Sandy Hook

Sandy Hook

Friday, May 14, 2010

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.


13 comments:

  1. This is another example of the "white" "right" showing their "power".
    As you ask. Where does it end. Who is next.
    This is 100% politics.
    They have seen the demographic numbers of a future Az. and it is not to their liking.

    This is ethnic cleansing, a-la-carte.

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  2. A country with a GDP 7% of the United States' is going to invade and conquer us?

    I just see red when these racists invoke the Old South to justify their actions. It's obscene.

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  3. RZ: It is ethnic cleansing, isn't it? Haven thought of it that way but it definitely is.

    K: I think they should secede - or be put in concentration camps.

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  4. "...or 'promote the overthrow of the United States government.'"

    This is bullkaka!

    How many times have we heard white Republicans call for revolutions since Obama took office? Michelle Bachmann herself has said that the Tree of Liberty needs to be watered from time to time with the blood of tyrants--this is in reference to the US government, and President Obama in particular.

    That is talk of overthrowing the US government.

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  5. Shaw - Good point. They must have short term memory loss. Or maybe they are just stupid hypocrits.

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  6. My money is on "stupid hypocrites".

    Loved your last line, Leslie, and my money is on "struck by lightening" :)

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  7. Bee - thanks. I used to live around these creeps. When they weren't accepting graft they were playing golf - which I love btw, just not with them.

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  8. A few weeks back, I wrote a series called “Happening in America,” which included the revision of history in Tezas textbooks and the impact large Texas orders have on textbooks across the nation. So egregious were the revisions I felt I had to speak out. Other topics which would shock many unwary Americans were included in the series. I had planned to email them to all on my mailing list. In the end, I did nothing with them, because the liberals on my list – informed citizens all - would not be surprised at all and the conservatives would have only deleted the emails.

    The point: I keep believing there is a middle America out there comprised of good people with both common sense and a conscience who, in their day-to-day struggles, are not aware of the growing extremism in this country.

    In all my years of political activism, this is the problem which has perplexed me most: how do we make them listen?

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  9. BJ: I'm not sure I have an answer. Maybe a theory? The Texas School Board is about ignorance. The AZ law is also about ignorance but money and control have to be factored in. I think if we could take a chain saw and cut it out, the whole country would be better served.

    I still believe there is a middle America. They're just not as loud and obnoxious as the extremists.

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  10. BJ: You can't make them listen because they already have all the answers. Reason and facts won't work because they're irrelevant. You have to beat them, because they won't join anything but their own club. The right ridicules community activism and destroyed ACORN because they fear both as formidable opponents out to win.

    There's a scene from Inherit the Wind that starts at 6:06 here that runs until near the end of the clip. Spencer Tracy's climactic line sums it up for me.

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  11. As I have noted many times, to accuse the power that be in Arizona of collaboration with Nazis (yes, the for-real, swastika-wearing kind) is not hyperbole-it's the truth. Adolf Arpaio and Rudolf Pearce have among their buddies the guys who brought us WWII.

    It's damned important for the rest of America to understand this, but the MSM doesn't want to touch it.

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  12. I call it Teabuggery.

    GOP racism is obscene, but it troubles me how many people are willing to support stripping others of their rights, too stupid to realize that their present acquiescence could guarantee their future oppression.

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  13. K: That is one of my favorite movies of all time. "All shine and no substance" sums it up pretty well.

    JR: Here is another take on that from a link provided by Infidel.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37156086/ns/us_news-life

    TC: You might want to check the above link as well. But I do agree with you.

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