Race, culture, class, and gender: The Borderlands

     "When social change begins it cannot be reversed, you cannot un-educate a person who has learned to read, you cannot humiliate the person who feels pride, and you cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore." ~Cesar Chavez

    This quote so perfectly sums up what the TUSD's Mexican-American Studies program managed to accomplish during its short time.  Denying a certain group of people an education that focuses on their history and culture contributes to the structural racism that plagues schools and society as a whole.  Ethnic studies and the dire need to make it part of the curriculum is a nationwide issue.  Recently, students from the Providence Public School Department attempted to sue the Department of Education for denying them equal access to an Ethnic Studies program.  At the beginning of the documentary, Precious Knowledge, the young man made a powerful comment, "I've never met a kid with a dysfunctional relationship to learning; but, I have met a kid with a dysfunctional relationship to school."  As an educator in an urban high school, I wholeheartedly agree with this statement.

    The nationwide dropout rate for Mexican-Americans is over 50%, which is the highest of any minority group.  Tucson Unified School District serves 32, 500 Latinx students.  Prior to the Ethnic Studies program, students felt powerless and hopeless.  They were oppressed.  However, as one young man stated, "When you plant the seed that seed will grow."  In 2002, when the Hispanic Studies Department was renamed Mexican/Raza Studies, students began to learn about their culture and they suddenly learned that it was at least 7,000 years old.  They came to realize that they were not dumb and that they did in fact belong there.  Students were encouraged to use critical thinking while following social justice pedagogy.  As students became empowered, they were cautioned about "naive consciousness" and they learned that blaming others was not productive.  Students valued having teachers who looked like them as well as teachers who went out of their way to connect with them.  Students began to find challenging work interesting because they actually cared about the material.  As students' standardized test scores suddenly began to increase, the superintendent attempted to ban classes based on culture, claiming that it was dividing them by ethnicity and causing ethnic solidarity.  Students continued to talk about systems of oppression while finding the causes and then proposing solutions to issues such as segregation and language discrimination.  They were learning through the eyes of people who looked and spoke like them.  Unfortunately, teachers were accused of indoctrinating students and turning kids into "angry young radicals".

    The Pedagogy of the Oppressed was used to argue against ethnic studies, claiming that the narrative had been hijacked.  Nevertheless, students continued to follow the "community, service, advocacy" model.  The classroom was a true community where students felt empowered, valued, and respected.  They began to defy the odds and graduated and even got accepted into college.  During its brief existence, TUSD's program served as a model for developing programs throughout the nation.  In Education Week, Dr. Bettina Love states, "I argue that you must fight with the creativity, imagination, urgency, boldness, ingenuity, and rebellious spirit of abolitionists to advocate for an education system where all Black and Brown children are thriving.  I call this abolitionist teaching. To love our children, we must struggle together to create the schools we are taught to believe are impossible:  Schools built on justice, love, joy, and anti-racism."  Dr. Love describes exactly what the TUSD ethnic studies program accomplished.

    In Anzaldua's, La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a new consciousness, Mexican philosopher, Jose Vascocelos describes his theory of inclusivity: "At the confluence of two or more genetic streams, with chromosomes constantly "crossing over," this mixture of races, rather than resulting in an inferior being, provides hybrid progeny, a mutable more malleable species with a rich gene pool.  From this cross-pollination, an "alien" consciousness is presently in the making- a new mestiza consciousness, una conciencia de mujer."  Later in the chapter, the writer echoed sentiments from the documentary, "Individually, but also as a racial entity, we need to voice our needs.  We need to say to white society: We need you to accept the fact that Chicanas are different, to acknowledge your rejection and negation of us.  We need you to own the fact that you looked upon us as less than human, that you stole our lands, our person-hood, our self-respect" (85).  When people are empowered through education, they begin to feel valued.  Simply teaching American history without acknowledging slavery and stealing of land,  while excluding different cultures from the conversation is doing a huge disservice to our students and it is the opposite of what Dr. Love and Chavez stand for.  Students need to see their history and they need to be recognized and included on a regular basis- multicultural night doesn't cut it.  Furthermore, "Seeing the chicana anew in light of her history. I seek an exoneration, a seeing through the fictions of white supremacy, a seeing of ourselves in our true guises and not as the false racial personality that has been given to us and that we have given to ourselves" (87).

    Undoubtedly, we need to "plant the seed" and allow our students to thrive and flourish.  We must give them access to the knowledge that will empower them.  We must look at history- the good, the bad, and the ugly.  By simply denying the existence of racism we are perpetuating the vicious cycle which we are trying to eradicate.  Our students need us to advocate for change.  We need to teach them about their history and we need to teach them how to think critically and how to advocate for change. Change can begin in the classroom, lesson by lesson, and day by day.  Data shows why ethnic studies matters, as evidenced in this TEDTalk.