The Right to Ethnic Studies in Higher Education

There's a major battle playing out right now regarding making Ethnic Studies a requirement at both the Cal State University and University of California systems levels.  I am total in agreement that this is about our right as minoritized groups to this curriculum.  

That Anglos and other groups have also been denied this history and curriculum merits emphasis.  A critical, higher-order-thinking education is optimally always understood as for all if we can only get past the politics...  I've always said that someday, this will be simply called "a good education."

-Angela Valenzuela

The Right to Ethnic Studies in Higher Education

Especially given the demographics, asks Alvaro Huerta, why shouldn't colleges require students to learn about others' histories, struggles and successes in this country?

By 

Alvaro Huerta

May 15, 2020

69 COMMENTS

Dr. Alvaro Huerta

It’s racist to oppose ethnic studies in higher education and K-12.

Now that I have your attention, allow me to explain. In California, while we’ve done a relatively good job of enforcing home isolation (for those with homes) and social distancing during this crisis, a debate is ongoing in the state Legislature and higher education about whether or not to mandate an ethnic studies course for undergraduates. More specifically, a state bill, Assembly Bill 1460, introduced by Assembly Member Shirley Nash Weber and co-authored by other members, is pending. If passed by the Legislature and signed by Governor Gavin Newsom, it would make the 23 California State University campuses require all students to take one course of three units in ethnic studies to graduate. (The CSU represents the “nation’s largest four-year public university system.”) As approved by the CSU Board of Trustees in early 2013, CSU students need a minimum of 120 semester units to graduate for most bachelor’s degrees. Hence, if a student is required to take one three-unit ethnic studies course, it only represents 2.5 percent of the total to graduate.

“So why is it racist to oppose ethnic studies, Dr. Huerta?” I’m glad you asked. To answer this question, let’s consider the demographic composition of CSU students. In fall 2018, the CSU system enrolled 481,210 students, including postbaccalaureate and graduate students, of which only 110,570, or 23 percent, were white. That means that the majority, or 77 percent, of the university system’s students were nonwhite. While 76,386 students were Asian/Pacific Islanders, African Americans represented 19,301, or 4 percent, of the student body. And Latinas/os were the largest ethnic/racial group, consisting of 199,521 students, or 41.5 percent, of the total. Moreover, 21 of the 23 campuses meet the criteria for Hispanic-serving institutions. Thus, why would the opponents of ethnic studies deny a majority of racialized (or “otherized”) CSU students the opportunity to learn about their histories, struggles and successes in this country with its dark past and dark present?

Speaking of America’s dark past, in terms of structural racism in higher education, the struggle for ethnic studies dates back to the late 1960s. In fact, student organizers and others at a CSU campus, San Francisco State University, played a key role in demanding and establishing ethnic studies not only in California, but also throughout the nation. Founded in fall of 1969, SFSU’s College of Ethnic Studies’ website sheds light on this important movement:

In 1968 and 1969, the Black Student Union, Third World Liberation Front, select staff and faculty, and members from the larger Bay Area community organized and [led] a series of actions against systematic discrimination. Protestors spoke out against lack of access, misrepresentation, and the overall neglect of indigenous peoples and people of color within the university's curriculum and programs. Their specific demands included the establishment of four departments: American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Black Studies, and La Raza Studies within a College of Ethnic Studies. These demands reflected a respect for the diverse intellectual traditions and cultural expressions of scholars, activists, and artists of color and indigenous people throughout the United States.

It took 50 years for another CSU campus, California State University at Los Angeles, to follow in SFSU’s footsteps to establish a College of Ethnic Studies, going beyond a department or series of ethnic studies courses. Its mission statement also shines a bright light on the importance of ethnic studies:

The College of Ethnic Studies is the first such college to be established at a university in the U.S. in 50 years. We will develop leaders who engage in rigorous, self-reflexive study that motivates critical engagement, self-determination and decolonial understandings of the world. The college provides an interdisciplinary intellectual space that centers the histories, traditions, cultures, experiences, struggles and accomplishments of diasporic communities of color, making connections between the local and transnational.

