California’s Push for Ethnic Studies Runs Into the Israel-Hamas War

2024/02/16 Leave a comment

Not surprisingly, as would any history program:

California has grand ambitions for ethnic studies. By 2025, the state’s public high schools — about 1,600 of them — must teach the subject. By 2030, students won’t be able to graduate high school without it.

For policymakers, a goal is to give California students, 80 percent of whom are nonwhite, the opportunity to study a diverse array of cultures. Research has shown that ethnic studies classes can raise grades and attendance for teenagers at risk of dropping out.

But even in a liberal state like California, scholars, parents and educators have found themselves at odds over how to adapt the college-level academic discipline for high school students, especially because of its strong views on race and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

While the name “ethnic studies” might bring to mind a broad exploration of how ethnicity and race shape the human experience, the discipline, as taught in universities, is narrower — and more ideological.

Ethnic studies focuses on four groups: Black Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans. It aims to critique various forms of oppression and spur students to take action, often drawing analogies across disparate expanses of time and geography. The Palestinian experience of displacement is central to that exercise, and has been compared by some scholars to the Native American experience.

In reworking ethnic studies for high school, California came up with a 700-page model curriculum that captures much of the discipline’s leftist, activist spirit. But it added the stories of other ethnic groups, including Jewish Americans, while eliminating discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It said lessons should include “multiple perspectives” on political issues.

The state’s model ethnic studies curriculum does not directly address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but does include an optional sample lesson that emphasizes Jewish roots on the land that is now Israel.Credit…California Department of Education
The state’s model ethnic studies curriculum does not directly address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but does include an optional sample lesson that emphasizes Jewish roots on the land that is now Israel.

Now some prominent ethnic studies scholars and educators say the state has bowed to political critics and censored their field. They are promoting a competing vision, which they call “liberated ethnic studies.” It is truer to how the subject is taught in colleges, but more politically fraught. It largely excludes the histories of ethnic groups, including Jews, who are typically understood as white within the discipline’s context. (Arab American studies is defined as fitting into Asian American studies.) And it offers lessons that are critical of Israel — and, some argue, antisemitic.

A number of California school districts are working with curriculum consultants who embrace liberated ethnic studies, while other districts are drawing upon these materials in creating their own classes.

The dueling approaches have prompted several lawsuits and sparked a heated debate: How should millions of California teenagers engage with these explicitly activist concepts in the classroom?

Resolutions to this question may shape education across the country. States including Oregon, Vermont and Minnesota plan to introduce K-12 ethnic studies in the coming years.

Source: California’s Push for Ethnic Studies Runs Into the Israel-Hamas War

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The Hindus fighting against ‘caste consciousness’

2023/07/19 Leave a comment

Of note (California a trendsetter…):

The first-ever Caste Con, an event dedicated to “dissolving caste consciousness,” held in Fremont, California, on Sunday (July 16), may sound to the uninitiated as if its point was to oppose discrimination based on India’s social hierarchy that places Brahmins at the top of the social order and Dalits at the bottom.

In fact, the gathering brought together a group of activists who warn that recent efforts to outlaw caste discrimination in the United States only serve to reaffirm caste differences in a way that could negatively affect the U.S. Hindu community and stigmatize Indian Americans in politics, at school and in the courts. Many of the attendees are outspoken opponents of SB 403, a bill headed for a vote in the California State Assembly that would single out caste bias as a violation of the state’s anti-discrimination statute.

Richa Gautam, a data analyst who organized the event, portrays caste awareness as a version of American identity politics that left-leaning politicians use to force presumptions about caste on Indian immigrants such as her, she told Religion News Service in the days before Caste Con.

“Any seepage of identity politics is against multiculturalism,” said Gautam. “It is against progress, it is against even spiritualism, you know, the whole concept of Hinduism.”

Caste differences, a fact of life in India and other South Asian communities around the globe, has caused increasing controversy in the U.S. South Asian immigrant community since colleges and universities began adding caste to their list of differences, along with race and sexuality and gender identity, that were protected against bias. Brandeis University banned caste discrimination over complaintsfrom some Hindus in 2019; the California State University system added caste to their nondiscrimination policy in early 2022.

Gautam was inspired to join the fight against these measures in 2020, as California was prosecuting the most prominent legal case of alleged caste discrimination involving the computer giant CISCO Systems. An anonymous CISCO employee, a Dalit, accused two of his managers, Ramana Kompella and Sundar Iyer, of passing him over for a promotion. California’s civil rights department sued the two defendants in a years-long case that ended just this month, when it was dismissed due to lack of evidence.

Iyer made a surprise appearance at Sunday’s Caste Con, claiming that the state prosecutors decided he was a high-caste Hindu based on his last name, even though he identifies as non-religious.

“Ramana and I are the state of California’s best and only example of caste litigation,” said Iyer. “The CRD is supposed to protect civil rights, yet deliberately violated my religious liberty.”

More recently, 12 of the complainants in a 2021 lawsuit that alleged forced labor among “lower-caste” workers on the BAPS Swaminarayan Temple of Robbinsville, New Jersey, retracted their claims, saying they were coerced into making false allegations of caste discrimination.

Yet an often cited report on caste bias released in 2018 by Equality Labs, a Dalit civil rights organization and a co-sponsor of the California bill, found that two-thirds of respondents said they suffered discrimination at work; one-third reported that they had faced discrimination in education.

In an article on Caste Files, Gautam’s website tracking the issue, she characterizes the report as “fake and unscientific.” Other Hindu organizations, including the Ambedkar Phule Network of American Dalits and Bahujans, representing traditionally lower-caste groups, have also criticized Equality Labs’ findings.

