge for a democracy that claims to be multiracial and diverse. So I just fear that this is going to have adverse effects on science, on economics, on a lot of sectors of life in our country.
By which you mean fewer African Americans getting those pathways?

Yes, absolutely.

We are seeing a decline in the number of Asian Americans at certain colleges and universities, while at others like Columbia and MIT, the Asian American enrollment has dramatically risen. What gives?

There was research that came out of Georgetown by Anthony Carnevale and his team several years ago, before the lawsuit's ruling [the one last year significantly limiting affirmative action in school admissions]. And his team found that without race-conscious admissions, there might be a 1% — give or take — increase in Asian Americans being admitted.

So when you take the ecosystem of all these institutions, it's been a mixed bag. It kind of washes out into what Dr. Carnevale and his team predicted, which was maybe a slight gain. But at the same time, I want to be clear that there are natural fluctuations year to year in admissions.

Depending on things that are happening in the world with each cohort of high school graduates — there might be a pandemic, or there's a debacle with the FAFSA [Free Application for Federal Student Aid] form with the federal government, right? So things happen that then create these kind of so-called natural fluctuations in enrollment numbers.

The percentages going up and down in the shares of Asian American enrollment may have to do with, again, these institutions perhaps not recruiting in ways that they had before or building relationships with different communities. There's just a lot of things that could go into it. So I'm interested in seeing how this unfolds in the next few years, to see actual trends, because one year does not make a difference.
Is it clear how white students have been affected by the changes?

It's also been a little bit of an up and down, but mostly the picture is not fully clear yet. For now, you've only got a couple dozen institutions, and the actual public reporting data day is Oct. 15, barring any federal government shutdown.
So there's a very strong to-be-determined quality to all of this.

Yes.

What did you feel last year when the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action?

I felt pretty devastated when the Supreme Court ended race-conscious admissions. I just knew it would have ... it was just a continuation of attacks on a multiracial democracy — and who is affirmed and included in spaces of higher education and spaces of learning and engagement in the life of our nation. As a mom of a young child and the daughter of immigrants, I felt really upset. I think there were a lot of tears actually.

Did the ruling fundamentally change how colleges and universities do their work?

I think there's been a lot of changes. People are still trying to figure out what they can do.

I think what we're finding, like my colleague Liliana Garces at the University of Texas — she's a professor there, and a trained lawyer — she has really put forward this idea of "oppressive legalism." In other words, lawyers are telling their colleges and universities to back off of things that are still very legal.

And so schools are moving away, and they're really driven and leading through fear, which I think is not a good way to lead principled and mission-driven organizations.
What does this mean for an institution that sees a very exciting application from, say, a Black student, but who is objectively less impressive because of some numerical score?

I think they're second-guessing. I think some of these colleges are so afraid of getting sued, they have really rolled back their target recruitment efforts to visit and build relationships with communities, with talented Black and brown students, low-income students.

If you're in the business of finding talented students, then you should be doing that. But I think because this lawsuit and the makeup of the court is what it is, that fear is really driving these institutions to say, "Well, I don't know if we can do this."

Do you think that Ed Blum — the legal activist who founded a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which won the Supreme Court victory against Harvard and the University of North Carolina — and this movement is ultimately about increasing white student representation in institutions of higher education?

Yes. [laughs] I mean, the simple answer is yes. I think at the end of the day, what Ed Blum's movement is about is really shutting down and decreasing who's at the table in this country in various sectors. He started out in voting rights. It's about power and who gets to have it in this country.

There are students across the country, high school juniors and seniors who are just trying to make sense of this. What advice would you give them?

Be yourself. Really, just be yourself and know that you've worked hard. And lean into your interests and curiosities and know that there are over 4,000 colleges and universities in this country. And we forget that sometimes, right? We think that there's only like 50.
So how to reconcile that with what you said earlier, which is that Black students are being denied spots in some of these more prominent institutions?

There's still a lot of opportunity in higher education, but we can't pretend like there's also not material consequences and inequalities, right?

There's an economist, Zach Bleemer, who studied the University of California and what happened there in relation to who went to the University of California campuses, versus the California State University campuses and community colleges. After the ban on affirmative action, there was kind of this cascading effect where fewer Black and Latino and Indigenous students were going to the UC's but were going more to the Cal States and the community colleges. And, as a result [for] white and Asian students, he said, there was no economic gain.

But there was an economic decrease, there was harm done to these other students of color who were cascading downward.
So it sounds like what you're saying is that there are material gains for the most disadvantaged communities...

When you go to the most prestigious institutions.
Less so for white and Asian students.

