Arizona Bans Ethnic Studies (Also, Reason and Justice)

While much condemnation has rightly been expressed toward
Arizona's anti-immigrant law, SB 1070, a less-reported and potentially more insidious
measure is set to take effect on January 1, 2011. This new law, which was
passed by the conservative state legislature at the behest of then-School
Superintendent (and now Attorney General-elect) Tom Horne, is designated as HB
2281 and is colloquially referred to as a measure to ban Ethnic Studies
programs in the state. As with SB 1070, the implications of this law are problematic,
wide-ranging, and decidedly hate-filled.

Whereas SB 1070 focused primarily on the ostensible control
of bodies, HB 2281 is predominantly about controlling minds. In this sense, it
is the software counterpart of Arizona's race-based politicking, paired with
the hardware embodied in SB 1070's "show us your papers" logic of "attrition
through enforcement" that has already resulted in tens of thousands of people
leaving the state. With HB 2281, the intention is not so much to expel or
harass as it is to inculcate a deep-seated second-class status by denying
people the right to explore their own histories and cultures. It is, in effect,
about the eradication of ethnic identity among young people in the state's
already-floundering school system which now ranks near the bottom in the
nation.

There's a word for what Arizona is attempting to do here: ethnocide. It is similar to genocide in
its scope, but it reflects the notion that it is an ethnic and/or cultural
identity under assault more so than physical bodies themselves. By imposing a
curriculum that forbids the exploration of divergent cultures while propping up
the dominant one, there's another process at work here, what we might call ethnonormativity. This takes the
teachings of one culture - the colonizer's - and makes it the standard version
of history while literally banning other accounts, turning the master narrative
into the "normal" one and further denigrating marginalized perspectives.
America's racialized past abounds with such examples of oppressed people being
denied their languages, histories, and cultures, including through enforced
indoctrination in school systems.

As if to add insult to injury, HB 2281 barely makes a
pretense to hide any of this in its language and intended scope. A close
reading of the law lays bare some of the more stark and disconcerting aspects
of its potential application in a state where Hispanic students fill nearly
half the seats in the public schools (the domain to which HB 2281 will apply).
In particular, there are three primary aspects of the law that merit further
investigation as contributing factors to the ongoing erasure of ethnic
identities and the further marginalization of people of color in Arizona.

First, there is the perverse Declaration of Policy preamble,
in which the legislature expresses its intention that pupils "should be taught
to treat and value each other as individuals" and likewise "not be taught to
resent or hate other races or classes of people." The irony here is palpable,
since SB 1070 precisely singles out "races or classes of people" in its coded
language requiring police to demand legal papers from anyone who is deemed
"reasonably suspicious" of being undocumented - which in the southwest
obviously correlates with skin color and ethnic origin. Moreover, HB 2281
itself was aimed specifically at abolishing the Raza Studies program in Tucson
(as well as all Ethnic Studies programs statewide), which translates literally
to "race" as noted in the working definition adopted by the program at San
Francisco State University:

"The term Raza literally means race or colloquially, the
people. The term figuratively has reference to the Spanish conquest of the
indigenous Indians of Mexico and the resulting mestizaje or the mixed racial
and ethnic identity of indigenous, European and African heritage unique to the
Americas. In practical usage, the term Raza refers to mestizos or mixed
peoples; we have the blood of the conquered and conqueror, indigenous, (i.e.,
Aztec, Mayan, Olmec, Yaqui, Zapotec and numerous other Native Americans),
European, African, and Asian. The term Raza was popularized by Mexican
educator, Jose Vasconcellos who wrote about La Raza Cosmica to
inclusively refer to a new 'race' of people born out of the neo-Columbian New
World."

In this sense, we come to perceive the aim of banning Ethnic
Studies as an attempt to single out the histories and cultures of certain
people based expressly on race and class. While the Arizona legislature states
its intention to prevent resentment and hatred of others, the new law fosters
precisely that, and in denying people their histories further encourages
self-hatred as well. Indeed, people kept from knowing where they come from have
a difficult time knowing where they are going, creating a self-fulfilling
downward spiral that is common where people are categorized and labeled as
"other" and/or "lesser" vis-a-vis the dominant norm. As such, we see that HB
2281 actually violates its own provisions by promoting that which it claims to
eliminate.

