Fantastic news—maybe there really is a new American Revolution

Yesterday the Arizona legislature passed a bill to ban “ethnic studies” courses. According to Fox News:

The new bill would make it illegal for a school district to teach any courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

The bill stipulates that courses can continue to be taught for Native American pupils in compliance with federal law and does not prohibit English as a second language classes. It also does not prohibit the teaching of the Holocaust or other cases of genocide.

Schools that fail to abide by the law would have state funds withheld.

State Superintendent for Public Instruction Tom Horne called passage in the state House a victory for the principle that education should unite, not divide students of differing backgrounds.

“Traditionally, the American public school system has brought together students from different backgrounds and taught them to be Americans and to treat each other as individuals, and not on the basis of their ethnic backgrounds,” Horne said. “This is consistent with the fundamental American value that we are all individuals, not exemplars of whatever ethnic groups we were born into. Ethnic studies programs teach the opposite, and are designed to promote ethnic chauvinism.”

Horne began fighting in 2007 against the Tucson Unified School District’s program, which he said defied Martin Luther King’s call to judge a person by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Horne claimed the ethnic studies program encourages “ethnic chauvanism,” promotes Latinos to rise up and create a new territory out of the southwestern region of the United States and tries to intimidate conservative teachers in the school system.

But opponents said the bill would prevent teachers from using an academically proven method of educating students about history. They also argued that the Legislature should not be involved in developing school curriculum.

This is inspiring. Why did no one think of doing this before—simply outlaw these things?

The bill awaits the governor’s signature. It can be read here.

- end of initial entry -

John M. writes:

I must admit, I am a little surprised at your positive reaction to this news item. I would have thought you would have found the following disturbing:

education should /unite/, not divide students of differing backgrounds….

Traditionally, the American public school system has brought together students from different backgrounds and taught them to be Americans and to /treat each other as individuals/, and /not on the basis of their ethnic backgrounds …

This is consistent with the fundamental American value that /we are all individuals, not exemplars of whatever ethnic groups we were born into./ Ethnic studies programs teach the opposite, and are designed to promote ethnic chauvinism.

Personally, I don’t see a Revolution at all, but rather another attempt at making civic nationalism work in the West; the very ideology that is poisoning European nations as well by insisting that there are no group differences, that we’re all one and that culture has no relation to heritage. These “right-wingers” who push civic nationalism are denying one of the realities of the human condition; which is that human differences are real.

This civic nationalism promoted in Arizona is only going to reassure American whites that the immigrants will assimilate, and the bad ones will leave, when nothing can be further from the truth. And thus American whites will go back to sleep, foolishly believing that non-whites share their individualist fantasies.

LA replies:

What we have now is officially encouraged race celebration and race preferences for nonwhites, and officially enforced race blindness for whites combined with officially imposed race guilt on whites. Ending that system would be an unimaginable victory for America and for whites. In the common public sphere of America I am not seeking to bring about some official race conscious whiteness. The return of majority self-conscioussness and self-assertion that I support is something that needs to be advanced, at least for now, in the cultural sphere, not the legal/governmental sphere. Remember also that the overwhelming majority of white conservatives at present would have nothing to do with any explicit white movement.

Based on the logic of your email, apparently you would not regard it as a good thing if the entire system of minority racial preferences were done away with. If that happened, the better universities in America would rapidly empty of blacks and Hispanics. Many professions now staffed by underqualified nonwhites would be filled again by whites. True civic nationalism, with individuals treated as individuals, which you dismiss, would result in a radical loss of power for the minorities and the left, a removal of the demonization of whites, and a large step in the direction of a restoration of white cultural dominance in America.

The European countries don’t have civic nationalism; they have what I call left-liberalism or openness liberalism, which mandates surrender of the majority to the minorities and aliens.

LA continues:

Also, see my article, “How the 1964 Civil Rights Act made racial group entitlements inevitable,” in which I lay out an alternative model to the civil rights structure we’ve had for the lat 50 years. In that article, I make an argument that is designed to appeal to mainsteam conservatives / classical liberals: namely that if they want a system based on the individual, then there must be white cultural dominance, because only whites will preserve such a system.

Hannon writes:

On civic nationalism, I believe this has been viewed as a primary function of our public K-12 school system from its inception. It is only in more recent decades that this unifying principle, which certainly has some merit, has been utterly corrupted by the entrenchment of Leftist bureaucrats and minority politicking— and minority influence, thanks largely to the 1965 Immigration Reform Act. A return to state control of curricula and funding of schools and the abolishment of the Department of Education cannot happen too soon.

James P. writes:

I was fascinated to learn that Tuscon public schools have (or had) an “ethnic studies” program. I didn’t think they taught that drivel in secondary schools, only in college.

State Senator Frank Antenori believes the classes push kids to despise the government. He said, “It has no business being in the high school system. If you want to go to college, fine, but taxpayers should not be funding this.”

The fact is that Arizona taxpayers fund a great deal more “ethnic studies” at the college level than they do at the secondary level. Arizona spends over a billion dollars a year on colleges and universities, and Arizona State alone has BA-granting departments of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, three types of Asian Studies, and three kinds of “Transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies” (plus of course, Women and Gender Studies). Taxpayers shouldn’t be funding those breeding grounds of grievance and ethnic chauvinism, either!

I was somewhat curious about the wording of the description of the bill.

The new bill would make it illegal for a school district to teach any courses that promote the overthrow of the U.S. government, promote resentment of a particular race or class of people, are designed primarily for students of a particular ethnic group or “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.”

Normally, I would expect an effort to prohibit people from promoting “the overthrow of the U.S. government” or “resentment of a particular race or class of people” to be directed against the Right. If a legislature passed a law against Tea Parties, for example, they would accuse it of just those things (promoting the overthrow of the government and promoting resentment against NAMs). Yet one hardly imagines that there are any courses in Arizona that advocate resentment against NAMs and white solidarity, so this law must indeed be directed at the Left.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at April 30, 2010 02:20 PM | Send