Right.

Do you have specific advice for the parents of students whose anxieties are probably supercharged right now?

I am very sympathetic to those concerns as a mom. My daughter's in Chicago Public Schools. We have magnet high schools. This is not about college, but it's still a selective process.

And I have told my daughter since she was entering kindergarten just very casually, "Hey, isn't this a beautiful neighborhood high school? Someday you can go here, right?"

And last year in third grade, she came home and said, “Mom, if I don't go to Lane Tech High School” — which is, I guess, like a Stuyvesant here in New York, we have about 10 or 12 of those kind of magnet high schools — she said, “If I don't go to Lane Tech High School, my life is over.” And I was just like, “Té Té, you're in third grade!” What is happening here?

It just was confounding. I guess in some ways, I'm the anti-stereotypical Asian parent. There's lots of possibilities, but I recognize that this is actually a privilege that she has.

My daughter has a privilege as a daughter of two highly educated professionals. So when I think about middle-class and educated parents, I really want to tell them, "Let's calm down here." But I think about my daughter's classmates and their parents, and a lot of their children, if they go to college, this will be their first person in their families to go to college.

And so that anxiety I recognize and respect.
How about institutions themselves? Do you think they need to be changing course in some manner or are they at the mercy of larger political and legal forces?

I mentioned there's over 4,000 colleges and universities, right? The great majority of them are at the whims of their financial situations.

Historically, if you look at how colleges and universities developed, they've been financially precarious institutions. The majority of colleges and universities are driven by financial considerations. So admissions decisions have so much to do with the calculus [around] what percentage of my incoming students can pay full or close-to-full tuition? So that I can also then cover those who need financial aid, because I only have X amount of dollars in next year's fiscal budget in the university to cover financial aid. Here's my limited financial aid budget. And how do I leverage Pell Grants or state aid, right? And so there's this prediction there, but it does create a privilege for wealthier students.

Disproportionately white.

Yes. Disproportionately white.

As an Asian American, how do you explain the centrality of Asian Americans to this particular issue? Is it simply about equity?

Asian Americans are so complicated. We are an extremely diverse community — socioeconomically, ethnically, culturally, linguistically, you name it. There's all kinds of Asian American experiences. There's folks who are incredibly wealthy and folks who are incredibly poor and everyone in between.

But at the end of the day, there are these flattened racial stereotypes about Asian Americans — as crazy, rich Asians, as extremely intelligent but only at math and science, really docile, quiet, hardworking, not complainers, overcoming adversity and so on — unlike these undeserving minorities, posing against the stereotypes of undeserving Black, undeserving Latino communities.

This is all flattening all of us, and it's a divide-and-conquer tactic that Ed Blum has played into very well, unfortunately. And so you use these stereotypes to say we don't need policies or practices to recognize these inequalities in our education system. And so then you can keep these inequalities in place and those who are most privileged continue to benefit.

And so Asian Americans get used, and that's what I talk about in this book and how different Asian Americans are making sense of all of that.

Everybody needs to read every word of this U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights Fact Sheet: Diversity & Inclusion Activities Under Title VI two-pager. DEI is not only legal but exists because of structural racism in higher education at its root. 

As indicated by David Hinojosa, who directs the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C., this means that without diversity-focused programs and initiatives of the kind outlined in the Fact Sheet above, a lot of preferential hiring on the basis of "fit," as opposed to merit, is more likely to occur.

Regarding the alleged idea of “purg[ing] conservative thought," I've come across some interesting research by Dr. Jeffrey Sachs at Columbia University that suggests that universities may not be liberalizing communities, so much as communities liberalizing universities. 

With that as the hypothesis or premise in mind, it does seem compelling that universities are located—so many of them—in liberal towns within each state. To be sure, liberalism is a continuum unto itself. Austin, Madison, UCLA, Berkeley, Cambridge, Denver, Ann Arbor and so on, come easily to mind. 

Supposing that this hypothesis is actually true—and Sachs leans in that direction—the policy solution is perhaps rural universities—although that would re-segregate higher education. Not that this would concern some policymakers, but rather that prospective students—an increasingly black and brown demographic—would not be attracted to such institutions when there are great options and alternatives.

Expressed differently, the research suggests that they're not going to ever find all these cadres and cadres of conservative faculty that they seem to think are out there.

Policymakers need to stop churning up moral panics and fear and decide, instead, to adjust to the times that always bring new realities. As Heraclitus once said, "change is the only constant in life." 

