Arizona's Ethnic Studies Ban

In a campaign similar to the Senate race between John McCain and J. D. Hayworth, Tom Horne and the notorious Sheriff of Maricopa County Joe Arpaio are battling it out for Attorney General. All four are tripping over each other to prove who is the fairest of them all. Translated, that means the whitest of the white, the rightest of the right, and the racist of their race.

As if Arizona's immigration bill isn't outrageous enough, Tom Horne, superintendent of public instruction, wrote a bill to kill ethnic studies classes, including La Raza studies. "It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it," he has said of ethnic studies classes that, he claims, teach Hispanics to resent whites.

Governor Jan Brewer signed it into law this week.

Horne's rhetoric "'skips straight to the inflammatory charge that such learning could encourage students to revolt against US government, effectively legitimizing fears of a Mexican 'reconquista.' "Where students of ethnic studies were once merely criticized as enemies of the Western canon, they're now being vilified as enemies of Arizona state."

According to the Christian Science Monitor:

The new law threatens to withhold 10 percent of state funding from any school district or charter school that offers classes that are designed for one particular group, “advocate ethnic solidarity,” “promote resentment of a race or class of people,” or “promote the overthrow of the United States government.”

The overthrow of the government? When was the last time you heard that kind of paranoid prattle?

Sometimes one finds a nugget of wisdom in a pile of road apples.

Tucson Unified School District acting superintendent Maggie Shafer says the classes, offered by the Mexican American Studies Department, will continue and “are in full compliance with the law.”

The classes are open to all students and include non-Hispanics, she says. The Tucson district is 56 percent Hispanic. “If kids come together and they feel some sense of brotherhood from sharing a class and studying about history and possibly previous oppression, well, that’s a byproduct of the course; we’re not teaching solidarity.”

Are Women's Studies, Asian Studies, Native American Studies and Black Studies going to be next on the chopping black? Either the water table has dropped so low that these neanderthals are digesting too much sand or they've been struck by lightening on the golf course.

Further reading at Progressive Eruptions.