“Any survey or any bill that is made without us is looking to butcher our cultural existence,” Sandeep Dedge, a volunteer at APNADB, told the Caste Con audience. “The people with little experience are trying to oppress the contributions of the Dalits and Bahujans.”

Those who reject the need for provisions against caste discrimination say not only that such laws have no place in the United States, but they also deny that caste is primarily a feature of Hinduism. Instead they claim that caste was imposed by British colonizers of India, who fastened on varna — a spiritual term dictating one’s inner nature — and jati — a description of a distinctive social group — and conflated both with caste as a way of ordering Indian society under their rule. It should be removed from American consciousness altogether, they say.

Sudha Jagannathan, a board member of the Coalition of Hindus of North America and longtime California resident, says she never experienced discussions of caste before coming to the United States. She began referring to herself as Bahujan only after caste became a talking point in recent years. To her, caste is a “slur against Hindus” that is already covered under the existing anti-discrimination laws.

“The caste discrimination ban is broadcasting caste consciousness into America in big ways,” said Jagannathan. “The Americans who did not know this, whenever they see a Hindu now, the first question they ask is, ‘What is your caste?’”

California, where a vast number of Indian immigrants live, has long been the center of the discourse about caste in America. In 2006, the Hindu Education Foundation, along with the Vedic Foundation and the Hindu American Foundation, fought in California courts to erase mentions of the caste system, among other stereotypes about the Hindu religion, from the state’s school textbooks. The litigation ended in settlements, with repeated text changes.

Source: The Hindus fighting against ‘caste consciousness’

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Here’s what happened when affirmative action ended at California public colleges

2023/07/03 Leave a comment

Useful case study:

For decades, the question of affirmative action — whether colleges should consider race when deciding which students to admit — has been the subject of national debate.

And as the nation’s highest court has grown more conservative in recent years, court-watchers wondered if it would reverse decades-old precedents allowing affirmative action.

This week, it happened: The Supreme Court struck down race-based admissions practices at public and private universities and colleges.

Supreme Court justices ruled that the admissions policies at the University of North Carolina, one of the country’s oldest public universities, and Harvard University, the country’s oldest private university, violated the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

As college admissions offices prepare to tailor their policies to the Supreme Court ruling, California offers lessons on what may be in store for the rest of the country.

Here’s the upshot: A quarter-century after California banned race-based admissions at public universities, school officials say they haven’t been able to meet their diversity and equity goals — despite more than a half billion dollars spent on outreach and alternative admissions standards.

In an amicus brief sent to the Supreme Court in support of Harvard and UNC’s race-based admissions programs, University of California chancellors said that years of crafting alternative race-neutral policies have fallen short.

“Those programs have enabled UC to make significant gains in its system-wide diversity,” the brief said. “Yet despite its extensive efforts, UC struggles to enroll a student body that is sufficiently racially diverse to attain the educational benefits of diversity.”

The shortfall is especially apparent at the system’s most selective schools, the university leaders said.

An affirmative action ban first caused a huge drop in diversity at top California universities

In 1996, California voters approved Proposition 209, an affirmative action ban at public universities in the state. Before the ban, UC Berkeley and UCLA were roughly representative of the California high school graduate population who were eligible for enrollment at universities, according to Zachary Bleemer, an economist at Princeton University.

The ban first took effect with the incoming class of ’98. Subsequently, diversity plummeted at UC’s most competitive campuses. That year, enrollment among Black and Latino students at UCLA and UC Berkeley fell by 40%, according to a 2020 study by Bleemer. As a result of the ban, Bleemer found that Black and Latino students who might have gotten into those two top schools enrolled at less competitive campuses.

“Black and Hispanic students saw substantially poorer long-run labor market prospects as a result of losing access to these very selective universities,” Bleemer told NPR. “But there was no commensurate gain in long-run outcomes for the white and Asian students who took their place.”

Black and Latino students were also less likely to earn graduate degrees or enter lucrative STEM fields.

“If you follow them into the labor market, for the subsequent 15 or 20 years, they’re earning about 5% lower wages than they would have earned if they’d had access to more selective universities under affirmative action,” Bleemer said.

The ban has in fact acted as a deterrent to prospective Black and Latino students, Bleemer said. His study found that high-performing minority students were subsequently discouraged from applying to schools where minority students were underrepresented.

“Most do not want to attend a university where there’s not a critical mass of same race peers,” said Mitchell Chang, the associate vice chancellor of equity, diversity and inclusion at UCLA. That’s because attending a school made less diverse by an affirmative action ban, “puts them at greater risk of being stereotyped and being isolated,” he said.

These findings “provide the first causal evidence that banning affirmative action exacerbates socioeconomic inequities,” Bleemer’s study said.

A learning curve

Faced with plummeting minority enrollment, admissions offices began a years-long effort to figure out ways to get their numbers back up.

Admissions offices pivoted to a more holistic approach, looking beyond grades and test scores. Starting in the early 2000s, the UC system implemented a couple of initiatives to increase diversity: The top-performing students graduating most high schools in the state were guaranteed admission to most of the eight UC undergraduate campuses. It also introduced a comprehensive review process to “evaluate students’ academic achievements in light of the opportunities available to them” – using an array of criteria including a student’s special skills and achievements, special circumstances and location of high school.

In 2020, the UC system eliminated standardized test scores as an admission requirement, nixing a factor that advocates say disadvantages underserved students.

