“Death and life are in the power of the tongue, and those who love it will eat its fruits.” Proverbs 18:21 (English Standard Version)
The Bible is full of wise references to the power of our words. We can use words to build up or tear down. Ideally, words are given life to communicate important facts and distribute knowledge. But sometimes, they are fashioned and assembled to create rhetoric, narratives, and propaganda. Fully aware of the power of words, leftists have honed their skills at manipulating and weaponizing language. “Equity” blows up in place of equality. Diversity” is designated for proportional racial representation. “Inclusion” is embraced at the expense of opposing viewpoints. Often, the misuse of words is more subtle, blurring the distinctions between sob stories and uplifting experiences. Consider the case of ethnic studies in California.
For the past five years, the Golden State has led the nation in proselytizing this hotly contested discipline. In 2020, with the passage of Assembly Bill 1460, the California State University (CSU) system started requiring a three-unit ethnic studies course for graduation for all undergraduate students. In 2021, the state legislature passed a mandate (AB 101) for ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement, after a contentious fight over teaching pedagogies and ideological frameworks related to the state-approved Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC). This year, Sacramento lawmakers are entertaining another proposal (AB 1468) to flesh out the model curriculum into state content standards.
Facing opposition from a bipartisan coalition, the California Department of Education rejected three earlier and more radical drafts of ESMC. Governor Gavin Newsom pledged that race-essentialist approaches to ethnic studies would “never see the light of day.” The State Legislature inserted key guardrails against “bias, bigotry, discrimination, or religious doctrine” in the graduation mandate bill. California’s education policymakers seemed determined to comply with state law requiring that ethnic studies be taught to prepare students to “be global citizens with an appreciation for the contributions of multiple cultures.”
Is that so? Do ethnic studies practitioners truly care about instilling a sense of appreciation for different cultures in students?
[RELATED: Georgetown’s Asian Gambit—Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics]
The fine line between victimhood and empowerment
Sample lessons for “Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies” in ESMC and in all recent school district curricula demonstrate just the opposite. The lesson on “the Model Minority Myth” is a three-day program critiquing “a false narrative that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) have overcome racism and prejudice” and that “glosses over the violence, harm and legalized racism that AAPIs have endured.” The lesson plan further argues against the myth for “creat(ing) a division among the AAPI community and plac(ing) a wedge between them and other oppressed groups, including, but not limited to, African American, Latinx, and American Indian communities.” It goes on to lambast the media portrayal of Asian Americans’ success in pursuing the American Dream as a controlling tool to delegitimize systemic oppression and systemic racism.
Such a manufactured outrage against the model minority myth is entirely farcical.
First, it is divisive and politicized rhetoric that treats hard work, emphasis on education, family values, and today’s sacrifice for tomorrow’s gain as vehicles of oppression and control by an inherent racist structure of white supremacy. Oddly, these values are quintessentially American. Moreover, the perpetual drumbeat of victimhood and marginalization overshadows a track record of resilience and growth, caricaturized as a stereotype. The following sample lesson on “Chinese Railroad Workers” focuses on the mistreatment received by Chinese laborers in the broad context of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
The lesson accuses the Golden Spike Foundation, a Utah-based organization that celebrates Chinese Americans’ contributions to the railroads, of not being representative of all Chinese railroad workers. To that point, the sample lesson mentions isolated incidents such as the 1867 Chinese railroad strike and the omission of Chinese workers in the image of the 1869 Promontory Point workers meeting, as proof of underrepresentation.
The foundation is singled out because it did not sufficiently highlight the experiences of Chinese strikers and labor organizers. The lesson’s emphasis on resisting oppression and marginalization ignores equally important historical examples of perseverance and reform. The lesson fails to mention that, during the first decade after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act, over 10,000 lawsuits were filed by Chinese-American lawyers to defend their 14th Amendment constitutional right.
Another lesson on “Hmong Americans” again pushes victimhood, group isolation, and resistance. The source argues that “criminalization of men and boys of color goes hand in hand with the decriminalization of white males.” The sample lesson makes no mention of the fact that Hmong immigrants, who came to the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s as refugees, have achieved miraculous improvements in standard of living and socioeconomic success. In 1990, only 24 percent of the Hmong were employed, compared to 56 percent by 2010. Over this same period, the median household income of the Hmong grew from just 47 percent of the national average to 92 percent, and the percentage of the Hmong receiving public assistance fell from 67 percent to 12 percent. All of these impressive accomplishments were done in a matter of 20 years. Instead of celebrating these positive transformations, the lesson obsesses with oppression and struggles.
The left’s anger against the model minority myth is last but not least hypocritical.
