Жасырап қалған тарихтар: Этностық зерттеулер мен билік арақатынасы

Interdisciplinary study of race, ethnicity and nationality's relationships with power

Ethnic studies, in the United States, is the interdisciplinary study of difference—chiefly race, ethnicity, and nation, but also sexuality, gender, and other such markings—and power, as expressed by the state, by civil society, and by individuals. Its origin comes before the civil rights era, as early as the 1900s. During this time, educator and historian W. E. B. Du Bois expressed the need for teaching black history. However, Ethnic Studies became widely known as a secondary issue that arose after the civil rights era. Ethnic studies was originally conceived to re frame the way that specific disciplines had told the stories, histories, struggles and triumphs of people of color on what was seen to be their own terms. In recent years, it has broadened its focus to include questions of representation, racialization, racial formation theory, and more determinedly interdisciplinary topics and approaches. As opposed to international studies, which was originally created to focus on the relations between the United States and Third World countries, ethnic studies was created to challenge the already existing curriculum and focus on the history of people of different minority ethnicity in the United States. Ethnic studies is an academic field that spans the humanities and the social sciences; it emerged as an academic field in the second half of the 20th century partly in response to charges that traditional social science and humanities disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and area studies were conceived from an inherently Eurocentric perspective. "The unhyphenated American phenomenon tends to have colonial characteristics," notes Jeffrey Herlihy Mera in After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism: "English language texts and their authors are promoted as representative; a piece of cultural material may be understood as unhyphenated—and thus archetypal—only when authors meet certain demographic criteria; any deviation from these demographic or cultural prescriptions are subordinated to hyphenated status."