However, the effort to boost diversity has come with a heavy price tag. Since Prop 209 took effect, UC has spent more than a half-billion dollars on outreach programs and application reviews to draw in a more diverse student body.

It’s taken 25 years of experimentation through race-neutral policies, for UC schools have begun to catch up to the racial diversity numbers lost in the wake of the affirmative action ban, says UCLA vice chancellor Chang.

“There was no magic bullet. Some things worked better than other things. And this is also work that doesn’t happen overnight,” Chang said.

Still, the California schools are unable to meet their diversity goals systemwide. Chang says his school is not where it wants to be. It still enrolls far fewer Black and Latino students than their share of California high school graduates — a problem it didn’t have before the affirmative action ban.

As with the UC system, experts think that across the country, similarly competitive universities will be most affected by the Supreme Court’s ruling.

Gabrielle Starr, president of Pomona College, a small Southern California school that wasn’t subject to the state ban, fears the selective, private university will lose its racial diversity under the nationwide affirmative action ban.

Starr says that being able to consider race has allowed her school to ensure its ability to put together a diverse class.

“Having a campus that looks like the world in which our students will go onto live is really important just as a bedrock value,” she said.

Source: Here’s what happened when affirmative action ended at California public colleges

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California becomes the first state to break down Black employee data by lineage

2022/08/18 Leave a comment

Of interest. Will be interesting to see the comparative outcomes:

California is the first state to require its agencies to present a separate demographic category for descendants of enslaved people when collecting state employee data.

According to a recently signed law, the State Controller’s Office and the Department of Human Resources can start collecting this information as soon as Jan. 1, 2024.

These demographic categories will include African Americans who are descendants of people who were enslaved in the United States and Black employees who are not descendants of people who were enslaved in the United States.

The data collected will be included in a public state report on or after Jan. 1, 2025.

Employees will not be required to disclose this demographic information, but advocates who have been pushing for this expansion of data collection say it is for the Black community’s benefit, according to the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California.

In recent years, the state has been working to determine whether the state will pay reparations to Black Californians, particularly those who are descendants of slaves. And this year, the California Reparations Task Force affirmed lineage-based eligibility for state reparations — meaning only people who can prove they are descendants of slaves would be eligible.

“Not only will this historic legislation provide critical and timely information to California’s Reparations Task Force, which recently affirmed lineage based eligibility for California Reparations, this legislation begins the process of recognizing the identity and peoplehood of African Americans/American
Freedmen in California whose ancestors came to America in chains, were enslaved for hundreds of years, suffered Jim Crow, and yet managed to build the most powerful and wealthiest country in the world,” the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California said in its news release.

The statement went on to say, “In addition, this legislation is a model for states and localities across the country seeking to take serious steps toward repairing the damage done to the identities and livelihoods of African Americans/American Freedmen for over 400 years.”

Chris Lodgson, the lead organizer of the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, told Axios that Black Californians who are descendants of U.S. slaves are subject to shocking economic disparities and oppression.

Lodgson told the news outlet that this mandate to collect detailed demographic information from state employees will open the door to revealing disparities in income, careers and leadership within California state agencies.

“You can’t fix a problem until you see it, until you acknowledge it,” Lodgson told Axios.

Source: California becomes the first state to break down Black employee data by lineage

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Caste has become a university diversity issue in the US

2022/02/14 1 Comment

Hard to imagine that this also happens in Canada to some extent given the large number of South Asian students and grateful for information readers may have:

Many international students from disadvantaged groups hope to leave the entrenched social structures and caste discrimination behind and start afresh as they come to the United States or elsewhere. 

But to their consternation and horror, some South Asian students have found that caste discrimination is alive and well overseas, particularly where there is a large South Asia diaspora or foreign students on campus.

Mounting evidence of such discriminatory treatment and harassment led the California State University (CSU) system to add caste to its list of protected groups in January, prohibiting caste-based discrimination, harassment or retaliation. Other universities in the US are examining whether they should do the same. 

The CSU system, with some 485,000 students and about 56,000 faculty and staff, is sending a signal out to the rest of the university sector that caste discrimination exists and that affected students and staff require protection, say inclusivity activists who have campaigned for years to include caste-oppressed students and faculty. They have called the CSU decision an important civil rights win. 

“This is very important because we can now feel safer,” said Prem Pariyar, who recently graduated from CSU’s East Bay campus with a masters degree in social work. He began the campaign for caste protection at East Bay and helped extend it across CSU’s 23 campuses. 

“At least now the university has a policy to recognise our pain and to recognise our issues,” he told University World News. “In the US people are conscious about race and religion and the like but they did not know about caste discrimination.”

“Being a protected category is important as it means people like me [and] other students will feel more comfortable to go and complain. Before adding caste as a protected category, even if students reported to the administration, they would not understand what it is. It is not racial discrimination, but it is the same logic.”

Michael Uhlenkamp, senior director of public affairs in the CSU Chancellors Office, said: “While caste protections were inherently included in previous CSU non-discrimination policies, the decision to specifically name caste in the interim policy reflects the CSU’s commitment to inclusivity and respect, making certain each and every one of our 23 CSU campuses is a place of access, opportunity and equity for all.” 

“The existing processes for reporting instances of discrimination, whether based on caste or any of the categories listed in the policy, still apply,” he added. 

‘Long overdue’

“It’s long overdue. This was a campaign that we were working on for almost two and a half years,” said Thenmozhi Soundararajan, executive director of Equality Labs, a US-based civil rights organisation fighting for the rights of Dalits, a low-caste group formerly known as ‘untouchables’.