The second critical aspect concerns the law's main
prohibitions against any education programs that (1) "promote the overthrow of
the United States government," (2) "promote resentment toward a race or class
of people," (3) "are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic
group," and (4) "advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils
as individuals." The problems here are manifest, starting with the reflexively
implicit link to terrorism contained in the first provision - as if to say that
ethnic solidarity is somehow akin to attempting to overthrow the government. The
third provision is even more problematic in its potential implications, since a
plausible argument can be made that the entire mainstream public education
curriculum is precisely designed for pupils of a particular ethnic group -
namely the dominant, white, Eurocentric group that defines its history and
worldview as the "normal" or "standard" ones against which subaltern
perspectives are to be judged as deviant and, under HB 2281, banned.

The fourth provision does double duty in prioritizing
individualism over group-centric processes, reflecting another deeply-rooted
cultural bias and projecting it back as the norm. The libertarian and
individualistic foundations of Western culture are viewed as iconic in Arizona,
and it is no coincidence that the more communitarian impulses of Raza peoples
are denigrated as politically dangerous and pedagogically bereft. Again, the
worldview of the oppressor is normalized in its rugged individualism, and
attempts to break down any movement toward solidarity and unified action among
people of the disfavored class. This also expresses contemptuous judgment
toward solidarity-based movements grown in the Western world, including the
rise of union organizing, anti-globalization and anti-war activism, and the
mobilizations of people against totalitarianism in the Eastern bloc nations.
What the Arizona legislature completely fails to grasp is that individual
identity arises out of cultural consciousness - in other words, that it is
ethnic solidarity in itself that provides people with the grounding necessary
to know who they are as individuals.

Finally, HB 2281 contains an exemption for teaching students
about episodes such as the Holocaust, genocides, and "the historical oppression
of a particular group of people based on ethnicity, race, or class." In
essence, combined with the provisions noted above, this means that students of
a particular group can be taught about their history of subjugation but not about
their spirit of solidarity; they can focus on their decimation but not their
emancipation. This sinister portion of the bill strives to reinforce pain at
the expense of pride, encouraging young people to internalize the oppression
delivered by the dominant culture and make it part of their self-consciousness
as "other" in a world whose norms are built on the inherent superiority of the
master class. Thus, the law seeks not only to prevent the teaching of histories
and values that might empower marginalized people, but further endorses the
transmission of destructive episodes and ideologies that can only serve to
increase the group's collective disempowerment.

In all of these ways, HB 2281 is a potent example of
legislative bigotry and open persecution of people based on factors such as
race and class. As with SB 1070, HB 2281 is also self-violating in that it
promotes precisely what it claims to prohibit, namely ethnic chauvinism and
"resentment toward a race or class of people." Both of these laws - as well as
similar ones in the offing being considered by the Arizona legislature - are
entirely counterproductive and manifestly unjust. Confronting similar patterns
of legislated intolerance and the widespread attempt to reduce a category of
people to second-class status based primarily on ethnic origin, Martin Luther
King, Jr. famously wrote in his landmark essay Letter from a Birmingham Jail, following the teachings of St. Augustine,
that "an unjust law is no law at all." King further reminds us that "injustice
anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere," calling upon us to recognize the
interlinked nature of destinies and, indeed, the inherent solidarity of our
struggles, and further counsels that in this effort "one has a moral
responsibility to disobey unjust laws."

Carrying the logic further, King articulates a framework for
resistance that applies as much in Arizona today as it did in the South during
the Jim Crow era:

"Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All
segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and
damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority
and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the
terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an 'I it'
relationship for an 'I thou' relationship and ends up relegating persons to the
status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and
sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful.... An unjust law is a
code that a numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey
but does not make binding on itself. This is difference made legal.... A law is
unjust if it is inflicted on a minority that ... had no part in enacting or
devising the law.... We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in
Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in
Hungary was 'illegal.'"

By denying marginalized peoples their own stories and
understandings, HB 2281 likewise denies the "conquerors" the capacity to come
to terms with the full implications of history, thus literally enabling the
perpetuation of a state of "denial" that inhibits the development of necessary
processes of atonement, accountability, and reconciliation. As with laws
associated with segregationist and tyrannical regimes throughout history, HB
2281 and SB 1070 are inherently unjust, and hence are "no laws at all." They
must be disobeyed, not out of spite or hatred, but more so to uplift the
oppressors and the oppressed alike, as Paulo Freire has suggested. In this
sense, solidarity transcends its narrow bounds, and the struggle itself is our
finest education.