Sleeter, "The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies"
Week 5: Sleeter, Ethnic Studies
When I went back to complete my bachelor’s degree as a returning student in my mid-thirties, I decided that despite the negative implications for my potential academic career, I would major in History because it’s the subject that most interests me and I am most interested in teaching (in a single subject teaching context). I had already had a few jobs inside schools, and was fascinated by the contrasts I had been experiencing first-hand between a public charter school in a predominately black neighborhood, and the private Waldorf school. I had experienced my initial “racial awakening” while working at the charter school, and then found myself helping a very privileged and white-dominated community at the Waldorf school navigate COVID and the racial reckoning that was brought on by the murder of George Floyd. In an attempt to educate myself beyond the racist generalizations (and omissions) that were a feature of my own K-12 education, I did a lot of reading on issues of race and histories of systemic racism in the US while working at the charter school, and this self-guided education continued through my time at the Waldorf school. So, upon entering university and declaring a history major, I proceeded to seek out all the history courses which focused on the experiences of the non-white / non-mainstream groups. This was how I eventually discovered the discipline of Ethnic Studies.
I think its really important that we frame “mainstream” K-12 social studies / history education in the way that Sleeter asserts. By labeling the mainstream “Euro-American,” we can begin to see how the ethnic studies curriculum offers a corrective, rather than an additive form of multiculturalism that fails to challenge the omissions and bias of the mainstream. When I declared my dual major in ethnic studies and history, and as a result re-arranged my course selections to meet the major requirements for both disciplines, I was thrilled by the depth and diversity of the content. In ethnic studies, I had found the critical framework which contextualized all of the shortcomings of “mainstream” social studies curriculum, while studying content which offered a corrective for all the gaps and generalizations in my own education. Its alarming how under-prepared citizens are to engage with the reality of contemporary racial injustice in the US, based on our mainstream education. It’s an outrage how under-prepared teachers are for engaging with this content and navigating student and community concerns around this subject. I was privileged to engage with both my own re-learning process, while learning along with other future educators in a course (which was unfortunately, the other students’ only required exposure to histories of systemic racism, meeting the “race and ethnicity” requirement for their degree). I am benefitting greatly from exposure to those consistent themes that Sleeter identifies in their article, which were reflected in all of my ethnic studies courses. This is where superficial understandings of ethnic studies as a multicultural additive, collide with the reality that ethnic studies is critical, decolonial, and subversive: its not just about showing non-white students more representation in their curriculum, it’s about contextualizing the formation and inter-relation of the primary racial subgroups which have evolved over the course of US history, for all students to better understand their positionality and what it means to be a citizen of the US. I explain to skeptics, that I learned more about what it means to be white in my course about pan-African freedom movements, then I ever did in mainstream education – which treated whiteness as an invisible, default expectation rather than its own identity with its own racialized positionality.
I can reflect on my own K-12 education in this regard, and the invisibility of whiteness and the privilege it affords is a defining feature of my experience. For a white person raised in whiteness the way I had been, I could not see white cultural hegemony running through all facets of life in our broader society: rather, I experienced my own whiteness as a sort of "non-cultural" identity, and found myself envying other cultural groups for the depth of heritage and connection to community I imagined they felt (completely overlooking how this played out in the context of mainstream cultures of power). My whiteness was of the "not-racist" kind, which blinded me to the racist outcomes of the systems I unwittingly upheld through my thoughts, actions, and influence. I was raised to conflate cultural appreciation and appropriation, unable to see how problematic it was that my family decorated the house with relics from a mainstream approximation of Native American cultures, or how the music I consumed reflected the erasure of black American contributions through a system that rewarded white interlopers with greater prestige and financial success than the black artists they "borrowed" from.
In the ethnic studies classes I have taken part in, I found my own understanding of whiteness and racialized identity in our society deeply enriched, and many questions or discomforts I had were surfaced and examined in a critical manner. Ethnic studies is valuable for all students, from all backgrounds, to better understand the story of race and power throughout US history, and to understand their own positionality within this system with greater depth, as well as compassion for the experiences of others. Rather than feeling guilty or ashamed as many in the opposition fear will be the case for white students, I felt a sense of relief: the discomfort and cultural longing I had experienced could be explained. It turns out, I wasn't flawed for unconsciously rejecting the stories my culture whispered in my ear while I slept, which offered shallow justifications for the status quo. In ethnic studies courses, I have experienced and I have seen students experience similar forms of relief: being armed with the critical histories and analyses which can make sense of our troubled US history while contextualizing the cultural, ideological, and political wars which rage on between competing factions which make up the landscape of informed discourse in the US.
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For additional resources associated with the topic of ethnic studies, I decided to check out the Kanopy streaming access we have as students of RIC. In addition to Precious Knowledge, there are a few additional documentary resources which I have yet to check out but find I'm interested in watching. Tim Wise's book was made into a doc titled White Like Me: Race, Racism, and White Privilege in America. Also, there is a James Baldwin documentary called I Am Not Your Negro: James Baldwin and Race in America.
Even more relevant to our studies as future educators, Pushout: the Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools as well as Teach Us All: Segregation and Education in the United States are just a few more of the many documentaries available to RIC students through Kanopy.
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