Equality Labs has been advising institutions and companies in the US. It carried out the first survey of Dalit discrimination among the South Asian diaspora in the US in 2016. In a sample of 1,500 respondents, “the numbers are high – one in four experience some form of physical or verbal assaults, one in three face discrimination in terms of their education and two out of three face workplace discrimination,” Soundararajan told University World News.

The survey was instrumental in convincing the CSU system to include caste in their policy, along with students like Pariyar, himself a Dalit, who were willing to speak out. 

“The whole process of educating and transforming these institutions towards caste equity has been one of very powerful testimony, and storytelling by really courageous and bold caste-oppressed students and faculty and campus community members. 

“And doing so under very difficult environments where caste bigots were literally intimidating, harassing and doxing them,” said Soundararajan, who is also a visiting scholar at the Center for South Asia, Stanford University. 

Soundararajan points to various types of campus discrimination – including discrimination with housing, work or student groups “openly using caste slurs and other microaggressions as well as more serious cases of gender-based violence like harassment and assault”. 

Equality Labs has been advising a large number of universities and colleges in the US, including providing advice from legal scholars “who have already done some thinking about this – we’ve worked with many institutions, large and small on these issues”.

“In our countries of origin, while there are laws to protect against caste oppression, there is a great deal of impunity and a lack of political will to enforce them. In the United States, however, because of the struggles of black and indigenous and other communities of colour, civil rights laws still have teeth,” Soundararajan explained.

“Increasingly, American institutions that are concerned about their liability related to civil rights and human rights compliance are proactively adding caste and making it explicit,” she noted. “When it’s not explicit, all the things that come from [being] a protected category don’t exist within the campuses’ or institutions’ purview.”

But universities are also key to educating society in general. “In making caste a protected category, institutions of higher learning are positioned to take the critical issue of caste oppression and discrimination seriously and to render it visible,” said Angana Chatterji, cultural anthropologist and scholar at the University of California (UC) Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender.

“Such commitment is imperative to deepening the study of caste and generative of new knowledge formations attentive to its intersections with gender and race. And to developing support systems, curricula and interventions to dismantle caste oppression and caste privilege within the university,” she added.

Often invisible

Caste harassment can often be invisible to those outside the South Asian community, but that does not mean it does not exist outside Asia. 

“I have been experiencing caste discrimination from my childhood, but I did not imagine that caste discrimination exists in the US, but then I experienced it myself. I was discriminated against within campus and outside campus,” said Pariyar, who is from Nepal. His caste are often not allowed to sit at the same table as higher castes or share food. 

Pariyar, who arrived in the US in 2015, said other South Asians “will ask your name, what does your father do. Their intention is to know my caste identity. In the beginning the conversation is respectful, but after knowing my caste identity that respect is gone,” he said.

“This is happening in California and not just in California but elsewhere in the US,” he added, saying he was left embarrassed, humiliated and depressed by these experiences and preferred not to go to get-togethers, house parties or other parties where there were other South Asian students present. 

Others who face caste discrimination are often reluctant to speak out because, in effect, it means revealing their caste origins. Some of them drop their surname or adopt a caste-neutral surname.  

“Many people do not feel comfortable talking about this type of discrimination and they want to hide their identity because they want to be protected; they don’t want harassment from dominant-caste people,” noted Pariyar, who says he is talking to other campuses about similar protections, including the University of California system – separate from the California State University system – starting with UC Berkeley. 

“We have to take it step by step,” said Pariyar, noting the victories in the CSU system and elsewhere along the way. 

The wording varies in different institutions. Brandeis University added this category in December 2019 that says caste is a recognised and protected characteristic in the school’s anti-discrimination policy. In September 2021, UC Davis added ‘caste or perceived caste’ as a category to its anti-discrimination policy. 

Colby College of Maine revised its non-discrimination policy to add caste to its list of ‘protections for the campus community’. In December 2021 Harvard, the first Ivy League university to do so, “added protections for caste-oppressed students” to its graduate student union contract.

Before CSU included it more broadly, some student and faculty organisations passed resolutions last year calling on the university to add caste to its anti-discrimination policy. These include the California Faculty Association, a CSU labour union, as part of their collective bargaining agreement, and Cal State Student Association, a non-profit representing students across the university, in April 2021.

“The student resolutions really matter because when the voice of the students from all 22 campuses say ‘we need this’, it’s huge. So that began the engagement with the [CSU] Chancellor’s office, and they have their own legal team. So they’re confident about the choices,” said Soundararajan. “But we also connected them with top legal scholars on caste in the United States.”

Periyar says it was an uphill battle. When the CSU-wide resolution came up, the Hindu American Foundation (HAF), a Hindu lobby group, vehemently opposed it. Its website includes a comment by Sunil Kumar, professor of engineering at San Diego State University. 

Rather than redressing discrimination, “it will actually cause discrimination by unconstitutionally singling out and targeting Hindu faculty of Indian and South Asian descent as members of a suspect class because of deeply entrenched, false stereotypes about Indians, Hindus and caste,” he said. 

HAF had been virtually silent until then, perhaps not understanding the significance of student and faculty resolutions. But Pariyar counters: “This policy is not dividing. It is a policy of inclusion. There are marginalised students and they need to be included.”

Berkeley’s Chatterji said: “Hindu nationalist organisations in the diaspora have repeatedly attempted to silence conversations around caste oppression, gender and Islamophobia. If systems of higher education in California determine to make caste a protected category, it will have an impact not just on California, but nationally.”

A ‘caste curriculum’

Becoming more inclusive is also important in the context of broadening diversity of incoming international students. 

