Three cheers for Arizona's law defunding ethnic studies

In a legally vague but otherwise rather compelling phrase, the bill bans teachings that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of treating pupils as individuals.” It was the formidably intellectual literary editor of the New Republic, Leon Wieselthier, who once said that a “multicultural society should produce multicultural individuals.” Chicano education courses do no such thing. Indeed, sad to say, multicultural societies tend to produce monocultural enclaves, united, if at all, in the endless struggle to empower their own kind.

It’s certainly true that the Arizona law both by intent and effect will target Mexican kids studying Mexican or Latino courses–palpable evidence of anti-ethnic, not to say racist, bigotry say the critics. Never mind that the courses being banned might be accused of just that. No, in various interviews Horn has been at pains to point out that he is all for a variety of cultures being taught, but just not in a spirit of resentment or grievance. Doesn’t that automatically censor the history of injustice toward, say, Native Americans or African-Americans? Ah, there’s the rub, for it rather depends on what gets tagged onto the historical facts. That is, it all depends on whether you’re teaching history or politics, or put another way, using history to buttress a political agenda. If so, the state should absolutely demand that opposing viewpoints be included. Namely, for example, that the history of this country undeniably included problems of race, but also of triumphs in overcoming them. Exhibit one: the president…

We are doing no favors to minorities when we teach them the doctrine of their own cultural infallibility. All too often, we set them on a dangerous course. Consider the would-be Times Square car bomber. He was apparently motivated by ethnic sympathy for fellow Pashtuns–in effect Taliban sympathizers–killed by U.S. forces in the Afghan war. Did anyone, at any point, educate him in the sanguinary history of the Pashtun tribes of the Pak-Afghan region–how many of their own kind did they kill over the centuries in intra-Pashtun wars, not to mention during the largely Pashtun Taliban rule over Afghanistan in the 1990s? And their treatment of women down the ages to the present? What about Chicano treatment of women? Ethnic minorities resentful of America might be less inclined to act out if they had a clearer notion of how their own cultures had failed them in the first place.