God bless the radical, hell-raising, revolutionary 1960s.
That was the decade when American culture changed more thoroughly and rapidly than it ever had since the decade after the Civil War, when the society was flooded by millions of emancipated black people.
The ‘60s brought us women’s liberation, gay rights, civil rights and the modern environmental movement.
And they brought us black studies programs in public schools and private universities across the nation. They, like women’s studies and other ethnic studies, are now staples of the college catalog. Some campuses have had the curricula for 40 years now, as much a part of the campus as ivy, student unions and dormitories.
But, it was not easy come.
In fact, most of the programs didn’t appear until after a considerable amount of lobbying and agitation. At a few places, getting the attention of the powers-that-be took drastic turns – walkouts, rallies, marches, even brief coups. Resistance was stiff.
But the tides of change were simply too powerful to resist. Opponents of the new programs had lost the moral argument, and they knew it. The last gasps of Jim Crow were evident and embarrassing. It was time, they realized, to start making things right. Or, at least, to get out of the way.
Four decades should be long enough for any program to prove its value and to be rendered safe from the naysayers, but the same strain of ignorance, jealousy and misanthropy that infected the start up of ethnic and gender studies has survived all these years. It is alive - and spreading - in Arizona, which is quickly upstaging the Old South as the country’s crucible of bigotry.
The ink had barely dried on the “show me your papers” measure aimed at illegal immigrants – a blueprint for racial profiling – when, lo and behold, the vacuous governor of Arizona signed a bill to shut down the Tucson school district’s Mexican-American studies program.
Here’s what Tom Horne, the state school superintendent and the man behind the legislation, told National Public Radio, based on what he says a former teacher told him about the Mexican-American program:
“They taught students that the United States was and still is a fundamentally racist country to those Mexican-American kids. Individuals in this ethnic studies department are vehemently anti-Western culture. They are vehemently opposed to the United States and its power. They are telling students they are victims. They should be angry and rise up.”
Enough to give any proud supremacist the shakes, don’t you think?
People of a certain age will recall that fear mongering like Horne’s was quite common when school boards and college deans were being barraged by demands for ethnic and gender studies back in the late 1960s.
By their lights, history books and culture studies should be what they were before the liberal do-gooders, crusaders and hippies got their hands in the mix. That is, the story of white male domination and accomplishment, ignoring what they took by hook and by crook, whom they rolled over in the process, and who else was involved when all of that good American stuff was happening.
They would have us go back to a time when there was only one ethnicity – white – and one gender – male – that mattered. And, step by step, Arizona is becoming their mecca.
This is CABL.com posting #306495. Tiny Link: cabl.co/mbrTD