Angela Valenzuela

Exclusive: Gov. Greg Abbott explains his fight against diversity hiring programs on college campuses

Jeremy Wallace, Austin Bureau

March 3, 2023Updated: March 3, 2023 6:13 p.m.

Even as Gov. Greg Abbott successfully pressures Texas universities to retreat from using diversity, equity and inclusion programs, he is adamant that doesn’t mean he’s against diversity on college campuses and in the government.

“Diversity is something that we support,” Abbott said in an exclusive interview with Hearst Newspapers.

THE ISSUE: As Gov. Abbott attacks diversity hiring, Biden launches all-out defense of the programs

The Republican governor said everyone is for equality and anti-discrimination policies. But he contends that diversity, equity and inclusion programs proliferating on college campuses have drifted far from advancing equal opportunity and are instead leading to hiring decisions based on the race of applicants. Further, he says they are part of a larger effort to “purge conservative thought.”

“What we’ve seen in our universities is DEI practices that are there for political purposes, advancing political agendas, blanketed with the perception that they are trying to protect diversity,” he said.

Advocates of diversity and equity programs say Abbott has it wrong. They say the goal is to increase pools of applicants for positions and address systemic barriers that have kept people from underrepresented backgrounds from advancement opportunities in the past.

In the past, many institutions thought they were hiring people based on merit when they were really hiring and promoting people based on how “they fit” with the organization, said David Hinojosa, the director of the Educational Opportunities Project at the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law in Washington, D.C. That often meant decisions reflected the biases of the people doing the hiring, he said.

“The bottom line is these diversity, equity and inclusion programs are mostly set up because of these institutional biases against people of color,” said Hinojosa, a graduate of Edgewood High School in San Antonio who has argued affirmative action cases before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Abbott said his fight over DEI is bigger than just one program. He said he’s concerned about the atmosphere of college campuses where conservative ideas are not allowed to be expressed.

“They are purging any conservatives from the faculty and allowing the faculty to be led only by liberal leftists,” he said. 

Universities move to comply

Abbott is already seeing results since his office sent stern warning letters to all public Texas colleges and universities about DEI in January.

First, Texas Tech University officially removed DEI statements from faculty hiring requirements.

Then, the University of Texas last week announced that it had paused all new DEI initiatives and launched a review of existing programs.

On Thursday, the Texas A&M University system ordered all its schools and agencies to remove requirements that job applicants provide personal statements about their commitment to DEI efforts. Some units of the A&M system had such requirements, but others did not.

Those moves all come as the Republican-dominated Legislature has threatened funding for universities that espouse DEI. 

“Unfortunately, we’re paying for these things that we know are bad,” state Sen. Mayes Middleton, R-Galveston, said during a panel discussion of the matter put on Thursday by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation in Austin. “The state of Texas shouldn’t be paying for that.”

DEI has been around for decades, but after the murder of George Floyd by a Minnesota police officer in 2020, those programs got a boost as colleges addressed demands that they foster more diverse leadership on campuses. 

“Some university trustees didn’t know what hit them,” anti-DEI advocate John D. Sailer said at the Thursday panel discussion.

Sailer said that nationally, schools are imposing DEI priorities in all facets of university life, including making it a litmus test for promotions, tenure and hiring. The result, he said, is applicants know that if they don’t subscribe fully to DEI efforts, that can be used against them.

“Universities exist for the pursuit of truth,” said Sailer, who is a fellow with the New York-based National Association of Scholars. “But DEI represents a distortion of that mission to pursue social justice and a specific political goal.”

In January, Sailer issued a report on DEI programs at UT-Austin. He said DEI has “invaded every aspect” of the school.

“These policies espouse a specific set of contentious political views, dictate a new curriculum and embed the principles of DEI into the fabric of the university,” his report said.

Less than two weeks after the report, Abbott's staff sent a letter to all Texas public colleges, including UT, the governor's alma mater, warning them about DEI and repeating Sailer's concerns.

“Rebranding this employment discrimination as 'DEI' does not make the practice any less illegal,” wrote Gardner Pate, Abbott's chief of staff.

'Enormous harm'

On the other side, Texas NAACP President Gary Bledsoe has called the effort to dismantle DEI an attempt to return to Jim Crow-era laws and set back progress that communities of color have made.

“The governor's initiative will do enormous harm and take the state backwards,” Bledsoe said at a news conference last month blasting the effort.

Bledsoe says it is absurd for Abbott to claim he supports diversity when he’s going after the very programs that are helping to diversify institutions.

“You cannot support diversity and kill DEI,” Bledsoe said.

jeremy.wallace@houstonchronicle.com