Ethnic Studies Now!*

*In what is lately becoming an increasingly fragile climate in which to talk about race relations, the debate about Ethnic Studies at Columbia is one of the most obviously delicate components of this discussion. It shouldn’t be breaking news that the ongoing effort by students and teachers demanding that ethnic studies be given equal opportunity alongside a Eurocentric Core Curriculum through substantial course offerings, hiring power (not to mention the fight for tenured faculty), and basic respect, has yielded unsubstantial results. In this hyper-tense climate it might seem wrong to question this fact. But to agree that it’s nothing short of ridiculous for the ethnic studies program to have gone through a hunger strike, a takeover of Hamilton, and a decade’s worth of struggle to achieve legitimacy and yet still be at the pitiful state its in today, doesn’t mean that there aren’t problems with the state of the struggle itself.

It’s not that I don’t support ethnic studies. Is that even an imaginable option? Unless you hate freedom, it is impossible to not support a program’s right to exist, right to demand tenured faculty and to ask for its own center that would allow the program to grow and excel. Or unless you’re asking the administration to fund and inaugurate the Center for Holocaust Revisionism Studies. Otherwise, solidarity with the demands for ethnic studies should at least be implicit in a University community. And yet that general solidarity doesn’t seem to rise up in anybody but the activists themselves, and I would argue that it stems from the alienating “us” versus “them” mentality that surrounds the “fight” for ethnic studies at Columbia, weakening a movement that should be supported, without question, by all of us.

As an immigrant to this country interested in the way countries are shaped by the interaction between races from both outside and within, I should have taken some ethnic studies classes by now. The idea that a program exists to examine the “ongoing process by which people of color are grouped and defined at the complex intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality, and nationality” is of obvious appeal.

But not only was Intro to Comparative Ethnic Studies cancelled two years in a row—back when I signed up for it I had only a vague idea about what ethnic studies even meant, and even though being on the Spectator’s opinion staff had made me aware of the ongoing protest, I was unaware of my ignorance of the discipline itself. So last spring, my roommate and I hurried over from the CC coursewide lecture by Uday Mehta to Hamilton Hall, where an ethnic studies teach-in was about to start.
The event was called, revealingly, “What is Ethnic Studies.” The emphasis was theirs—I guess I wasn’t the only one who didn’t really know. The event promised to dispel the myths behind the program, to show that ethnic studies wasn’t, as they said in the e-mail announcing the event, “diversity,” “intellectual affirmative action,” or “victim’s studies.” “It is not the multi-cultural celebration of difference,” the e-mail announced.

The hostility from the panel was palpable. The professor presentations began with a prepared statement by Nicholas de Genova of the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, who declared “racism” too ambiguous a concept, preferring “white supremacism” as the proper object of study for examining “the socio-political order of privilege of whiteness over any other form of racial identity.” He mentioned that ethnic studies is no mere derivative of U.S. history, but could actually be seen as a counter-discipline to it, and that the existence of the discipline was crucial at “any university within the U.S. that aspires to not be merely an accomplishment of the continuing perpetration of racial injustice.”

He was followed by Nicole Marwell, also from CSER, who emphasized the question, “can we use the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house?” and referred to the administration’s reaction to student protesters as “throwing them some crumbs.”
The crowd was visibly receptive—it was as though the unity of beliefs in that stuffy Hamilton classroom was an antidote to the definitive oppression that existed in every other lecture hall, arising in classrooms and minds alike. But while informative and at times inspiring, the “teachings,” instead of being empowering and myth-dispelling, left me with a profound sense of bewilderment—a movement that counters the grouping and defining of non-whites was combining all others as part of the enemy? The presentation made it clear that there exists a complete lack of options with which to approach the issue. One either has to feel oppressed and fight, or one is affirming and even contributing to the institutionalization of oppression both in history and in academia.

During the section where past and present ethnic studies activists spoke, one student said that as he took more and more classes in the program, he went from “being apolitical and then became almost militant.” He didn’t seem to see this as problematic, but perhaps it’s that exact mind-set which limits the speaking points of the broader so-called dialogue we are always asking for—and which, lately, we really need—to grow beyond just two opposing extremes.