Their logic to conflate objective observations on Asian Americans’ documented defiance of the victimhood narrative with this amorphous claim of systemic racism is demeaning. At the same time, critics of the myth, who are categorically in agreement with proponents of racial preferences, often label high-achieving Asian-American students as unimpressive, nerdy, lacking in leadership, and good at math, when it comes to perpetuating racial discrimination in college admissions. They only condemn the model minority myth when it serves their agenda to highlight oppression over progress.
[RELATED: A Way Past the Asian-American Challenge]
Infiltrating the universities
Saul Alinsky once instructed his fellow radicals, “[t]rue revolutionaries do not flaunt their radicalism. They cut their hair, put on suits and infiltrate the system from within.” Promoters of woke ethnic studies in California heeded his advice.
After making a grandstanding of protesting the state’s moderating stance as a compromise to appease “white supremacist, right wing, conservatives,” ethnic studies revolutionaries went to work through the institutions. Leading figures of the Liberated Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum Consortium (LESMCC), a group dedicated to “[h]onoring ancestral knowledge, struggles, and friendship built in solidarity,” and “[e]quip lack, Chicanx/Latinx, Asian American, American Indian/Indigenous and low-income youth,” have infiltrated the state’s public universities.
For instance, Trish Gallagher-Geursten of LESMCC serves on the University of California (UC) Ethnic Studies Faculty Council, which has tried—and so far failed—multiple times to make ethnic studies into an undergraduate admissions requirement for UC. In the proposal from the faculty council to the UC Academic Senate, ethnic studies courses must apply “culturally relevant pedagogy,” “abolitionist teaching,” “critical analysis,” and “nuancing approaches to race, racism and racialization.” Questionable scholarly sources such as “Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Race: Ethnic Studies and Literacies of Power in High School Classrooms” and “The Development of Critical Consciousness and Its Relation to Academic Achievement in Adolescents of Color” are cited as research evidence for the course’s academic benefits.
In its “UC Area A-G/H White Paper,” the faculty council insists that “ethnic studies creates bridges between racial and ethnic groups and promotes a sense of understanding and empathy between students of all races.” But the faculty council itself does nothing to build bridges or empathy in its biased definition of ethnic studies as “anti-racist” to “address systemic racism.” The group’s professed key concepts for “the multidisciplinary field of study… that centers Indigenous people and people of color” couldn’t be further away from teaching appreciation and understanding. To name a few, these concepts include: “race as a social construct,” “racism as a structure,” “oppression,” “decolonization,” and “social justice.”
In the wake of the Israel-Palestinian conflict, the faculty council took a radical-left stance to support pro-Palestinian student protestors. Rather than showing moral clarity, the group issued a statement on May 3, 2024, urging the UC administration to “initiate a UC-wide boycott of Israel,” partake in the BDS movement, and “grant amnesty for protestors.”
CSU does not fare any better.
Allyson Tintiangco-Cubales, a key leader for LESMCC and one of the 20 signatories who requested name removal from the state’s ESMC on account of anti-racism, is a Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University. There, she utilizes the public, taxpayer-funded resources to carry on research in “pinayism (process of decolonization, humanization and liberation),” “critical pedagogy,” “critical leadership praxis,” “culturally responsive teaching,” and so on.
CSU Northridge employs another LESMCC leader and ESMC protestor Theresa Montaño as a Professor of Chicano/a Studies. Professor Montaño once uninvited herself from a local forum on ethnic studies in Orange County that I helped curate, complaining that the event would be unsafe and other speakers—myself included—lacked expertise. Instead, the professor and her mask-wearing supporters hosted a counter-preference just hours before the forum, holding incendiary signs saying “With Justice and Equity for All” and “Stop the Hate Educate.”
The College of Ethnic Studies at CSU Los Angeles, the first such college in the nation, vows to “develop leaders who engage in rigorous, self-reflexive study that motivates critical engagement, self-determination and decolonial understandings of the world.” The college’s Department of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies (CLS) advocates for equipping “students with the critical tools to navigate and challenge complex systems of power.”
Official webpages of any ethnic studies program or department in any California public university are littered with woke buzzwords, assembled uncritically in a hodgepodge fashion to initiate young students into activism. Nowhere in and between these pages have words like personal empowerment and individual agency been given any credit.
That should not be a surprise. After all, achieving within the current post-colonial, patriarchal, and racist power structure is too “white supremacist.” Instead, underachievement should be the norm for all minorities who face systemic discrimination in every facet of American life. Any norm-breaking behaviors should be treated with utmost suspicion, followed by group-shaming disdain. There it is, ladies and gentlemen, the left’s modus operandi in a few sentences.
Image: “Parliamentary Secretary’s statement on Chinese Railroad Workers Memorial Day” by Province of British Columbia on Flickr
It should be easy to beat these people.
Instead the losses continue.
Maybe a good idea to think why?
p.s. these articles by author would be better if 1/3 shorter.