California's push for ethnic studies runs into the Israel-Hamas war
California has grand ambitions for ethnic studies. By 2025, the state's public high schools — about 1,600 of them — must teach the subject. By 2030, students won't be able to graduate high school without it.
For policymakers, a goal is to give California students, 80% of whom are nonwhite, the opportunity to study a diverse array of cultures. Research has shown that ethnic studies classes can raise grades and attendance for teenagers at risk of dropping out.
But even in a liberal state like California, scholars, parents and educators have found themselves at odds over how to adapt the college-level academic discipline for high school students, especially because of its strong views on race and the IsraeliPalestinian conflict.
While the name “ethnic studies” might bring to mind a broad exploration of how ethnicity and race shape the human experience, the discipline, as taught in universities, is narrower — and more ideological.
Ethnic studies focuses on four groups: Black Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans. It aims to critique various forms of oppression and spur students to take action, often drawing analogies across disparate expanses of time and geography. The Palestinian experience of displacement is central to that exercise and has been compared by some scholars to the Native American experience.
In reworking ethnic studies for high school, California came up with a 700-page model curriculum that captures much of the discipline's leftist, activist spirit. But it added the stories of other ethnic groups, including Jewish Americans, while eliminating discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It said lessons should include “multiple perspectives” on political issues.
Now some prominent ethnic studies scholars and educators say the state has bowed to political critics and censored their field. They are promoting a competing vision, which they call “liberated ethnic studies.” It is truer to how the subject is taught in colleges but more politically fraught. It largely excludes the histories of ethnic groups, including Jews, who are typically understood as white within the discipline's context. (Arab American studies is defined as fitting into Asian American studies.) And it offers lessons that are critical of Israel — and, some argue, antisemitic.
A number of California school districts are working with curriculum consultants who embrace liberated ethnic studies, while other districts are drawing upon these materials in creating their own classes.
The dueling approaches have prompted several lawsuits and sparked a heated debate: How should millions of California teenagers engage with these explicitly activist concepts in the classroom?
Resolutions to this question may shape education across the country. States including Oregon, Vermont and Minnesota plan to introduce K-12 ethnic studies in the coming years. Ethnic studies primer
At Edward R. Roybal Learning Center, a mostly Latino high school in Los Angeles, Guadalupe Cardona's
ethnic studies students have been keenly interested this year in tracing the shift in female archetypes in Mexican culture, from Aztec mythology to the legends of the Spanish conquistadors.
“A majority of my students have never even studied their own history,” said Cardona, a leader in the liberated ethnic studies movement.
Some students, she said, had also asked her about the Israel-Hamas war.
Cardona said she explained there had been a long dispute over land in the region — a dispute that would be better solved peacefully, she added.
And she considered the discipline's approach to the topic clear.
“If someone is going to teach that conflict from a true ethnic studies perspective, it's going to be critiquing settler colonialism in Palestine,” she said.
Ethnic studies grew out of student activism at Bay Area colleges in the late 1960s, when Black, Latino, Asian and Native American students went on strike to demand more focus on their groups' histories and cultures.
Some activists were part of the Third World Liberation Front, a student group that linked racial segregation and discrimination in the United States to colonialism, imperialism and militarism across the globe.
For early scholars and students of ethnic studies, proPalestinian activism was also crucial, said Keith Feldman, chair of comparative ethnic studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Israel had recently captured the Gaza Strip and the West Bank after defeating Egypt, Jordan and Syria in the Arab-Israeli War of 1967.
And some ethnic studies scholars have argued that the 1948 founding of Israel, in the immediate wake of the Holocaust, was part of the same general pattern of settler colonialism that brought White Europeans to the Americas and led to the displacement and genocide of Native Americans.
Those frameworks are “central to the ethnic studies approach,” said Dylan Rodriguez, an ethnic studies scholar at UC Riverside.
Ethnic studies is not “a descriptive curriculum that speaks to various ethnic and racial groups' experiences,” Rodriguez said. “That is a bland form of multiculturalism.”
Instead, the discipline “is a critical analysis of the way power works in societies,” he said.
For those reasons, several ethnic studies scholars said in interviews, the Palestinian cause should be included in high school classes. It was important, they said, to stand in solidarity with Palestinian American students.
For critics, ethnic studies frameworks — such as categorizing Israeli Jews as European settlers — flatten the Jewish experience in ways that are inaccurate and, some argue, antisemitic.
About half of Israeli Jews identify as Mizrahi, meaning they have lived for hundreds or even thousands of years in the Middle East. And some Jews have always lived on the land that is now Israel, before 1948, among a Palestinian Arab majority.
There is a broad range of views in the Jewish community as to whether and when critique of Israel veers into antisemitism. Some draw a line at suggesting that Israel does not have the right to exist as a Jewish state.
“It's not appropriate to teach students that Jews are colonizers and have engaged in, quote, `land-grabbing,'” said James Pasch, senior director for national litigation at the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish group. “That course content will spread antisemitism throughout our high schools.” 2615 Pacific Coast Highway #329, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254