Julianne Hing on Arizona's Ethnic Studies ban

I was entranced by that photo. And something about old Asian people stirs up feelings of automatic reverence. I blame my upbringing. The photo also reminded me just how deep Asian-Americans’ roots in this country go, and my ignorance of that history. Ethnic studies courses offer a version of this experience for all students of color, a chance to look at history and see the images of ancestors, however distant, reflected back at them. The dominant message that Asian-Americans are outsiders and will forever be foreign is so entrenched in our culture that proof to the contrary can still feel like a precious discovery. Knowing that I have a history that is much bigger than my own small life makes me feel like I have the right to be in this country, and an obligation to defend my community and other people society would be more comfortable labeling perpetual unwelcome outsiders.

I’ve actually only ever taken one ethnic studies course. It was a powerful one (thank you, Professor Vo). It didn’t make me hate other races or want to overthrow the U.S. government. It made me want to fight to better this country.

A counter perspective. Ethnic studies didn’t make me want to overthrow this country. It gave me not only a new set and range of critical perspectives, but also what I believe is a fuller understanding on the histories, the politics, and the ethical foundations of this country. It gave me a preliminary appreciation, a cursory glimpse of the histories that had to be erased, the lives that had to disappear from view, the ways of experiencing, being in, and relating—to the world and to others—that had to be suppressed and distorted, in order for this country to become what it is.

What I appreciate about my training in ethnic studies is that it did not, or did not usually, give history to me as a refuge in which I could glimpse the truest representation of what I was. Jamaica Kincaid’s author-figure in Autobiography of My Mother hit it on the head: “For me history was not a large stage filled with commemoration, bands, cheers, ribbons, medals, the sound of fine glass clinking and raised high up in the air; in other words, the sounds of victory. For me history was not only the past: it was the past and it was also the present. I did not mind my defeat. I only minded that it had to last so long; I did not see the future, and that is perhaps how it should be.”

I learned to confront the assurance that knowledge of history was going to make me whole. It gave history to me in the forms of struggle, resistance, failure, silence, escape, repetition. Disappearance. Confinement. James Baldwin in 1970: “American people…appear to glory in their chains, now more than ever, they appear to measure their safety in chains and corpses.” 250,000 or so people incarcerated then, well over two million now. Repetition, failure, silence, escape. Tempus fugit.

It is a bad idea to romanticize the sixties and the seventies. But that shouldn’t stop us from recognizing that it was permissible in 1970 in a way that it profoundly is not now to question the very legitimacy of this country. I think whether or not the U.S. government should be overthrown is not only a fair question, but one of the most ethical ones that a person could dare to press. Yet at the same time, once we find ourselves asking or answering to the question of whether or not ethnic studies makes students want to overthrow the U.S. government, we should recognize that we are already trapped. It’s not just because such a question radically overestimates ethnic studies’ real power as it is presently constituted within a U.S. education system that has attempted to evacuate it of radical (and much of its transformative) content. It’s not just because universities have aggressively attempted to reshape ethnic studies so that its role is to provide feelgood ethnic heritage courses for the ascendant people-of-color petit bourgeoisie, museumized and nostalgic representations of social movements, and/or a flimsy fulfillment of checkbox general education requirements (usually in contexts that make knowledge of one “ethnic” community fundamentally replaceable with others). It’s also because in the structure of the question, “does ethnic studies make students want to overthrow the U.S. government?”, the state actually disappears.

Which is to say, the question reveals how unwilling we are to entertain the possibility that it is not ethnic studies but the U.S government that makes people want to overthrow the U.S. government. Many, if not most, people who graduate from public universities these days have to take an ethnic studies course in one form or another as a result to the gen-edization of ethnic studies content. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m not seeing a lot of these classes leading people to take up arms.

What I find most important about ethnic studies is not primarily the possibility that they will catalyze governmental overthrow. It’s about what, and how, and how deeply, and how differently, they might teach us to want. It’s hard not to traffic in platitudes here, but it’s about the world that they might teach us to see as just, as right as possible, as already here and on the way. The danger of ethnic studies might not be in what we are being told they are against—against this country, against capitalism, against settlerism. It is, I think, just as much about the possibility of what they might teach us to be for, to desire, to feel entitled to, to embrace and thereby to be otherwise. Unforeseen collaborations. Radical forms of social equality. The transformative restoration of lands. A relationship to the world not based in exploitation or domination. Ways of living together we don’t have language for, not yet. They might teach us how to move and be moved by forces beyond the lethal necessity that capitalism produces only to exploits. But if that world is to be possible, to crib from Andy Smith, is the U.S. even necessary?

(Source: bollywoodsuperstar, via wecanbenew-deactivated20120105)