Arizona governor signs bill targeting ethnic studies

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Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill targeting a school district's ethnic studies program, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.

State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the bill for years, said he believes the Tucson school district's Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.

Public schools should not be encouraging students to resent a particular race, he said.

"It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it," Horne said.

Brewer's signature on the bill Tuesday comes less than a month after she signed the nation's toughest crackdown on illegal immigration — a move that ignited international backlash amid charges the measure would encourage racial profiling of Hispanics. The governor has said profiling will not be tolerated.

The measure signed Tuesday prohibits classes that advocate ethnic solidarity, that are designed primarily for students of a particular race or that promote resentment toward a certain ethnic group.

The Tucson Unified School District program offers specialized courses in African-American, Mexican-American and Native-American studies that focus on history and literature and include information about the influence of a particular ethnic group.

For example, in the Mexican-American Studies program, an American history course explores the role of Hispanics in the Vietnam War, and a literature course emphasizes Latino authors.

Horne, a Republican running for attorney general, said the program promotes "ethnic chauvinism" and racial resentment toward whites while segregating students by race. He's been trying to restrict it ever since he learned that Hispanic civil rights activist Dolores Huerta told students in 2006 that "Republicans hate Latinos."

District officials said the program doesn't promote resentment, and they believe it would comply with the new law.

The measure doesn't prohibit classes that teach about the history of a particular ethnic group, as long as the course is open to all students and doesn't promote ethnic solidarity or resentment.

About 1,500 students at six high schools are enrolled in the Tucson district's program. Elementary and middle school students also are exposed to the ethnic studies curriculum. The district is 56 percent Hispanic, with nearly 31,000 Latino students.

Sean Arce, director of the district's Mexican-American Studies program, said last month that students perform better in school if they see in the curriculum people who look like them.

"It's a highly engaging program that we have, and it's unfortunate that the state Legislature would go so far as to censor these classes," he said.

Six UN human rights experts released a statement earlier Tuesday saying all people have the right to learn about their own cultural and linguistic heritage, they said.

Brewer spokesman Paul Senseman didn't directly address the UN criticism, but said Brewer supports the bill's goal.

"The governor believes ... public school students should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people," Senseman said.

Arce could not immediately be reached after Brewer signed the bill late Tuesday.
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http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100512/ap_on_re_us/us_arizona_ethnic_studies
 
Wtf brah, you should post more instead of just posting the original story as troll bait for me.

OT, I wouldn't mind taking those specialized classes. I saw mostly white people in Asian studies classes. I saw a large number of whites in African-American studies classes in college. Nothing in those courses made me think it was tailored for people of a certain ethnic group.

It's always good to learn about other cultures. I don't know how you determine if it encourages 'ethnic resentment'. Knoell?
 
So teaching someone about history = teaching them they are oppressed by white people. Well, that's certainly one way of looking at it.
 
The people who condemn stuff like this - in this case, the governor, not the human rights activists - are the kind who've never ever taken a course that covers such material. Instead, they've heard bits and pieces through the grapevine, each exaggerated and taken far beyond what is actually said in the middle of lecture. They then throw a huge reactionary fit, claim reverse-racism, and scramble to destroy it before the status quo can be questioned.

I took a course on African American history in the 20th century. It was absolutely eye opening. And this was at a pure conservative hellhole university, smack dab in the red state of Texas. I just couldn't believe the kind of shit the civil rights groups had to struggle through. You hear these little vignettes in school about Rosa Parks and MLK, but no one ever touches Marcus Garvey, the full Montgomery Bus Boycott, W.E.B. Dubois, and so on. No one ever goes into detail about lynchings and all the terrible mythos around them.

I think this kind of thing ought to be mandatory, but then I'd be accused of hating on white people and being a totalitarian bleeding heart, and all the other stupid kneejerk tantrum whine shits people cry out when they broach these subjects.

Sorry that history isn't sanitized. Sorry that, despite your heroes and winners saying it one way, the ugly truth can still spill out. Sorry that you can't understand that there are people living today who are little more than one generation removed from segregation. That's f.u.c.k.e.d. up when you think about it, and yet we're so totally incapable of doing it because of shortsighted narrowminded bullshit like this.

We're going to be the minority in a few short decades. I guess the worst of us just need to get our kicks in now before our asses start absorbing them.
 
A guy i know once went on a little rant about the liberal influence on history after Texas decided to oust Jefferson and others from curriculum. He's the type of person who scoffs at the slaughtering of Native Americans being referred to as genocide.

History is ugly, we (white people) don't play a very pretty part in it, trying to gloss over it doesn't help anyone. If someone resents us for valid historical reasons, then I don't see how we can blame them.
 
I'd like to see what they're basing it on and what their criteria is. I have a feeling it'll either affect basically nothing because the accusations are based on some nonexistent classes that "promote resentment" or it'll affect everything because their definition of promoting resentment is mentioning what white people have done wrong.
 
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