Cross posted at Bluetruth
California’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum: New and….Improved?
Last summer, California’s Department
of Education unveiled a model curriculum for teaching Ethnic Studies.
In addition to being loaded up with politically correct woke jargon
(“critique empire and its relationship to white supremacy, racism,
patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism,
anthropocentrism and other forms of power and oppression at the
intersections of our society.”), it had 500 pages in which Jews
were mentioned 3 times. Arab Americans, however, had 25% of the
curriculum, in which a significant portion was devoted to the
Palestinian struggle, figures such as Linda Sarsour and Ilhan Omar,
and included song lyrics about “Free Palestine”, and Israelis
“using the press so they can manufacture”. The glossary defined
BDS as a “a global social movement that currently aims to establish
freedom for Palestinians living under apartheid conditions”. In
terms of being representative of California’s demographics, there
are more Jews of Persian descent in Los Angeles County alone than
Palestinian Americans in all of California. In its list of kinds of
hatreds against minority groups in California, there is no mention of
antisemitism. Two antisemitic hate groups heralded in the ESMC as "African American spiritual and religious traditions" and
so were recommended for study -- Nation of Islam and Black
Israelites. The latter group’s teachings motivated the mass murders
in Jersey City last December. Both groups are designed as hate groups
by the Southern Poverty Law Center
As this document had been prepared by a
committee of ‘critical ethnic studies’ proponents, several of
whom had publicly endorsed BDS, none of this came as a surprise.
According to its own organization, “Critical Ethnic Studies…aims to develop an approach to scholarship, institution building, and activism that is animated by the spirit of the decolonial,antiracist, and other global liberationist movements that enabled the creation of "Ethnic Studies" and that continues to inform its politicaland intellectual projects” and “ to produce critical engagement about white supremacy, settlercolonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, militarism, occupation,indigeneity, neocolonialism, migration, and anti-blackness.”
The outcry was
immediate and fierce. On July 29, the Legislative Jewish Caucus
submitted a letter signed by every member which stated—“We have been advised that this exclusion appeared to be intentional and reflected the political bias of the drafters of the ESMC. This purposeful exclusion is deeply insulting, fundamentally inconsistent with the purposes of ethnic studies, harmful to Jewish and non-Jewish students, and indicative of an anti Jewish bias in the ESMC that would be dangerous to institutionalize in our curriculum.” Recordings of the meetings of the ESMC committee do show that they
considered, and deliberately excluded, Jews as well as other
minorities (Hindu-Americans, Armenian-Americans, Korean-Americans) in
favor of those who were represented on the committee.
State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond held a pressconference on August 14 with members of the JLC and stated that the
curriculum draft would be revised to reflect the experiences and
contributions of Jewish Americans and all oppressed groups.
"To
the concern that there is not enough balance in the model draft, we
agree that there
can be more work done to achieve
balance," Thurmond said. "We are being contacted
by many other groups that feel their
story needs to be told."
Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the
state Board of Education, issued a statement
“A model curriculum should be
accurate, free of bias, appropriate for all learners in our diverse state, and align with Governor
Newsom’s vision of a California for all. The current draft model curriculum falls
short and needs to be substantially redesigned.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom, who signed AB2016
into law, called the draft “deeply offensive in so many ways” and
vowed it would “never see the light of day.” Luis Alejo, the
former Assemblyman who sponsored AB2016, called the draft curriculum“a setback” in need of revision. Assemblyman Jose Medina, who had
introduced legislation to make ethnic studies courses based on this
new curriculum a high school graduation requirement, was one of 16
state legislators who signed a letter stating that they were
“strongly opposed” to the draft curriculum moving forward
“without significant revisions.
In all, over 18,000 comments against the
draft were received by the Board of Education, most of them the
result of activism by Jewish groups.
Given all this, the Department of
Education agreed to rework the project and take it up again in 2020.
And almost immediately, the promises made to our community began to be backtracked. Tony Thurmond talked about keeping other minorities
outside of the “Ethnic Studies” course. there are ways to
include in some of the references opportunities that speak about
other groups that have experienced mistreatment—to talk about the
Holocaust, to talk about the experience of Jews in America and in the
world, to talk about the Armenian Genocide, to talk about many
groups. And so while it will while we are recommending to the IQC
[Instructional Quality Commission] and the State Board that it be
grounded in those four groups, there will be opportunities to have
conversations about the experience and struggle of other groups..we
owe it to those who founded the ethnic studies movement to kind of
keep a sense of fidelity there. But please be sure that the
California Department of Education will be leading conversations
statewide about how we address hate, acts of violence, and how we promote the beauty of the diversity of
what our students represent in this state. And so it's not limited to
just what happens in ethnic studies. And we'll be making sure to have
broad and inclusive conversations for anyone who's interested."
And
the Critical Ethnic Studies proponents formed a group, the Save Our
Ethnic Studiescoalition, that sought to get school boards across the
state to endorse the original 500 page draft on the grounds that any
deviation from that document would be equivalent to rejecting ethnic
studies entirely. They also falsely claimed that the only opposition came from “white supremacist culture,privileged advocacy groups and institutional racism.”
Now, the
Department of Education has finally released their updated draft. You
can find it here (under agenda item 2/A/4), though it is split into multiple smaller
documents.
This new document, to its credit, has removed from its
text the entire deeply flawed and jargoned “glossary” of the
original. And there is no mention of the Israel-Arab conflict. But
once again, while there are plenty of references to white supremacy,
antisemitism (which led to the murder of 1/3 of the world’s Jews in
the last century for the crime of not being white) is nowhere to be
found. Nor, in the multiple lesson plans from around the state
provided as models, are Jews. Well, except in a mention, together
with Irish Americans, in a lesson on how we have gained “racial
privilege”.
And a dive into the sources and footnotes reveals that
while the offending material is out of the text, it’s not out of the
curriculum. One of the guidelines for the curriculum reads:
“conceptualize, imagine, and build new possibilities for
post-imperial life that promotes collective narratives of
transformative resistance, critical hope, and radical healing.”
The footnoted source is “Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales and Edward
Curammeng, “Pedagogies of Resistance: Filipina/o Gestures of
Rebellion Against the Inheritance of American Schooling,” in Tracy
Buenavista and Arshad Ali, eds., Education At War: The Fight for
Students of Color in America (New York, NY: Fordham University Press,
2018), 233–238.” Tintiangco-Cubales is a Critical Ethnic Studies
proponent who co-chaired the group that produced the disastrous first
draft. And that source includes this sentence: “The United
States*is*war. Schools are battlefields where war is waged, and the
fight is between the imperial and the colonized, white supremacy and
antiracism, and dominance and resistance.”
But wait, there’s
more! Another article that is cited in the section on “Connecting
Ourselves to Historical and Contemporary Resistance Movements That
Struggle for Social Justice on the Global and Local
Levels”. It’s called “Meeting Asian/Arab American Studies:Thinking Race, Empire, and Zionism in the U.S.” and it calls Israel a
“settler-colonial state”, and calls for “Grappling with ways to
connect anti-Zionism in the context of Middle East politics to
anti-racist and anti-imperialist movements in the U.S.”.
So—is
relegating sources that promote antisemitism into the footnotes going
to be an adequate fig leaf to get the Jewish community to ignore
them? Is erasing Jews and other minorities (Hindus, Armenians,
Koreans) from lessons on Ethnic Studies acceptable in California? I
guess that’s what we are going to find out.
