Beware the Spread of 'Liberated' Ethnic Studies in California – and Beyond
In 1969, three years into China’s ruinous Cultural Revolution, disaster struck: my father, a construction manager, became a victim of the Marxist class struggle, which pitted one group against another. As a result, he endured endless torture and humiliation. Like many other victims of the Cultural Revolution, he was forced to attend “Criticism Conferences” and to kneel down for hours with a heavy steel plate emblazoned with his name hanging from his neck. I was born in 1963 into a happy working-class family in the Yunnan Province – but within a decade of my birth, millions had perished, including my grandmother and my mother.
Years later, after Chairman Mao died and Deng Xiaoping put a stop to the class-struggle campaign, I was grateful to come to the United States on a student visa and eventually to build a successful life and career in America. But my experience during the Cultural Revolution provides insight into a disturbing trend in K-12 education in the U.S. today.
Those of us who have suffered the unspeakable horrors of Marxist ideology tend to develop a keen sense of danger that stems from our understanding of the far Left. The rhetoric of “class struggle,” “critical consciousness,” demonization of the bourgeoisie (or, in today’s parlance, “the privileged”), and Manichean notions of the oppressed versus the oppressors arouses traumatic memories. We came to this country to escape such misery and to enjoy the fruits of a free society. When we hear radical voices in America spout uncannily familiar ideas, our internal warning systems go off. When we see these ideas institutionalized in K-12 public schools, we go on high alert, fearful that the society we fled to is starting to sound like the one we fled from.
My hope is that our haunting memories can serve to warn Americans, most of whom are less attuned to the perils of divisive ideologies and seductive idealism, that danger lurks in the body politic. We know. We’ve seen this movie before.
Originally taking hold in California, Liberated Ethnic Studies is a radical K-12 curriculum designed, in the words of the Union del Barrio (UDB), one of the activist organizations behind it, to advance liberation from the “international capitalist elite that is currently led by the United States.” The organization seeks the liberation of “la Raza,” the indigenous and Latino inhabitants of North and South America.
In September 2014, UDB helped establish the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition (ESNC), which sought to mandate ethnic studies for all students in the state. The Coordinator of Statewide Curricular Advocacy for the Ethnic Studies Now Coalition was R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, a scholar who denounced the United States as a “Eurocentric, white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, hetero-patriarchal, and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” And the original versions of the Californian ethnic studies curriculum were as radical as the activists who pushed for them.
While the California legislature ultimately rebuffed these radical activists and excised some of the more incendiary aspects of the curriculum, the final model curriculum is anything but moderate: it calls for educators to “critique empire building ... and its relationship to racism and other forms of power and oppression.” And it seeks to engender “critical consciousness” – the supposed ability to see hidden systems of oppression and to address such oppression through “radical healing.”
What might seem innocuous to innocent American ears can sound ominous to those of us who were steeped in this ideology in our youth. As divisive as the class-struggle education campaign launched by Mao Zedong in China six decades ago, this school curriculum incites hatred, instigates racial divisiveness, and advocates transforming America’s constitutional republic.
Since the “moderate” curriculum was officially approved by the state, the radical players from UDB and allied organizations who pushed the original extremist version have swooped in to sign contracts with local school districts in California and elsewhere to conduct teacher training and curriculum development. They’ve planted the curriculum in states such as Minnesota and Massachusetts, which are also teaching radical versions of ethnic studies. Students in several school districts are now learning to see America precisely as these radical activists see it – as an oppressive, settler-colonialist state.
Though the U.S. was founded on democratic ideals and maintains well-established institutions, we should not underestimate the danger of teaching a divisive ideology to the next generation. After taking power in 1949, Mao and his followers were able to indoctrinate tens of millions of innocent Chinese youth in Marxist theory, many of whom became radical Red Guards who destroyed over 3,000 years of Chinese cultural heritage.
America is far from perfect, but tens of millions of immigrants would agree with me: on economic, technological, and, yes, social justice fronts, America is the greatest nation on earth.
We should be educating our young people in America’s highest ideals and preparing them to assume the mantle of democratic stewardship – not propagandizing them in the rhetoric of racial resentment and divisive ideologies.
