It’s never a good thing when you hear about something like this:
Officials are currently bringing to bear all their influence in the public school curriculum, going so far as to enter classrooms to confiscate books and other materials and to oversee what can be taught. After decades of debate over whether we might be able to curtail ever so slightly the proliferation of violent pornography, the censors have managed a quick and thorough coup over educational materials in…
These books and materials must be truly, objectively dangerous. What possible subject could be so controversial that books would be confiscated?
Yes, that’s right. Ethnic studies.
Dangerous? Perhaps if you personally are a personification of a majority privilege, if you exist solely as an avatar of that abstraction. Otherwise only in the fever dreams of the politicians who passed Arizona House Bill 2281 in 2010 and the dreams of their supporters.
But what is AZ HB 2281? That is a bill that, despite recognizing within the bill itself that it is the state’s role to impose minimum curriculum standards on individual schools, sets out the following.
States that the Legislature finds and declares that public school pupils should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people.
Note that it does not state that any of these things are not happening in the absence of this law. This is an affirmation of a value, not a call to action.
Prohibits a school district or charter school from including in its program of instruction any courses or classes that:
Ø Promote the overthrow of the United States government.
I’m thinking they may have a problem finding one, particularly as the Smith Act remains on the books in the U.S.
Ø Promote resentment toward a race or class of people.
What exactly promotes resentment? Is historical truth disallowed under this law if it justly promotes resentment? If you don’t think that can happen, it might be worth thinking about the fact that the law later exempts “classes for Native American pupils that are required to comply with federal law.” Do we stop teaching about the realities of U.S. slavery?
How about economic or demographic truths? How many people have to be resentful? Do we get to insist that the 1% need to stop being taught to resent the 99%?
Ø Are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.
This would be a lovely thing if it weren’t for the part where white students aren’t considered to be “ethnic” in any way. Designing primarily for them is just fine. It is, in fact, invisible.
Ø Advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.
Don’t forget, boys and girls, that if you have an ethnic identity of which legislators are aware, you are not individuals. And if your school insists on acknowledging that you can both identify as having an ethnicity and be an individual, it can have its state funding taken away.
I’m being flip, because I’m angry, but this is really the central point of this law. Linda Martín Alcoff explains for the New York Times:
If the scientific status of race reveals the disconnect between reality, on the one hand, and common ideas and practices on the other, then we need to train our attention on the latter. Race is a socially constructed category with a resultant set of very real experiences. In an important sense, after all, races exist absolutely as social and historical entities. Biologists and social scientists may have rejected the concept, and many may declare that we are now post-racial, but one’s apparent racial identity continues to determine job prospects, career options, available places to live, potential friends and lovers, reactions from police, credence from jurors and whether one can walk around safely at night wearing a hoodie. Scholarly debates have not changed these facts, as the tragic case of Trayvon Martin has revealed.
Race may not be in our DNA, but it is all over the history of Western literature, in Melville as much as in Mark Twain, Charles Dickens as well as Conrad. The white imaginary — in Toni Morrison’s evocative phrase — constructs “Americanness” in racial terms while undertaking what she calls “elaborate strategies” to erase its own influence from view.
The operations of race are thus complex and can take some work — critical work — to render visible.
Visibility. That’s the problem. That’s what happens when you stop taking each member of an ethnic group and treating them like an individual. For an individual, having an individual experience, anything could cause that experience. When you congregate those individuals into ethnic groups and compare the experiences of those groups, the possibilities for explaining the differences in treatment are greatly reduced.
The possibilities that remain are uncomfortable. Some of them are strongly resistant to change. Some of them can only be changed through strategies that are highly inconvenient–though not dangerous–for the majority.
It’s ever so much easier to legislate that schools can’t deal with students in ways that would allow these problems to become visible. It’s ever so much easier to say they can’t say anything that would expose students to reasons they should feel resentful than it is to fix the realities that feed the resentment. At least, it seems easy on the surface.
The truth, however, is that as long as there is unequal treatment based on some kind of classification, those classes are going to continue to fall out. Their members will continue to gather and they will continue to validate each other’s experiences and they will continue to learn that there are things worth resenting. Trying to hide the problems instead of fixing them is only going to give them one more thing to resent.