“It is already a topic of conversation on campuses on how to diversity the pool of international students, [to know] what are the systemic forms of discrimination that exist over time and how can US institutions make sure they are reaching a broader diversity of South Asian students,” said international education consultant Rajika Bhandari. 

“On-the-ground understanding is definitely required, because if policies are not shaped by individuals who deeply understand the context, it can fall into a kind of neocolonialist framework or a very Americanised view of another countries’ social issues,” she said. 

Social stratification by caste, prevalent in India for centuries, has variations by region and community, even within India and its neighbouring countries, as well as further afield in South Africa, East Africa and Southeast Asia – particularly in Singapore and Malaysia, the Caribbean and elsewhere with communities from South Asia, often since British colonial times. Its complexity is difficult to explain to others. 

Pariyar agrees universities will need to understand caste better in order to be truly inclusive. 

“Adding caste is not enough, application is very important,” he said. “We need a caste equity action plan”. 

“We need training and a curriculum. We need to train all the diversity and inclusion committee members, all the faculty within the CSU system about the gravity of caste discrimination, what it is and how it exists. There is visible discrimination and invisible discrimination and they need to understand that,” Pariyar said, adding that the university system needs to hire experts to train staff and faculty.  

Some of this expertise is provided by Equality Labs which says it helps institutions develop better tools and know the process of how to identify discriminatory behaviour on the basis of caste.

“Institutions need to create real metrics – enrolment metrics, application metrics – to get a sense of what the baseline of crimes or incidents are, then to be able to bring it down. Data is the key – if we don’t begin with a set of really strong KPIs [key performance indicators], we can’t measure progress,” said Soundararajan.

Source: Caste has become a university diversity issue in the US

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Stephens: California’s Ethnic Studies Follies: A proposed curriculum magnifies differences, encourages tribal loyalties and advances ideological group think.

2021/03/11 Leave a comment

Some exaggeration regarding divisiveness but valid points regarding over-reach and the risks in not using ethnic studies to look at both the commonalities and differences:

The first time California’s Department of Education published a draft of an ethnic studies “model curriculum” for high school students, in 2019, it managed the neat trick of omitting anti-Semitism while committing it.

More than a million Jews live in California. They are also among the state’s leading victims of hate crimes.

Yet in a lengthy draft otherwise rich with references to various forms of bigotry, there was no mention of bigotry toward Jews. There was, however, an endorsement of the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, which essentially calls for the elimination of the Jewish state. There was also an approving mention of a Palestinian singer rapping that Israelis “use the press so they can manufacture” — the old refrain that lying Jews control the media.

The draft outraged many Jews. And they were joined by Armenian, Assyrian, Hellenic, Hindu and Korean civic groups in a statementurging the California Department of Education to “completely redraft the curriculum.” In its original form, they said, the document was “replete with mischaracterizations and omissions of major California ethnoreligious groups.”

Last September, Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed a bill that would mandate ethnic studies as a graduation requirement in California’s high schools, pending further review of the model curriculum. While some maintained that a critical ethnic studies curriculum was a mistake, and not just for Jews, others took the view that, when it came to those revisions, it was better to be at the table than on it. Progressive Jews helped redraft a curriculum that included two sample lessons on the Jewish-American experience, along with testimonials about Jewishness from the likes of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Dianne Feinstein.

A victory? One can still quarrel with the curriculum’s tendentiously racialized view of the American-Jewish experience. But at least the anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist dog whistles have been taken out and the history of anti-Semitism has been put in.

Yet as the Board of Education is set to vote on the new curriculum this month, it is likelier than before to enthrone ethnic studies, an older relative to critical race theory, into the largest public school system in the United States. This is a big deal in America’s ongoing culture wars. And it’s a bad deal for California’s students, at least for those whose school districts decide to make the curriculum their own.

What is “ethnic studies”? Contrary to first impressions, it is not multiculturalism. It is not a way of exploring, much less celebrating, America’s pluralistic society. It is an assault on it. “A multiculturalist framework that views our people through a colonialist lens is what literally led to the need for ethnic studies,” Sharif Zakout of the Arab Resource and Organizing Center told a state Education Department panel last year.

Ethnic studies is less an academic discipline than it is the recruiting arm of a radical ideological movement masquerading as mainstream pedagogy. From the opening pages of the model curriculum, students are expected not just to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs,” but to “critique empire-building in history” and “connect ourselves to past and contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice.”

That would be fine if it appeared in the pages of, say, The Nation. It would be fine, too, if students were exposed to critical race theory the way they might be exposed to Marxist philosophy or some other ideology — as a subject to be examined, not a lens through which to do the examining. The former is education. The latter is indoctrination. The ethnic studies curriculum conceals the difference.

It also does so in a uniquely lopsided way. “Ethnic studies is for all students,” the curriculum announces. Actually, not so much. Irish-Americans have faced a long history of discrimination in the U.S. and are famously proud of their heritage. But the word “Irish” hardly appears anywhere in the model curriculum, and nowhere in its sample lessons. Russians, Italians, Poles and others rate only the briefest mentions.

Perhaps this is because all of them, like most Jews, have a new identity, known in the jargon of ethnic studies as “conditional whiteness,” which simultaneously erases their past and racializes their present. Leave aside the ignorance this fosters regarding the long history of differences, struggles and achievements by various European ethnic groups in America. It’s also the mirror image of longstanding prejudices regarding “Asians” or “Hispanics” as ethnically undifferentiated masses of mainly identical people.