In the United States, the field of ethnic studies evolved out of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s and early 1970s, which contributed to growing self awareness and radicalization of people of color such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and American Indians. Ethnic studies departments were established on college campuses across the country and have grown to encompass African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Raza Studies, Chicano Studies, Mexican American Studies, Native American Studies, Jewish Studies, and Arab Studies. The first strike demanding the establishment of an Ethnic Studies department occurred in 1968, led by the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a joint effort of the Black Student Union, Latin American Students Organization, Asian American Political Alliance, Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor, and Native American Students Union at San Francisco State University. This was the longest student strike in the nation's history and resulted in the establishment of a School of Ethnic Studies. President S. I. Hayakawa ended the strike after taking a hardline approach when he appointed Dr. James Hirabayashi the first dean of the School (now College) of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, and increased recruiting and admissions of students of color in response to the strike's demands. In 1972, The National Association for Ethnic Studies was founded to foster interdisciplinary discussions for scholars and activists concerned with the national and international dimensions of ethnicity encouraging conversations related to anthropology, Africana Studies, Native Studies, Sociology and American Studies among other fields. Minority students at The University of California at Berkeley united under their own Third World Liberation Front the TWLF, initiated the second longest student strike in US history on January 22, 1969. The groups involved were the Mexican American Student Confederation, Asian American Political Alliance, African American Student Union, and the Native American group. The four co chairmen of the TWLF were Ysidro Macias, Richard Aoki, Charlie Brown, and LaNada Means. This strike at Berkeley was even more violent than the San Francisco State strike, in that more than five police departments, the California Highway Patrol, Alameda County Deputies, and finally, the California National Guard were ordered onto the Berkeley campus by Ronald Reagan in the effort to quash the strike. The excessive use of police force has been cited with promoting the strike by the alienation of non striking students and faculty, who protested the continual presence of police on the Berkeley campus. The faculty union voted to join the strike on March 2, and two days later the Academic Senate called on the administration to grant an interim Department of Ethnic Studies. On March 7, 1969, President Hitch authorized the establishment of the first Ethnic Studies Department in the country, followed by the establishment of the nation's first College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University on March 20, 1969. In 1994, with Taiwanese government's support, National Dong Hwa University established the first Ethnic Studies institute in Taiwan, the Graduate Institute of Ethnic Relations and Cultures, which nowadays is one of leading institution of Ethnic Studies in Asia for its Austronesian and Taiwanese Indigenous Studies. Courses in ethnic studies address perceptions that, because of the Eurocentric bias and racial and ethnic prejudice of those in power, American historians have systematically ignored or undervalued the roles of such ethnic minorities as Asian Americans, Blacks, Mexicans, Latinos and Native Americans. Ethnic studies also often encompasses issues of intersectionality, where gender, class, and sexuality also come into play. There are now hundreds of African American, Asian American, Mexican American and Chicano/Latino Studies departments in the US, approximately fifty Native American Studies departments, and a small number of comparative ethnic studies programs. College students, especially on the East Coast, continue to advocate for Ethnic Studies departments. The Ethnic Studies Coalition at Wellesley College, the Taskforce for Asian and Pacific American Studies at Harvard University, and CRAASH at Hunter College are among student organizations calling for increased institutional support for Ethnic Studies. Ethnic studies as an institutional discipline varies by location. For instance, whereas the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley comprises separate "core group" departments, the department at UC San Diego does not do so. In May 2016 there was another Hunger Strike that took place at San Francisco State University. It was started by Hassin Bell, Julia Retzlaff, Sachiel Rosen, and Ahkeel Mesteger, all students at SFSU, in the attempt to both defend and improve the College of Ethnic Studies. They were on strike for 10 days and their strike reached national attention that helped end the strike with a signed compromise from the SFSU president Leslie Wong. The compromise consisted of allocating $250,000 to the Ethnic Studies department. Branches of ethnic studies include but are not limited to African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American/ Indigenous Peoples' Studies, and Latino/a Studies. A discipline within ethnic studies is African American Studies, which consist of studying people of African descent and their ideologies, customs, cultures, identities, and practices by drawing on social sciences and the humanities. The changes made to educational and social institutions by the U. S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s can be traced as the origin for the development of African American Studies as a discipline. When initially created, in many cases to end protests, the African American Studies programs at predominately white universities were underfunded and not highly esteemed. Since the 1970s, African American Studies programs, in general, have become reputable and more concretely established within predominantly white universities. Teaching African American Studies has been categorized by two methods: Afrocentric, which relies solely on text by black authors and are led by all black faculties, and traditional methods, which are more inclusive of non black authors and are more broad in their studies. Scholars whose work was influential to the development of African American Studies, and whose work is studied include W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, and George Washington Williams. The first attempts at establishing some form of Native American Studies came in 1917 from Oklahoma Senator Robert Owen, who called for an 'Indian Studies' program at the University of Oklahoma. Several decades later, the "Red Power" Movement of the 1960s, in a time of high minority and suppressed group activism in the US, sought to get Native American Studies into higher education. San Francisco State University and University of California at Berkeley were the first to adopt these fields into their departments in 1968. Navajo Community College, later renamed Diné College, was the first of these institutions. Paula Gunn Allen who was a writer and educator of Native American Studies, poet Simon J. Ortiz. Asian American Studies, different than Asian Studies, is a subfield within ethnic studies, which focuses on the perspectives, history, culture, and traditions of the Asian peoples' in the United States. Asian American Studies originated in the late 1960s at the San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) where a student strike led to the development of the program at the school. To counter this historical representation of ideas, Asian American Studies became one of the interdisciplinary fields that emphasized teaching the perspective, voice, and experience of the minority community. Prose, plays, songs, poetry (Haiku) and several other forms of writing were popular during the 1970s as methods of Asian American expression. Among the most read authors were Frank Chin, Momoko Iko, Lawson Fusao Inada, Meena Alexander, Jeffery Paul Chan, and John Okada, Important to whiteness studies, according to scholars such as Richard Dyer, is understanding how white bodies are both invisible and hypervisible, and how representations of whiteness in visual culture reflect and, in turn, shape a persistent commitment to white supremacy in the U. S. even as some claim the nation is currently a colorblind meritocracy. In addition to visual culture, space also reproduces and normalizes whiteness. The sociologist George Lipsitz argues that whiteness is a condition rather than a skin color, a structured advantage of accumulated privilege that resurfaces across time spatially and obscures the racism that continues to mark certain bodies as out of place and responsible for their own disadvantage. Such attention to geography is an example of the way ethnic studies scholars have taken up the study of race and ethnicity across almost all disciplines using various methodologies in the humanities and social sciences. In general, an "Ethnic Studies approach" is loosely defined as any approach that emphasizes the cross relational and intersectional study of different groups. George Lipsitz is important here as well, demonstrating how the project of anti black racism defines the relationship between the white spatial imaginary and other communities of color. Thus, the redlining of the 1930s that prevented upwardly mobile African Americans from moving into all white neighborhoods also forced Latino and Asian bodies into certain spaces.