As an interdisciplinary scholarly field, ethnic studies is about self-respect and self-determination. It’s about racialized groups -- workers, students, scholars, organizers and others -- refusing to be viewed or gazed upon from a Eurocentric paradigm as inferior or less than. It’s about rejecting the scholarly practice of being objects of studies. Instead, we demand to be the subjects in this equation. As subjects, we don’t need outsiders writing our stories, narrating our histories and planning our futures.

As subjects, we, too, create knowledge!

Today, as we confront the dire consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially given the inept and negligent federal response from the White House and GOP-controlled Senate, racialized/marginalized communities are suffering disproportionately in terms of rates of infections and deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That includes Latinas/os, African Americans and Native Americans, among others. It especially includes immigrants; the Trump administration is wreaking havoc among los de abajo (those on the bottom) with its draconian and xenophobic policies. Moreover, we are witnessing an increase in racism and hate crimes against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in this country due to COVID-19, which is fueled in large measure by President Donald Trump and his Republican lackeys referring to it as the “Chinese virus.”

¡Ya basta!

The impacts of COVID-19 pandemic clearly and strongly demonstrate the need for ethnic studies. But as those of us who support such studies make the case for them, we must also reject being tokenized. It will not be progress if a minority of brown scholars (and other racialized groups) “make it,” while the majority of brown and black kids in America’s barrios and ghettos are denied quality K-12 schools and equal access to higher education, limiting their opportunities to get ahead. And let’s not forget about Native Americans on reservations and beyond.

“College isn’t for everyone!” Yeah, I’ve heard that line before while growing up on the mean streets of East Los Angeles and pursuing higher education. Now that I’m a Chicano scholar-activist and survivor of white studies with undergraduate and master’s degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, I often contemplate if white students from privileged backgrounds are also told (or conditioned to believe) this anticollege message that’s primarily aimed at racialized and working-class groups. It’s yet one more reason why I continue to say, “Viva ethnic studies!”

Alvaro Huerta holds a joint faculty appointment in urban and regional planning and ethnic and women’s studies at California State Polytechnic University. Among other scholarly publications, he’s the author of Reframing the Latino Immigration Debate: Towards a Humanistic Paradigm and Defending Latina/o Immigrant Communities: The Xenophobic Era of Trump and Beyond. He holds a Ph.D. in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and an M.A. in urban planning and a B.A. in history from the University of California, Los Angeles.

The Student Strike That Changed Higher Ed Forever

This powerful story (see video below) on the origins of Ethnic Studies should give us pause.  We are heirs to a political movement where people were willing to put their lives on the line for their education, for a curriculum that reflects our heritage a culturally diverse nation.  While still in need of greater acknowledgement and respect at the college level, we’ve still come a long way.  Texas and other states now have Ethnic Studies in the K-12 curriculum in state law.  It is my understanding that the State Board of Education issues rules on the new Mexican American Studies course in June and that it will be on the books in Fall, 2019.  Headway is also being made with respect to African American Studies, too, thankfully.  As I say repeatedly, “Someday, this will all just get called a ‘good education.’” 

-Angela Valenzuela

March 21, 2019   5:17 PM ET

KAREN GRIGSBY BATES

SHEREEN MARISOL MERAJI

Today, ethnic studies is an accepted part of academia. Many if not most college students have taken a course or two. But 50 years ago, studying the history and culture of any people who were not white and Western was considered radical. Then came the longest student strike in U.S. history, at San Francisco State College, which changed everything.

The groundwork was laid for the strike a couple of years before, when black students organized to press for a black studies department and the admission of more black students.

One of those organizers, Jimmy Garrett, was older and had worked in the civil rights movement in the South. He met a student named Jerry Varnado at a Negro Students' Association meeting, and the two helped assemble various black groups on campus into the very first Black Student Union.

Organizing for change

The BSU began a two-pronged effort: to press the school to admit more black students and to persuade parents of black high-schoolers to send their kids to SF State (which is now San Francisco State University).

The administration responded with a promise to allocate a little more than 400 slots for black students one semester and a couple of hundred more the next.

When the Asian and Latinx students heard about that deal, they wanted similar treatment. But the administration told them they would need to ask the black students to share part of their allotment.

Varnado and Garrett said no. As Varnado remembers it, his view was: "We're not in a position to be giving away anything. Everybody got to carry they own weight up in here — you got to go into battle!"