When the main thing left-wing progressives see about America is its allegedly oppressive systems of ethnicity or color, they aren’t seeing America at all. Nor should they be surprised when right-wing reactionaries adopt a perverse version of their views. To treat “whiteness” — conditional or otherwise — not as an accident of pigmentation but as an ethnicity unto itself is what the David Dukes of the world have always wanted.

It shouldn’t be like this. Public education is supposed to create a sense of common citizenship while cultivating the habits of independent thinking. This is a curriculum that magnifies differences, encourages tribal loyalties and advances ideological groupthink.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/09/opinion/californias-ethnic-studies.html

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To Tackle Racial Disparities In COVID-19, California Enacts New Metric For Reopening

2020/10/08 Leave a comment

Worth considering in Canadian provinces as well, particularly in for our larger centres:

There are many things still unknown about the coronavirus. But one thing is certain: the disproportionate harm COVID-19 has caused in communities of color.

To address the issue, California has implemented a new health equity requirement on the state’s 35 largest counties — those with a population of more than 106,000. It’s believed to be the first such measure in the U.S.

In order to advance to the next phase of economic reopening, counties like Los Angeles will need to reduce the levels of the virus in their most vulnerable communities — by meeting certain test-positivity goals as well as showing targeted investments in resources such as more increased testing, contact tracing and education.

The goal isn’t simply to reduce the number of cases, but to bring the numbers in a county’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods more in line with the county’s overall level.

“We want to make sure that our focus on COVID has a look at every community, regardless of skin color or wealth, and that we are concerned about equity,” Dr. Mark Ghaly, California’s health secretary, tells All Things Considered. “That means a disproportionate investment in populations and groups that have a disproportionate impact.”

Latinos make up about 40% of the state’s population, but account for 61% of coronavirus cases and nearly 50% of the deaths. The Black community is 6% of the population, but accounts for about 4% of cases and more than 7% of deaths.

Compare that to the white population — which is about 37% of the population, but 17% of cases and just about 30% of deaths.

Here are excerpts from the interview.

On business owners who might chafe at the health equity metric

For a county to be able to move forward with confidence and success, bringing all of their communities along with reduced transmission, flooding the communities that need testing with that, making sure that we have enough disease investigators and supporting isolation, really allow the county as a whole to move forward, even sooner and with greater confidence, because the disparate levels of transmission within a single county can really lead to problems for the entire county, as the level of mixing, while we reopen more of our business sectors, occurs. …

We know that so many of the communities that have the disproportionate impact are, in fact, the essential workers and the people who travel on public transportation and move into all parts of the community. So really, this is not just a focus on the race and ethnic impacts of COVID, but really a strategy to make sure we address transmission in a wise and thoughtful way across our state.

We believe that it certainly gives us a greater path to addressing some of it. In the short run, we focus on creating access to testing. We create better, stronger lines of communication between public health officials and those communities, causing us to hire and bring on more bilingual staff that can relate and connect with the target population. So we believe it both focuses on COVID, but also gives us a pathway to continue to increase our connection and deepened impact with communities that, on so many health measures, have faced a disproportionate impact of disease and other bad outcomes.

Source: To Tackle Racial Disparities In COVID-19, California Enacts New Metric For Reopening

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California Gov. Signs Law Requiring Corporations to Have Board Members From Racial or Sexual Minority Groups

2020/10/03 Leave a comment

Significant:

Hundreds of California-based corporations must have directors from racial or sexual minorities on their boards under a first-in-the-nation bill signed Wednesday by Gov. Gavin Newsom.

The diversity legislation is similar to a 2018 measure that required boardrooms to have at least one female director by 2019. Like that measure, it could face court challenges from conservative groups who view it as a discriminatory quota.

Supporters evoked both the coronavirus pandemic that is disproportionately affecting minorities and weeks of unrest and calls for inclusion that followed the slaying of George Floyd in May in the custody of Minneapolis police.

After Floyd’s death, many corporations issued statements of support for diversity, but many haven’t followed through, said Assemblyman Chris Holden (D-Pasadena), who co-authored the bill.

“The new law represents a big step forward for racial equity,” Holden said. “While some corporations were already leading the way to combat implicit bias, now, all of California’s corporate boards will better reflect the diversity of our state. This is a win-win as ethnically diverse boards have shown to outperform those that lack diversity.”

By the end of 2021, the more than 660 public corporations with California headquarters must have at least one board director from an “underrepresented community,” according to the measure.

Those who qualify would self-identify as Black, Latino, Asian, Pacific Islander, Native American, Native Hawaiian or Alaska Native, or as gay, lesbian, bisexual or transgender.

The measure requires at least two such directors by the end of 2022 on boards with four to nine directors. Three directors are required for boards with nine or more directors. Firms that don’t comply would face fines of $100,00 for first violations and $300,000 for repeated violations.

At an online signing ceremony, Newsom said it was important for minorities to have a voice on the boards of powerful corporations.

“When we talk about racial justice, we talk about empowerment, we talk about power, and we need to talk about seats at the table,” Newsom said.

The legislation was part of a package of racial justice measures signed by Newsom before a midnight deadline. Others bar the use of peremptory challenges to remove potential jurors based on racial, religious or gender identity; allow judges to alter sentences that are believed to involve racial or ethnic discrimination; and set up a state task force to study the idea of reparations to African Americans for slavery.

The text of the corporate diversity bill cited the Latino Corporate Directors Association, which said 233 of 662 publicly traded companies headquartered in California had all-white boards as of this year. Nearly 90% didn’t have any Latino directors, although Latinos make up 39% of the state’s population. Only 16% had an African American board member.