Ethnic studies exists in dialogue—and occasional tension—with a variety of related fields and disciplines. In the case of traditional disciplines, ethnic studies often confronts resistance if not outright hostility to its mission. With many departments clinging to the ideal of objective and detached scholarship, the field is generally seen as a more politicized (and therefore, for some, a more troubling) form of academic inquiry. This hostility reflects, in some cases, a disinterest in the diversification of subject areas and the preservation of historically prominent fields. In the case of interdisciplinary fields, as ethnic studies has moved from a study of specific racial and ethnic groups towards the scrutiny of power dynamics, it has grown closer to fields like African American studies, Asian American studies, Native American studies, Latino studies, and American studies. Even more recently, ethnic studies has grown philosophically and politically closer to LGBTQ studies. "Ethnic Studies" is often housed within departments or units with many different names. Teaching units often have a range of different names—Critical Ethnic Studies, Comparative American Cultures, Ethnic Studies, or American Studies and Ethnicity—for curricula and faculty who are gathered together under the same set of academic interests. A wide variety of curricula are employed in the service of each of these rubrics. Occasionally, the gap between American Studies and Ethnic Studies can be productively bridged, especially in departments where the bulk of faculty focus on race and ethnicity, difference and power. But that bridgework can be troublesome, obscuring one foci and sharpening the emphasis on another. As a consequence of this great variation, though, ethnic studies needs to be understood within its specific institutional context. And, despite considerable financial (and often political) pressure to consolidate or eliminate ethnic studies within American Studies—or to house Native American studies, Latino studies, and Asian American studies within either ethnic studies or American Studies—the relationships between these fields should be considered within each institution's governing eco system.

The Association for Ethnic Studies (AES) was founded in 1972 by several scholars who wanted to study race through an interdisciplinary approach. It was previously known as the National Association for Ethnic Studies (NAES), and was initially named the National Association of Interdisciplinary Studies for Native American, Black, Chicano, Puerto Rican, and Asian Americans. The organization was officially renamed as NAES in 1985, and then to its current name in 2018. It is the oldest ethnic studies association in the United States. From its founding, the organization has strived to promote scholarship, research, and curriculum design for its members. AES also publishes the Ethnic Studies Review, a peer reviewed journal for scholarship in ethnic studies, published by the University of California Press.

The Critical Ethnic Studies Association (CESA) began with its first conference in March 2011 at the University of California Riverside, Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide: Settler colonialism/Heteropatriarchy/White Supremacy. This prompted the people who had organized and partaken in the conference to form the association. The second conference then took place in September 2013 at the University of Illinois Chicago and it was themed, Decolonizing Future Intellectual Legacies and Activist Practices. The third conference took place from April 30 May 2015 at York University in Toronto and it is titled, Sovereignties and Colonialisms: Resisting Racism, Extraction and Dispossession. In some instances, ethnic studies has become entrapped within and similar to the mandates of liberal multiculturalism, which relies on politics beholden to US nation building and capitalist imperatives. Ethnic studies is in a difficult position, because as it gets more legitimized within the academy, it has frequently done so by distancing itself from the very social movements that were the triggers for its creation. On the other hand, ethnic studies departments have always existed on the margins of the academic industrial complex, and became further marginalized through funding cuts due to the 2008 global economic crisis. Instead of just dismissing or wholly embracing identarian nationalism, CESA seeks to construct an open dialogue around issues like white supremacy, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy, militarism, occupation, indigenous erasure, neocolonialism, anti immigration anti Islam, etc. in order to expand the parameters and capacities of ethnic studies. CESA's goal is not to romanticize all movements or dictate a specific relationship between scholars and activists. Instead, it questions the emphasis of professionalization within ethnic studies, the politics of the academic industrial complex, or the engagement of larger movements for social transformation. It recognizes that at times Ethnic Studies has been complicit in neutralizing the university, rather than questioning the university's ideologies, actions, regulation and production of knowledge, and power. It works to situate the university as a point of contention, as a location among many for political struggles. CESA invites participation from all types of people: scholars, students, activists, arts, media makers, and educators of all fields, generations, and disciplines. The Critical Ethnic Studies Association was founded as a transnational, interdisciplinary, and un disciplinary association of scholars, activists, students, artists, media makers, educators, and others who are directly concerned with interrogating the limitations of ethnic studies in order to better engage the historical stakes of the field. It organizes projects and programs to reimagine ethnic studies and its future through new interventions, both scholarly and activist based. They aim to develop an approach to scholarship, institution building, and activism animated by the spirit of the decolonial, antiracist, and other global liberationist movements that enabled the creation of Ethnic Studies in the first place. It hopes that this approach will continue to inform its political and intellectual projects. Within the organization, there is an emphasis on counteracting institutional marginalization, revisiting the ideas that prompted the creation of ethnic studies, and creating new conversations that challenge US hegemony in traditional ethnic studies. Their goals include establishing an interdisciplinary network of scholars and activists stimulating debate on critical ethnic studies, providing forums such as the biannual conference or dialogues thought seminars, social media, etc. There is also a focus on publishing a journal, Critical Ethnic Studies, for new scholarship, and to facilitate dialogues that are critical and constructive between activist and academics.

