FREE//GRATUITO
PUBLISHED BY ACCIÓN LATINA
April 6-19, 2023
Vol. 53 No. 7
IN DEFENSE OF ETHNIC STUDIES: TEACHING ANTI-RACIST COURSES DESPITE BACKLASH
A LA DEFENSA DE LOS ESTUDIOS ÉTNICOS: IMPARTIR CURSOS DE ANTIRRACISMO PESE A LA RESISTENCIA
Mara Cavallaro
Mara Cavallaro El Tecolote
El Tecolote
Mara Cavallaro is El Tecolote’s Report for America Corps Member who reports on mental health and healthcare inequality in the Latinx community.
Mara Cavallaro es miembro de Report for America y reporta para El Tecolote sobre la salud mental y la desigualdad en la atención médica en la comunidad Latinx.
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n the fall of 2018, Capuchino High School, one of seven in the San Mateo Union High School District, piloted an Ethnic Studies course. The entire freshman class was enrolled, and they were all taught by Jackie Rogers, who for multiple class periods a day, every day, welcomed 30 youngsters to their first academic discussions about identity, race, and gender. “I’m not your first Ethnic Studies teacher [though],” she would say. “Families, relatives, [and] ancestors” have all been teachers already. “Every single one of [you] has been doing Ethnic Studies before stepping into [this] space.” At the end of the year, in a survey of the nearly 200 students in that first cohort, 85 percent said they would recommend the course to other students. 80 percent said the class helped them feel “more empowered in their education,” and nearly 70 percent felt more empowered in their communities. “I remember the kids being really excited,” Rogers says. “It was just wonderful. To provide this space for students … who may not have seen themselves in curriculum — [for them] to learn more about their histories … and feel affirmed for the beauty that they bring into the space.” That spring, the school board approved the semester-long course as a graduation requirement for the entire district — following a rigorous course approval process. A few months after that, in the summer, the state of California made public its own draft curriculum. It seemed like mandatory Ethnic Studies was finally on the horizon — until misrepresentations of the course came rolling in. There were claims that the state model curriculum was anti-Semitic, that it was unbalanced, that it was too political. “Much of the backlash came from American Jewish Zionist groups who opposed the inclusion of Palestinian topics—including a mention of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—within the Arab American studies portion of the Asian American module,” Jewish Currents reported in 2020. Complaints forced the state curriculum back into a revision process, where Arab American studies was removed from the Asian American module, and re-introduced in a new
of the SMUHSD, told El Tecolote. Then came the personal attacks. “My work email was just full of hate mail,” Shoman says. “It was awful. Vile, dirty, gross, invoking me, my family, my kids, wishing death. All of those things.” It got so bad that the district had to place filters on her email, and delete her voicemail messages. By the end of January, hundreds of copy-paste form letters had been sent to administration, demanding not only the removal of Shoman but an “update [to the] Ethnic Studies curriculum.” (Andrade Zúñiga, who combed through the emails, estimates that just five to ten percent were from parents who had kids in the district. Many were sent from established groups that opposed Ethnic Studies and Critical Race Theory. Others came from members of a local temple, where the template was distrib-
n el otoño de 2018, la Escuela Preparatoria Capuchino, una de las siete del Distrito Unificado de Escuelas Preparatorias de San Mateo (SMUHSD, por sus siglas en inglés), puso a prueba un curso de Estudios Étnicos. Todo el grupo del primer año estaba inscrito y Jackie Rogers fue la profesora, quien durante varios períodos impartiendo la materia al día, todos los días, dio la bienvenida a 30 jóvenes a sus primeras discusiones académicas sobre identidad, raza y género. “No soy tu primera profesora de Estudios Étnicos”, le dijo, “Familia, parientes, [y] ancestros han sido sus profesores. Cada uno ha tomado Estudios Étnicos antes de ingresar a [este] espacio”. Al final del año, en una encuesta realizada a casi 200 estudiantes de esa primera generación, el 85 por ciento dijo que recomendaría el curso a otras y otros estudiantes. El 80 por ciento expresó que la clase los ayudó a sentirse “más empoderados en su educación”, y casi el 70 por ciento se sintió más empoderada o empoderado en sus comunidades. “Recuerdo que estaban muy emocionados”, dice Rogers. “Fue simplemente maravilloso. Brindar este espacio a las y los estudiantes... que pueden no haberse visto a sí mismos en el plan de estudios, [para que ellos] aprendan más sobre sus historias... y se sientan afirmados por la belleza que aportan al espacio”. Esa primavera, la junta escolar aprobó hacer este curso de un semestre un requisito de graduación para todo el distrito —seguido de un riguroso proceso de aprobación. Unos meses después, en el verano, el estado de California hizo público su propio plan de estudios preliminar. Parecía como si la materia sobre Estudios Étnicos obligatorios finalmente estuviera en el horizonte, hasta que aparecieron tergiversaciones del curso. Hubo afirmaciones de que el plan de estudios modelo estatal era antisemita, que estaba desequilibrado, que era demasiado político. “Gran parte de la reacción violenta provino de grupos sionistas judíos estadounidenses que se opusieron a la inclusión de temas palestinos, incluida una mención del movimiento Boicot, Desinversión y Sanciones (BDS), dentro de la parte
See ETHNIC STUDIES, page 9
Vea ESTUDIOS ÉTNICOS, página 9
Jackie Rogers, profesora de la materia Estudios Étnicos en la Escuela Preparatoria Capuchino, en su salón de clases. Jackie Rogers, an Ethnic Studies teacher at Capuchino High School, poses for a portrait in her classroom. Courtesy: Jackie Rogers
“There is joy [and] community in our classrooms that may not be the case in other ones. I think that’s the heart of Ethnic Studies. Action, community, critical thinking, discussion, joy, and love.” - Jackie Rogers, Capuchino High School Ethnic Studies teacher
chapter called “Seeking Models of Inter-Ethnic Bridge Building.” Mentions of BDS, activists like Linda Sarsour, and Muslim-American congresswomen like Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar were erased completely. Almost all of the writers of the original curriculum — Ethnic Studies scholars — asked for their names to be removed from the new, final version. When AB 101 — the state bill requiring Ethnic Studies — was on track to be approved in October of 2020, Governor Newsom vetoed it because of the backlash. The bill wasn’t passed until a year later, with its revised model curriculum, in October of 2021. By then, Ethnic Studies had been running smoothly in the San Mateo Union High School District (SMUHSD) for years. Thousands of first-years had taken the course. But this year, amid a wider context of book bans, white supremacist historical erasure, and passage of ‘an-
ti-Critical Race Theory’ legislation around the country, local backlash began to leak in. First, it was a Fox News article targeting the district’s director of Ethnic Studies, Dr. Samia Shoman — who also happens to be the only Palestinian, Muslim-American administrator in the SMUHSD. Fox News decried Shoman’s support for classroom analysis of “systemic racism and oppression” as an “extreme version of Black Lives Matter Curriculum,” and attempted to paint her as anti-Semitic for criticizing the Israeli government’s human rights abuses. The rhetoric was all familiar. It featured the same mischaracterizations used to undermine the state’s Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) in 2020, and the same frameworks being pushed in Florida. “It’s the same thing. It was only a matter of time before [backlash] came to San Mateo, California,” Ligia Andrade Zúñiga, board president