If Arizona Gets Rid of Ethnic Studies, Is Women's Studies Next?

Though I'm sure you've heard by now, last week, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed a law banning ethnic studies. Between curriculum battles and racial and poverty profiling that requires anyone who "looks like an immigrant" to keep papers on themselves at all times, writers around the internets have been asking the question: is the new batch of Arizona laws a feminist issue?

The obvious answer is yes. We've already chronicled what a miserable couple of months it has been for women in Arizona: from restricted abortion coverage to the specific adverse effects the law will have on Latina women, it continues to boggle the mind that so many of these proposals are signed into law by a woman. We all know that a few chromosomes don't mean much when it comes to say, ethics or protecting the civil rights of others, but the total dismissal of so many people's rights has been a blow to thousands and stirred up controversy around the country.

But banning something as vital and obvious as ethnic studies takes the conversation to a whole new place — one that too few people are having. We're not just talking about restricting access to immigrants or denying basic, legal rights to young women. We're not even talking about racial profiling. We're talking about systematically erasing people's history, making the statement that people's heritage is irrelevant, unimportant, and useless. It's really the worst type of offensive censorship, especially if you consider how much we can look to our own respective histories for lessons about navigating the future.

In thinking about this, it caused me to wonder if people would be more upset if a discipline like women's or gender studies was under attack. Would people think to care then, be outraged that half the population was being ignored? Thing is, when you remove any classification folks tend to consider "ethnic" — meaning non-white — you're also excluding half of the nation's population! How is one prejudice more egregious than another? Aren't we all in this together?

This week, we mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Perhaps it's fitting, therefore, that we rethink our approach to fighting educational discrepancies, biased teaching tools, and privilege and solidarity in the classroom. If segregated classrooms are an abomination, what do we call segregated, biased educational standards and the erasure of millions of voices from our collective history? For now, we call it Arizona.

Photo Credit: kristina sohappy