The state's public high schools must teach the subject by 2025. By 2030, it will be required for students to graduate. School districts in California are implementing ethnic studies courses into school requirements. The El Rancho Unified School District (ERUSD), which serves the area of Pico Rivera, became the first school district in California to require an ethnic studies class as part of its students' graduation requirement in 2014. The ethnic studies resolution in ERUSD was both drafted and proposed by ERUSD's board President, Aurora Villon and Vice President, Jose Lara and was presented as an effort to "expose students to global perspectives and inclusion of diversity". This graduation requirement for ERUSD high school students is expected to be fully implemented by the 2015–2016 academic school year. The ethnic studies curriculum will begin as a pilot program in at least five high schools. While LAUSD board members proposed the resolution, many students took on the efforts by creating petitions and rallies in support of the ethnic studies resolution. In February 2021, the California Board of Education approved a curriculum to include the contributions of Asian, Black, Latino, and Native Americans. This included the approval of 33 optional lesson plans for schools to choose from.

The Mexican American Studies course was first brought under attack after the Deputy Superintendent of Public Education gave a speech to students, countering an allegation that "Republicans hate Latinos." The students walked out of the speech, and Tom Horne, the Superintendent, blamed the rudeness of the students on the teachers from their Mexican American Studies courses. He called for removal of the courses. When his call was not answered, he made an effort for a bill to be put into law banning Mexican American Studies courses. which prohibited the Mexican American Studies courses, was approved in December 2010. In an effort to enforce the bill, the district court gave the Superintendent of the school district the right to withhold funding to schools that continue to teach the ethnic studies course. Judge Kowal ruled the course “biased, political, and emotionally charged,” and upheld both the bill and the withholding of funding from schools. Overseen by Judge Rakoff, the court reversed part of what the district court had ruled on banning the course. Judge Rakoff looked at the 4 categories (listed above) that constitute which classes are prohibited. The judge ruled that the ban had been passed "not for a legitimate educational purpose, but for an invidious discriminatory racial purpose and a politically partisan purpose."

Ethnic studies has always been opposed by different elements. Proponents of ethnic studies feel that this is a reactionary movement from the right. They note the rise of the conservative movement during the 1990s in the United States, in which the discipline came increasingly under attack. For proponents, the backlash is an attempt to preserve "traditional values" of Western culture, symbolized by the United States. For some critics, this is a slant by proponents to disparage criticism by false association to right wing ideology. They have no objection about African, Latino or Native American culture being legitimate topics of academic research. What they object to is the current state of ethnic studies which they see as characterized by excessive left wing political ideology, postmodernist relativism which, in their view, greatly undermined the scholarly validity of the research. However, ethnic studies is accused of promoting "racial separatism", "linguistic isolation" and "racial preference". In 2005, Ward Churchill, a professor of ethnic studies at University of Colorado at Boulder, came under severe fire for an essay he wrote called "On the Justice of Roosting Chickens", in which he claimed that the September 11 attacks were a natural and unavoidable consequence of what he views as unlawful US policy, and referred to the "technocratic corps" working in the World Trade Center as "little Eichmanns". Conservative commentators used the Churchill affair to attack ethnic studies departments as enclaves of "anti Americanism" which promote the idea of ethnic groups as "victims" in US society, and not places where serious scholarship is done. In the face of such attacks, ethnic studies scholars are now faced with having to defend the field. In the media, this takes form of characterizing the attack as right wing reactionary movement. For example, Orin Starn, a cultural anthropologist and specialist in Native American Studies at Duke University, says: "The United States is a very diverse country, and an advocate would say we teach kids to understand multiculturalism and diversity, and these are tools that can be used in law, government, business and teaching, which are fields graduates go into. It promotes thinking about diversity, globalization, how we do business and how we work with nonprofits." In reaction to criticisms that ethnic studies academics undermine the study of a unified American history and culture or that ethnic studies are simply a "colored" version of American Studies, defenders point out that ethnic studies come out of the historically repressed and denied presence of groups within the U. S. knowledge production, literature and epistemology. Efforts to merge ethnic studies with American studies have been met with fierce opposition as was the case at UC Berkeley. While the field is already decades old, the ongoing creation of new ethnic studies departments is fraught with controversy. Administrators at Columbia University attempted to placate student protests for the creation of an Ethnic Studies Department in 1996 by offering American Studies as a compromise.