What They Don’t Want You to Learn...

Arizona Axes Ethnic Studies, Texas Whitewashes History

(Young Spartacus pages)

In May, Republican Arizona governor Jan Brewer signed a law that bans ethnic studies in public and charter schools, specifically targeting the Tucson school district’s Mexican American studies program. This was the culmination of a years-long campaign by state school superintendent Tom Horne. The bill bans courses that “promote the overthrow of the United States government” or “promote resentment toward a race or class of people” and further strikes down any program that is “designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group” or advocates “ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” Cynically couched in terms of prohibiting discrimination, the law explicitly allows for the ethnic and racial segregation of schools under the pretext of “academic performance, including capability in the English language, that may result in a disparate impact by ethnicity.”

Tucson’s ethnic studies program was a result of a 1974 court suit by black and Mexican American parents to desegregate the schools. To appease parents, the school district started black studies and Mexican American studies programs. The recent ban comes on the heels of Arizona’s apartheid-style SB1070 law, the anti-immigrant pass law that mandates the cops to stop and question anyone they think might be an “illegal” immigrant. Further targeting the rights of both immigrants and black people, elements of the Republican right are calling to repeal the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to children born on American soil and was enacted in 1868 on behalf of freed slaves and their children.

On March 12, just a few months before Brewer signed the Arizona ethnic studies law, the Texas board of education issued new guidelines for its social studies curriculum that rewrite history from the most reactionary perspective, dismissing the separation of church and state and enshrining the greatness of the “free-enterprise system.” In fact, throughout the guidelines, the term “capitalism” was replaced with “free enterprise” because of what one school board member said was its “negative connotation.” Most grotesquely, the guidelines promote the Confederacy’s blood-soaked defense of black chattel slavery in the Civil War, including heralding Stonewall Jackson as a role model for leadership and equating Jefferson Davis with Abraham Lincoln. All mention of the slave trade is removed, replaced with “Atlantic triangular trade”—sounding just like the slave traders for whom millions of slaves were just commodities. Texas is one of the largest buyers of textbooks in the country, and these guidelines will likely affect publications sold throughout the U.S.

The attacks on ethnic studies in Arizona and the falsification of historical reality in Texas show how education under capitalism acts as a pillar of the bourgeois system, reinforcing the ideology and serving the interests of the racist ruling class. We defend ethnic studies courses as part of our defense of all oppressed peoples and our fight for free, quality, integrated education for all, from preschool to postgraduate. Programs like ethnic studies are the result of social struggle—especially the civil rights and Vietnam antiwar movements and other movements of the ’60s and ’70s—and not the largesse of the ruling class. Often designed to demobilize protest and to provide a sop to a layer of the black and Latino petty bourgeoisie, ethnic studies programs cannot end oppression. Racial and ethnic oppression are rooted in the structure and development of capitalism. It will ultimately require the overthrow of the capitalist system to end oppression—and for the real history of the struggles against oppression and exploitation to be taught.

It is particularly rich that it is Texas and Arizona—both stolen from Mexico in order to expand slavery—that are pushing these anti-Latino and anti-black “revisions.” Horne specifically singled out one of the books used in Tucson schools, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, by renowned scholar Rodolfo Acuña. “The title of the book implies to the kids that they live in occupied America, or occupied Mexico,” Horne complained to the Los Angeles Times (12 May). The history of the state of Texas goes back to the attempt of white Southerners to extend slavery into Mexican territory. In 1845 the U.S. annexed Texas, then invaded Mexico the next year. By the time U.S. troops left Mexico in 1848, half of Mexico’s national territory—including most of Arizona—was in the hands of the U.S.

The South’s desire to expand slavery was a key factor that led to the Civil War (see “Mexican-American War: Prelude to American Civil War,” WV Nos. 933 and 934, 27 March and 10 April 2009). It took the Civil War to emancipate black people from chattel slavery. But the Civil War was not carried to its completion. While black people were freed from slavery, after the defeat of Reconstruction they were stripped of political rights and economically subjugated. Black oppression remains the cornerstone of American capitalism. The Spartacist League and the Spartacus Youth Clubs fight for black liberation through socialist revolution! Finish the Civil War!

As anti-immigrant hysteria and blatant anti-black racism become even more common, it is clear why much of the bourgeoisie doesn’t want this history taught—and is attacking even what minimal gains have been made. Still, much of the left appeals to the capitalists to serve the interests of the oppressed. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) complains that the same Arizona state government that created SB1070 is focusing on increasing anti-immigrant repression “instead of working on legislation to address the racism and inequity in the education system” (Socialist Worker online, 26 May). For the ISO, the problem is that the right-wing crazies in Arizona and Texas have wreaked havoc on education. Socialist Worker laments that “America’s pupils are in desperate need of courses that have not been whitewashed by conservative ideologues.”

It is not just “conservative ideologues” that whitewash the bloody past of U.S. imperialism. While the Republicans in Arizona and Texas are certainly on the warpath, they are not alone in touting lies about history. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama argued that “the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution.” The Constitution protected slavery, subjugating the free-labor North to the Southern slavocracy until the Civil War smashed slavery once and for all (see “Slavery and the Origins of American Capitalism,” WV Nos. 942, 943 and 944, 11 and 25 September and 9 October 2009). Now, Obama, the chief overseer of the entire racist plantation of U.S. imperialism, boasts that his administration deported a record number of “illegal” immigrants in its first year. The Democrats, like the Republicans, are a capitalist party, dedicated to maintaining the system of racist American capitalism.

The ideological onslaught, which aims to mandate the teaching of absurd lies about the blood-drenched history of American capitalism and to cover up oppressed peoples’ struggles, accompanies the growing segregation of American schools. More than five decades after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that formally ended Jim Crow segregation in public schools, Northern schools are more segregated than schools in the Deep South, with blacks and Latinos attending inner-city schools that are more and more like holding pens. Court-ordered schemes to desegregate the public schools, like the one in Tucson, that at least paid lip service to integration, are now being abandoned.

While increasingly concentrated in segregated schools and barred from access to a decent education, large numbers of black and Latino youth are condemned by the racist capitalist state to rising rates of incarceration and murderous police repression. Of the 2.3 million men, women and children behind bars, 70 percent are black or Latino. According to Colorlines (4 November 2007), Phoenix, Arizona, is one of the worst cities for police violence, with an average of more than one person killed per month by cops from 2000 to 2007. As we wrote in “From Slavery to Mass Incarceration” (WV No. 955, 26 March):

“Right now putrescent American capitalism has no need to educate working-class or poor youth; it has no room for those skilled black apprentices that filled the shipyards during World War II. Many of the black and Latino youth for whom the bourgeoisie cannot provide a future end up in prison.”

This situation cries out for a class-struggle fight against racist oppression and in defense of all the oppressed. The power of the multiracial working class is one thing the bourgeoisie definitely doesn’t want taught. As Marx wrote in the Communist Manifesto, all history is the history of class struggle. Because of its relationship to the means of production, the working class has tremendous social power. This power has been repeatedly demonstrated in Arizona, for example. From 1983 to 1986, thousands of predominantly Chicano and Native American miners battled the Phelps Dodge Corporation in southern Arizona. Phelps Dodge—which amassed its initial capital from the 19th-century slave trade—only defeated the workers with the help of massive state repression, overseen by Democratic governor Bruce Babbitt (see “Class War in Arizona Copper Mines,” WV No. 357, 22 June 1984). Students and racial and ethnic minorities must unite with the working class in order to make history, overthrowing this racist, oppressive system once and for all.