Wednesday, 18 June 2008

• This week's entry is from Advocacy Co-Chair Dorothy Young!
  
  

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  Maybe they should ban Ethnic Studies, after all.
  
  

  “The ethnic studies project is rooted in activism, with an agenda of social justice set by marginalized peoples.”  – Professor Sharon Elise
  
  Coming up on the 40^th anniversary of Ethnic Studies, and the possibility of a ban on Ethnic Studies in the state of Arizona, I’m left pondering the Third World Liberation Front and Movement and what they have brought upon us today. I have spent three years, going on four, learning to speak academic jargon and read unnecessarily wordy books about decolonization and critical race theory, writing endless papers (eight to ten pages, double-spaced), and resenting many a moment when some curious random raises their hand in an upper-div class and asks “but isn’t talking about whiteness racism too?”
  
  I have also, therefore, had the misfortune of spending too much time with other Ethnic Studies majors, nearly every one of which suffers from some sort of Ethnic Studies Snobbery and makes me want to cut them. Hard.
  
  Ethnic Studies Snobbery defined: Noun. Those kids who lord it over all others that they have read Omi and Winant backwards and forwards, those who can base an entire paper and/or conversation on critiquing Fanon and Foucault without having read an entire book (merely on excerpts), those who think that studying is good enough and that what they have read is what should be brought into practice. The future of most is as an Ethnic Studies Professor or Graduate Student, which will bring their E.S.S. to another level: Complacent Pretention. Or else, eagerly taking on a “career in activism,” perhaps working at a cultural, I mean, Community center; becoming an “art-ivist” (usually through spoken word and/or murals) and, always, always, to some degree, “organizing” (telling poor people what to do) (sometimes known as falling prey to the non-profit industrial complex). It severely worries me that critique of capitalism has long not been a part of curriculums, sometimes mentioned, yet rarely dialogued upon; that Ethnic Studies is still caught up in the idea of creating careers for majors to “take care of themselves”, a notion which too often seems to include a “need” for iPhones, designer clothing, expensive concert tickets, and whatever else.
  
  Sure, I think it’s important to base our studies on unheard stories. But I wonder how many Ethnic Studies departments are truly paying heed to Spivak’s notion of the subaltern. Of those graduates who join Teach For America because they want to bring low-income students of color (read, black and brown) out of poverty through education, without being critical of the notions of education as a critical component to the American Dream, without problematizing their own bodies entering a space to Tell People What To Do With Their Lives. Or even supposed culturally relevant or radical teaching, with Social Justice curriculums, spoken word and media incorporations: do these challenge the structures of class, geographic location, whatever the fuck else, that are creating the realities of people’s lives? Are we really being critical of our selves, our decisions, and our words when it comes to so eagerly helping others? (refer to Ivan Illich)
  
  Because really, what Ethnic Studies Majors most suffer from is know-it-all-ism. As do, admittedly, most college students in the United States.
  
  What does it matter that we have good, well-versed Ethnic Studies students that would be equally good and well-versed Sociology or Pre-Med or Zoology (I don’t know what normal people study) students?
  
  Ethnic Studies departments have worked overboard to legitimize themselves in the eye of institutions. San Francisco State University created a college of Ethnic Studies, my own department at the University of California, San Diego only does comparative and interdisciplinary work, while UCLA has taken the opposite approach with no Ethnic Studies Department and separate Asian Am, Black Studies, Chicana/Chicano, etc. However, in doing so, they are mutually reconstituting authority and legitimacy of the university to deem their work worthy of recognition. I would like to think the TWLF didn’t take the route they did in order to become a part of the institution. To become the department that receives Diversity awards for affirmative action, rather than the department that challenges power structures of the university and academia itself (academic freedom, publishing, tenure, etc.).
  
  I kind of don’t want to be part of a mediocre academic movement. If the struggle is really to bring change to the ivory tower of academia, we don’t NEED a separate department. I want to see revolutionary work within all disciplines: womyn of color studies within History paradigms, not just classes; a critical dialogue around race in the biological sciences. I want to see some fucking revolutionary math, for god’s sake! (Which, for the record, exists: I’m thinking of a professor that uses numerological theories surrounding the number 7 and Tupac’s death to teach middle and high school students).
  
  If it takes a ban for communities, for students, for the fucking PEOPLE to get fired up and put critical and radical theories into praxis (oops, another E.S.S. slip), then let it happen! If our infiltration isn’t working, if the university is going to take another twenty years to stay the same hostile environment for womyn and transgender folk, for people of color, for queer peoples, then either we devise a new scheme or we get on our feet and destroy this thing.
  
  Right now, Ethnic Studies is not informing actions or lives, at least not to the degree it is informing capitalist career choices. Do people in your Ethnic Studies classes know how to love people any better? Are they living transformative lives that inspire change in yours? Maybe my standards are too high but at least trying to live a revolutionary life is, for me, better and more important than getting an A on my paper about revolutions of the past.
  
  Dorothy Young lives in Los Angeles, attends school in San Diego, and is organizing in Hong Kong for the summer. She makes comic books ostensibly retelling fairy tales to detail her anger at the white supremacist patriarchy. Her current favorite song is “Powerplant” by Andrew Jackson Jihad.

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