Is Arizona the Mississippi of the New Millennium?

I'm back after long silence to grasp at some straws from the cyclone-jostled hay rick of American democracy. But it is hardly coincidental that on the same Saturday Rep. Gabrielle Giffords is shot, headlines blare about an Arizona Latino Studies class in Tucson being declared illegal under a new law that bans ethnic studies and classes stressing minority group (read: Hispanics) empowerment. Is Arizona the Mississippi of the New Millennium? I think so. Only this time the Negroes are Hispanics and, if any can be rustled up, Muslims.

Further compounding the perfect storm of strong circumstantial evidence of race war is the fact that the slain federal judge, a Bush appointee no less, had ruled against provisions of Arizona's notorious anti-immigration law. Throw the You Tube entries by the white supremacist shooter which deplored local Chicano illiteracy into the mix and you've got a Category 5 storm of racial hatred blowing through Tucson.

So I want all my bothersome Zionist friends to stop pestering me with paranoid rants about imagined anti-Semitic plots against Jews here and in Europe and focus on the many very real, provable plots against Hispanics and Arabs. Jews are part of those plots--both here in America and in Israel--with their Islamiphobia. Face it, my 'Hymie' brothers and sisters, 'Spics' and 'Towel Heads' are the new 'kikes' in America. If you're Hispanic or Arab, every day holds the threat of a Kristalnacht for you. Jewish paranoia is simply nostalgia for a past in no immediate danger of replay.

P.S., Our own sordid history of hate is the final and most compelling reason for our immediate exit from Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. We have no right to pretend to bring freedoms to people when we threaten the freedoms of those very same people within our own borders. Of course, human rights is not what all our wars are about, are they?

Arizona Latino Studies Class Declared Illegal Under New State Law

Posted on January 8, 2011 by Moral Low Ground| Leave a comment

by Brett Wilkins

Classes taught in the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American program have been declared illegal under a new state law that took effect January 1st. HB 2281 bans public schools from offering courses that advocate ethnic solidarity, promote the overthrow of the US government, or cater to specific ethnic groups. Proponents of the new law say it is necessary to check a program that promotes divisions based on ethnicity and advocates separatism and racial preferences. But critics counter that the ethnic studies program is intended to make students aware of their roots and proud of who they are, thus making them better members of American society.

Tucson High School teacher Maria Federico Brummer, center, teaches American government from a Mexican-American perspective at Tucson High Magnet School. (Photo: David Sanders/Education Week)

Arizona is more infamous for its harsh anti-immigration law, SB 1070, that gives police broad and intrusive powers to demand proof of citizenship from people they believe may be in the country illegally. That controversial 2010 law has been attacked as discriminatory, since it is highly unlikely that an undocumented immigrant from, say, Sweden would be targeted but extremely likely that Latinos– whether here illegally or not– would be harassed.

Critics of all colors say SB 1070 is a racist law.

Less known but equally insidious is HB 2281, the ethnic studies ban signed into law by Republican governor Jan Brewer last year, just weeks after SB 1070.

Whereas SB 1070 was designed to harass and expel human beings deemed “undesirable” by the state of Arizona, HB 2281 is about controlling people’s minds. It denies students the freedom to learn about their history, their culture– their very identities. Dr. Randall Amster writes:

“There’s a word for what Arizona is attempting to do here: ethnocide. It is similar to genocide in its scope, but it reflects the notion that it is an ethnic and/or cultural identity under assault more so than physical bodies themselves. By imposing a curriculum that forbids the exploration of divergent cultures while propping up the dominant one, there’s another process at work here, what we might call ethnonormativity. This takes the teachings of one culture – the colonizer’s – and makes it the standard version of history while literally banning other accounts, turning the master narrative into the “normal” one, and further denigrating marginalized perspectives. America’s racialized past abounds with such examples of oppressed people being denied their languages, histories and cultures, including through enforced indoctrination in school systems.”

No holiday in Arizona until the 1990s.

Arizona, a notoriously conservative state that didn’t even observe the Martin Luther King Jr holiday until after being shamed by worldwide condemnation and boycott in the early 1990s, favors the rugged individualist frontiersman narrative that is at odds with the more communitarian, decidedly leftist worldview espoused in the “illegal” Mexican-American classes. Again, Dr. Amster:

“The libertarian and individualistic foundations of Western culture are viewed as iconic in Arizona, and it is no coincidence that the more communitarian impulses of Raza [Latino] peoples are denigrated as politically dangerous and pedagogically bereft. Again, the worldview of the oppressor is normalized in its rugged individualism and attempts to break down any movement toward solidarity and unified action among people of the disfavored class. This also expresses contemptuous judgment toward solidarity-based movements grown in the Western world, including the rise of union organizing, anti-globalization and antiwar activism and the mobilizations of people against totalitarianism in the Eastern bloc nations. What the Arizona legislature completely fails to grasp is that individual identity arises out of cultural consciousness – in other words, that it is ethnic solidarity in itself that provides people with the grounding necessary to know who they are as individuals.”

Scary stuff for reactionaries.

The progressive, humanist values of many of the Mexican-American classes threaten the reactionary, conservative mores that Arizona’s leaders wish to instill in students. John Huppenthal, the state’s new schools chief, sat in on one of Tucson’s Mexican-American classes and was appalled to see Benjamin Franklin vilified as a racist and a photo of Che Guevara, regarded by tens of millions of Latinos as a hero of liberation but hated by reactionaries as a communist subversive, hanging on the wall. Assigned reading such as “The Pedagogy of the Oppressed” and “Occupied America” is loathed for fostering a sense of oppression and mistreatment among Latino youths.

But it doesn’t take a book to teach Arizona Latinos they’re being oppressed. With laws like SB 1070 and HB 2281 on the books, the oppression is right in front of their faces. Banning ethnic studies classes will only increase resentment against the very people that claim they’re trying to avoid inter-ethnic tensions. And by denying students the right to learn about their heritage, Arizona makes a mockery of the American freedoms it is so keen to promote at the expense of alternative narratives. “Who are the true Americans here– those embracing our inalienable rights or those trying to diminish them?” asked Augustine Romero, director of student equity for Tuscon schools. “There’s a fierce anti-Latino sentiment in this state,” he told the New York Times. “These courses are about justice and equity, and what is happening is that the Legislature is trying to narrow the reality of those things.”