The BSU leaders suggested the myriad ethnic groups join with each other and the BSU, so they could battle the administration together.

Jimmy Garrett (left) and Jerry Varnado helped organize the first Black Student Union in the country at San Francisco State.

Shereen Marisol Meraji/NPR

Strength in numbers

The new group called itself the Third World Liberation Front. It was "a vehicle to politicize students of color," says SFSU historian Jason Ferreira, who is writing a book on the strike. "Chicanos, Asian-Americans were dealing with the same issues the black students had been struggling with" a few years earlier.

The black consciousness the BSU members achieved began to percolate into students from other ethnicities, many of whom had conservative parents from immigrant backgrounds. For the students who were Latinx and Asian, assimilation had been the goal. "They were running around trying to be white ... looking in the mirror and wishing they looked different," Ferreira says.

At the same time, the anti-war movement had picked up steam. There were weekly demonstrations on many campuses protesting American involvement in Southeast Asia. The Black Panthers were protesting police brutality in the city's communities of color —it was a turbulent time.

One of the most prominent on-campus organizers at San Francisco State was George Murray, a popular graduate student who taught freshman English. Murray had a second job as the minister of education for the Black Panther Party. He was fiercely anti-Vietnam, and his politics got him suspended from campus in 1968. And that was it. "The strike kicked off," said Varnado.

On Nov. 6, 1968, members of the BSU and the Third World Liberation Front poured onto campus. Some 400 students gathered in front of the administration building to demand that Murray be reinstated. They stayed out of class and, every day, more students joined them.

Police were called in to contain the demonstrations and disperse the protesters. They sprayed mace and swung batons. The protests grew.

"This went on day after day," remembers Varnado, "everybody was under attack."

A new president takes charge

A few weeks after the strike began, SF State's president, Robert Smith, resigned. His replacement was S.I. Hayakawa, a jaunty, self-assured semantics professor, who would be remembered for his hard-line tactics and his signature headgear: a hand-knit, multicolored tam o'shanter.

Hayakawa had been born in Canada to Japanese parents. He became an American citizen after his family immigrated to the U.S., and in his early adult life he was a Democrat (his first vote was for Adlai Stevenson in 1956).

After the strike, he would become a Republican (and eventually, a U.S. senator).

Hayakawa became famous for climbing atop a sound truck and ripping the wires from loudspeakers the students were using to amplify their demands. He enjoyed the support of Gov. Ronald Reagan, who had waged his own battles with students at Berkeley over free speech, and the San Francisco police chief.

But accounts of students being beaten by uniformed cops started to circulate — and soon the students were joined by outraged faculty and members of some of the city's black communities.

Lisa Rae Gutierrez Guzman was arrested for striking at SFSU in 1968. She took a plea ended up spending her 19th birthday in jail.

Shereen Marisol Meraji/NPR

Student Laureen Chew was working in the library and remembers coming outside to one of the demonstrations. "I was at the fringe of this huge [crowd], hundreds of people" when, she says, mounted police appeared.

"Some people I know were getting hit by bayonets, with their heads bashed in, blood all over the place." Chew (who went on to teach Asian-American studies at SFSU) was arrested that day, and her biggest worry: what her mother would think.

Lisa Rae Gutierrez Guzman was also arrested that same day. "My dad had to pick me up with a bail bondsman," she recalls, chuckling. She still remembers the man's slogan: "Don't perish in jail, call Barrish for bail!" Guzman was charged with three misdemeanors and says she eventually spent 30 days in jail.

"And that was really traumatic because I spent my 19th birthday in jail."

Organizer Varnado spent a year in jail, but is philosophical: "Other people spent more."

Historian Ferreira says many people have no idea of the sacrifice these activists made: "People did time. Relationships were stressed to the point of crumbling. Word would come back to members of the Third World Liberation Front and the Black Student Union from the police saying, 'We have bullets with your name on it.' "

In the end, was it worth it?

The strike ended on March 20, 1969. The administration, in response to student demands, established a College of Ethnic Studies. The administration also agreed to accept virtually all students of color for the fall semester of 1969.

And the student strikers did have lasting effects: Eventually, the SF State's creation of a College of Ethnic Studies gave rise to similar departments around the country.