The History of Ethnic Studies

Comparative ethnic studies is the study of power, and its locations and articulations around the axes of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and nation. The field arose historically from the connections made by peoples of color in the U.S. with peoples of the Third World and their struggles against colonization and neo-colonization. Because crude caricatures of the field abound, I am compelled to stress that ethnic studies is not multiculturalism, identity politics, or intellectual affirmative action. Not an act of charity, ethnic studies was gained through contestation. As was astutely observed by Frederick Douglass, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Students have been instrumental in shaping the field of ethnic studies. The Third World Liberation Front, students at San Francisco State and the University of California, Berkeley, struck in 1968-69 for the institutionalization of ethnic studies, and more immediately, at Columbia in 1996, student critique of the core’s Eurocentrism and demands for American Indian, Asian American, and Latina/o studies helped to establish the University’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. I served as that Center’s founding director, in large part because of the agencies of those students, and I now write inspired by the students in my Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies class.

Since the Center’s birth in 1999, its faculty and many of its students have pursued an understanding of the U.S. “social formation,” which we trace from Marxist writings as the form and stage of society, both its structure and evolution. Our subject matter—human society and its passage through space and over time—is thus capacious, and in that unraveling we deploy methods and theories drawn from across the humanities and social sciences. Like its allied fields of area, women, and queer studies, ethnic studies is multidisciplinary. For ethnic studies, the social structure is conceived and cultivated by power and its relations among race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and nation as discrepant and intersecting constructions. Social formation attends to the multiplicity of forces at work in the positions and exercises of power. It demands a complexity in our thinking and politics to ascertain how social categories overlap, interact, conflict with, and interrupt each other. And it provides a rubric for engagements among racialization, feminist, queer, Marxist, and critical theories, and for political coalitions among peoples of color but also among and across created divides of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, and nation.

It was not always so, that expansive conception of comparative ethnic studies. The Third World Liberation Front at San Francisco State declared in its philosophy and goals: “The TWLF [...] has [as] its purpose to aid in further developing politically, economically, and culturally the revolutionary Third World consciousness of [racially] oppressed peoples both on and off campus.” That “revolutionary Third World consciousness” drew from anti-colonial writers like Frantz Fanon and Albert Memmi who denounced the erasure of the colonized from history and their resulting “cultural estrangement” from self and society. Colonization “disfigures,” wrote Memmi, and requires a recuperation of “a whole and free man;” Fanon urged the creation of “a new humanity ... a new humanism.”

The Third World, comprised of African, Asian, and Latin American nations aligned with neither the First, capitalist, nor the Second, socialist worlds, began the quest for a new world order of land, peace, and freedom following World War II. That project, according to Fanon, was an attempt by the periphery to solve the core’s problems of imperialism, wars, and systems of bondage, and at the 1955 Bandung Conference of newly independent African and Asian nations, its host, Indonesia’s president Ahmed Sukarno, outlined the Third World agenda that was absorbed by students in the U.S. over a decade later. “Let us remember that no blessing of god is so sweet as life and liberty,” Sukarno observed. “Let us remember that the stature of all mankind is diminished so long as nations or parts of nations are still unfree. Let us remember that the highest purpose of man is the liberation of man from his bonds of fear, his bonds of poverty, the liberation of man from the physical, spiritual and intellectual bonds which have for long stunted the development of humanity’s majority.”

Despite those transnational, insurgent roots, some branches of ethnic studies lost their ambition for educational and social transformation in the thicket of identity politics and nationalism. Black power and its permutations, an effective antidote to the poison of a colonized mentality and a radical declaration for self-determination, also bore the stain of white identity politics and national and manly reconstitution. Patterned on European states, the rise of nation promoted homogeneity and repressed heterogeneities for the sake of union, and was patriarchal and hostile to feminist and queer critiques and aspirations. Also, resistance to European imperialism and a discourse of global white supremacy prompted the liberating ideas of negritude and pan-Africanism, which, at the same time, arose from the myth of a “race” invented and dispersed by Europeans. Third World self-determination, including the legitimate claims of American Indians and Hawaiians to sovereignty, floundered in the terrain and language of the First World.

Ethnic studies as social formation, by contrast, aspires to escape the magnetism of nationalism and racial formation even as it distinguishes itself from imposters like multiculturalism and certain elements of post-structuralism and post-colonialism. An offspring of assimilation and race relations theory, multiculturalism celebrates diversity insofar as it contributes to and affirms the mainstream and its institutions. Ethnic studies, by contrast, apprehends racial and social formations as purposeful designs of those who hold and wield power to maintain privileges and poverties. In addition, racializations are neither solitary nor primary. As explained by a black feminist collective in 1977, “we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.” Post-colonialism’s heterogeneity, contingency, catachresis, hybridity, fluidity, and positionality can reduce the force of naming and fixing power and its effects, deny the realities of social structures and human experience, and absolve global citizens from local responsibility and action. Further, its universalism and disregard of borders resonate with the rise of global capitalism and its discourse of diffuseness and a paralyzing indeterminacy. Global initiatives and the global university, released from its moorings at home, might consort with those features of capitalism and empire.
Instead, world-systems and dependency theory, despite their flaws, the flows of capital, labor, and culture, and a persistent neo-colonialism testify to structures of a global order.

Those who now occupy the positions realized through student initiatives, in large part, have declared that Columbia’s Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race “is currently engaged in a redefinition of its intellectual direction.” Its institutional and intellectual foundations, nonetheless, were informed by the interventions of Third World liberation movements and the idea of social formation.

The author, the former director of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, is a professor in the School of International and Public Affairs.