The only official opponent in a legislative analysis was former California commissioner of corporations Keith Bishop. He objected that that bill, coupled with the existing diversity law, would make it more desirable for corporations to pick women who also are members of the underrepresented communities to simultaneously meet both sets of quotas, to the detriment of men or women who do not meet the qualifications in the new bill.

Source: California Gov. Signs Law Requiring Corporations to Have Board Members From Racial or Sexual Minority Groups

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Californians to vote on racial, gender preference programs

2020/10/03 Leave a comment

Will be interesting to see how the demographic shifts affect the vote:

A California with vastly different political preferences and demographics is voting on whether to allow affirmative action in public hiring, contracting and college admissions — nearly a quarter century after voters outlawed programs that give preference based on race and gender.

If approved, Proposition 16 would repeal a 1996 initiative that made it unlawful for California’s state and local governments to discriminate against or grant preferential treatment to people based on race, ethnicity, national origin or sex. Then-Gov. Pete Wilson, a Republican, championed the measure as part of his conservative bid for the presidency.

The California of 2020 is less Republican and more diverse than it was 24 years ago, with Latinos making up 39% of the population in a state where no group holds a majority.

Still, the repeal might not have made the ballot if not for the Memorial Day police killing of George Floyd while handcuffed by police in Minneapolis. Voters’ decision will test support for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Assemblywoman Shirley Weber, a San Diego Democrat and chairwoman of the California Legislative Black Caucus, is the lead author of the legislation that put the question to voters, which required two-thirds support in both houses of the state Legislature.

“I think the death of George Floyd made racism very real for people; they could see it. And now what I was asking them to do was to act on it, stop telling me how horrible it is, stop telling me that you really didn’t know that, stop telling me that this is such a revelation for you,” Weber said.

She added: “Now the question becomes, what are you going to do about it?”

Early voting begins Monday for the Nov. 3 election.

The U.S. Supreme Court has long outlawed racial quotas, but it has ruled that universities may use tailored programs to promote diversity.

Last year, a federal judge in Boston rejected claims that Harvard’s admissions policies discriminated against Asian American applicants to keep their numbers artificially low. The plaintiff, the Students for Fair Admissions group, is appealing.

Supporters of Proposition 16 include U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris of California, the Democratic nominee for U.S. , Black Lives Matter movement co-founders, professional sports teams and politically liberal groups of all types. They argue that some programs are needed to help level a systemically racist playing field. The campaign has raised $14 million, far more than the $1 million raised by opponents.

Opponents include Ward Connerly, an African American businessman and former University of California regent who pushed for the 1996 ban.

They say government should never discriminate by race or gender, and the only way to stop discrimination is to end it. Joining Connerly are more recent Chinese immigrants who say the United States shouldn’t play based on skin .

In 2014, activists scuttled an attempt to restore racial preferences in higher education and successfully voted out some Asian American legislators they called traitors to their race.

Assemblyman Evan Low, who is Chinese American, voted in June to put the issue before voters despite emails and phone calls running 37-to-1 against it. He rebuked proponents for failing to reach out to him and the broader Asian American community at a time when all minorities have reason to feel under attack.

“Yes, we have a moral compass, but we must have conversations, difficult ones, even with those communities in opposition, because we’re all in this together, right?” said Low, a Silicon Valley Democrat, in June.

Supporters say minority- and women-owned businesses have missed out on public contracting dollars. Because of the ban, culturally specific programs aimed at improving high school graduation rates for African American boys and Latinas were discontinued, deepening divides.

And while some Asian Americans are admitted to elite universities in large numbers, affirmative action proponents say they too hit a “bamboo ceiling” that prevents them from landing executive-level positions.

On the other side, Tom Campbell, a former dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said the college recruited minority applicants through strong outreach to high school students in nearby Oakland.

The legacy of slavery and Jim Crow segregation laws exists, he said, but, “I just will not engage in this method of correcting that, because it is wrong to the individual kept out because of her or his race.”

Kali Fontanilla teaches English as a second language in Salinas, California and before that, tutored African American students. She identifies as Black and biracial, and said students of don’t need their standards lowered.

“That’s insulting to me to say that there’s certain groups that because of the of your skin you’re not meeting the standard, you can’t meet the standard (so) we’re going to help you, we’re going to give you this crutch to get in,” she said.

Higher education has long been a flash point in the debate and both sides point to admissions statistics at the University of California and its nine undergraduate campuses to make their case.

Opponents of affirmative action say Latinos have made significant progress without preferential treatment, making up 25% of undergraduates last year, double their share two decades ago.

Supporters of affirmative action note that Latinos make up more than half of California’s high school seniors, with a graduation rate above 80 .

The population of California has also changed dramatically since 1996. The numbers of Latino and Asian American residents — and voters — have grown, although likely voters are still disproportionately white. Democrats still make up nearly half of registered voters, but the percentage of Republicans in the state has dropped from 36% to 24%.

Dan Schnur, who teaches political communications at UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California, noted that young white Californians also are much more liberal on issues of immigration, same-sex marriage and equity, having “grown up in much more diverse and multicultural environments than their parents and grandparents.”

But recent polls by the Public Policy Institute of California and the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California, Berkeley showed the measure trailing. Last year, voters in Washington narrowly upheld that state’s ban.

Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal and Education Fund, said claims that a quarter of college students are Latino are “not something to be celebrated,” given that more than half of all public school students are Latino.

“That’s a disparity that needs to be aggressively addressed, and Proposition 16 would allow us to do that,” he said.

Source: Californians to vote on racial, gender preference programs

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‘Herstory’ is out as California revamps K-12 ethnic studies course guide

2020/08/03 Leave a comment

Hard to update curricula for ethnic studies and develop consensus and balance (as in the case of citizenship guides):

State officials unveiled their latest try at an ethnic studies curriculum for K-12 students Friday, and it’s clear their hope is that this time fewer people will be offended.

To appease critics of academic jargon, the new draft ditches terms such as “herstory” for the more traditional “history.” To better honor diversity, teachers are encouraged to let the ethnic composition of the class influence study topics.

Still, the new version retains a focus on the four groups long associated with ethnic studies: African Americans, Asian Americans, Chicanos/Latinos and Native American and Indigenous peoples. That aspect could reassure leaders in the field of ethnic studies, who shaped the first version but had less influence over the revision.

All told, the latest draft represents an attempt at compromise among strong, difficult-to-resolve passions. Ethnic studies is innately and even intentionally political in challenging established norms. All the same, it embodies widely supported goals that include empowering students of color, nurturing empathy among white students and developing critical thinking and historical perspective among all.

The push for ethnic studies in California has recently gained momentum, buoyed by Black Lives Matter protests that followed the May killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. Ethnic studies, supporters say, has the potential to dismantle systemic and unconscious racism through the education of the citizens of tomorrow.

“Our schools have not always been a place where students can gain a full understanding of the contributions of people of color and the many ways throughout history — and present day — that our country has exploited, marginalized, and oppressed them,” state Supt. of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond said in a statement Friday. “At a time when people across the nation are calling for a fairer, more just society, we must empower and equip students and educators to have these courageous conversations in the classroom.”

Expect the reviews — positive and negative — to trickle in for weeks.

The debate is not merely for academics. This model curriculum is expected to guide teaching in K-12 public schools across California. The state Board of Education is scheduled to approve a final version by the end of March. And pending legislation would make ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement.

The latest version attempts to tone down references that some regarded as overly political or ideologically one-sided. There had been particular criticism of elements seen as anti-Semitic or anti-Israel, although there were Jews on both sides of the debate.

Among those with reservations about the original curriculum were members of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, which had contended that the guide intentionally excluded Jews. The lawmakers faulted the first version for failing to explain anti-Semitism while providing an overly positive representation of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel.

“There were 14 forms of bigotry and racism in the glossary,” said Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel (D-Encino), who called the exclusion of anti-Semitism glaring, obvious and offensive.

Anti-Semitism is now noted more clearly in the curriculum as a form of bigotry.

Critics are not entirely satisfied.

The draft has improved, but not enough, said Sarah Levin, executive director of Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa.

“These supplemental materials ignore the stories of all our coalition members — who together represent an estimated 60% of Californians who hail from the Middle East and North Africa — while portraying the Arab American experience as a monolith to represent the region,” she said.

Another critic, Williamson Evers, also felt the improvement was inadequate.

“The proposed model curriculum is still full of left-wing ideological propaganda and indoctrination,” said Evers, a senior fellow at the Independent Institute, an Oakland think tank. “It still force feeds our children the socialist dogma that capitalism is oppression. It’s almost all Berkeley and little Bakersfield.”

The new draft arrived nearly a year after the California Department of Education shelved the original.

Officials arrived at the latest iteration after reviewing thousands of public comments, convening experts and conducting teacher focus groups.

At its core, supporters say, ethnic studies teaches students how to think critically about the world around them, “tell their own stories,” develop “a deep appreciation for cultural diversity and inclusion” and engage “socially and politically” to eradicate bigotry, hate and racism, according to the earlier draft of the model curriculum.

The model curriculum is meant to serve as a guideline rather than a mandate for schools that choose to offer ethnic studies classes. In California, as nationwide, these courses are increasing in number, with grade-school enrollment nearly doubling from 8,678 in 2013-14 to 17,354 in 2016-17, according to the state Department of Education.

There appears to be broad legislative support for making ethnic studies a high school graduation requirement. Some school systems already have taken that step.

Supporters of the original curriculum include 25,000 people who have signed a “Defend Ethnic Studies” petition, ethnic studies faculty from the California State University and University of California, and many Jewish groups.

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, a Los Angeles teacher and co-chair of the advisory committee that created the original draft curriculum, said ethnic studies courses can be responsive to all students in a class and integrate other ethnic groups “without de-centering communities of color.”

Cuauhtin said ethnic studies terminology should remain in the curriculum. “Students of color need to also be respected as young intellectuals and given access to academic concepts and disciplinary language,” he said. “Every academic field has its own language, and yes, so does ethnic studies — let’s uplift that and ensure it’s accessible, not erase it.”

“Herstory,” for example, is a term used to describe history written from a feminist or women’s perspective. The term is also deployed when referring to counter-narratives within history.

Assemblyman Jose Medina, the author of the bill that would mandate ethnic studies, is optimistic about how the final product will turn out.

“The model curriculum is still a draft and in the early stages of the input process,” said Medina (D-Riverside). “I trust this process and believe we will end up with a strong ethnic studies framework that will provide a solid structure for educators to build off as they bring ethnic studies to life in their classrooms.”

In a related development, last month the Cal State Board of Trustees revised its general education curriculum for the first time in 40 years to create an ethnic studies and social justice requirement of all undergraduate students.

Ethnic studies faculty and some trustees criticized the requirement as being too broad and diluting the mission of ethnic studies, advocating instead for a narrower requirement proposed in a bill that is currently making its way to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk.

Source: ‘Herstory’ is out as California revamps K-12 ethnic studies course guide

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