California’s Santa Ana Unified School District (SAUSD) recently approved two new courses: Ethnic Studies: World Geography (three votes in favor; one abstention) and History 10 Ethnic Studies World Histories (passed unanimously). Both have been widely criticized as biased and bigoted.
Ethnic Studies: World Geography is a full-year social-studies course for high-school students in the district, and its stated purpose is to study “political and social hegemonies between cultures of power and indigenous groups” as a way to “develop empathy for individuals and groups as well as to challenge established stereotypes and Eurocentric perspectives of disputes between cultures of power and populations.”
“Essential questions” posed to students throughout the course include: “How do insecurities in regards [sic] to self-image affect communities of color?”; “What role does white privilege play in the disenfranchisement of the perspectives and challenges of communities of color?”; “What [are] examples of racism, colorism, or white supremacy in your daily life around Santa Ana?”
One 2020 article cited in the curriculum states: “Do not let the confusing logic of the Oslo Accords fool you; all Palestinians in all parts of the occupied West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the besieged Gaza Strip, are under military control.” In actual fact, Israel has no soldiers or military facilities in the Gaza Strip, from which Israel withdrew completely, including the evacuation of all Israeli settlements, in 2005. The article also accuses Israel of multiple instances of “ethnic cleansing,” including during the Six-Day War in 1967 and through evictions from firearms-training grounds, known as firing zones. However, Israeli law forbids evictions of permanent residents from military firing zones in the West Bank, and the eviction cited was the result of a two-decade legal dispute.
The curriculum itself also asks students how “the settlement of Israelis after WWII changed the socio-economic status and sovereignty of Palestinians over time,” and recommends a project in which students create a children’s book about an immigrant family’s journey, including why they fled.
Another source in the curriculum, Vox’s “brief, simple history’ of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, refers to a population of Christians, Muslims, and a “small number” of Jews who “lived generally in peace” in the centuries prior to the conflict, dismissing the history of antisemitic violence in the region. Multiple sources in the curriculum criticize the impacts of Israel’s blockades on Gaza, which are meant to limit terrorist attacks and have also been enacted by Egypt.
The courses are divided by unit, each of which include supplemental resources, essential questions, and performance tasks for students.
The History 10 Ethnic Studies World History course establishes similar overarching goals related to privilege, power, and intersectionality. One teacher-reference source, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing, cited in the course asserts, “the Palestinian cause is decidedly proletarian in its tone, seeing its oppressor as an exploiting and colonial Israel — backed up by American imperialism — while Israelis and Americans claim they are defending civilization against primitive terrorists.” It muses that “perhaps settler democracies are better described as ethnocracies, democracy for one ethnic group, [such as] Israel” and argues that “from John Locke to contemporary Israelis dispossessing Palestinians, Europeans have argued that those who work and improve the land are entitled to it.” It also claims that “Israelis have been cleansing the occupied territories of native Arabs,” an act that was “renewed again in the Jewish land-grabbing of the past few years.”
The Dark Side of Democracy uses claims about Israel to support the thesis that “murderous cleansing is modern, because it is the dark side of democracy.”
Controversy regarding ethnic-studies education in California has simmered before. In 2020, California governor Gavin Newsom vetoed ethnic studies as a high-school graduation requirement, noting that the proposed curriculum was “insufficiently balanced and inclusive.”
Jewish groups, including the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa, and the American Jewish Committee, had also criticized the vetoed programming for antisemitism, exclusion of Jews, and a positive presentation of the BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaign against Israel.
However, in 2021, Newsom signed legislation mandating a semester-long ethnic-studies course, with legislation recommending attention to four overlooked identity groups: blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and Asian Americans. Newsom, explaining why he was now willing to sign the legislation, pointed to new safeguards stating that curricula not be biased, bigoted, or discriminatory.
School districts may choose their respective ethnic-studies curricula. Salinas and Hayward Unified School Districts have adopted the original draft that resulted in the veto. By 2021, SAUSD’s school board had already voted to require ethnic studies.
Speaking with a panel at Chapman University, Bertha Benavides, an SAUSD principal, said:
Being the leader in a school in a district with Latinos who aren’t loved for who they are, hurts. To bring a program like ethnic studies into life and allow your kids to love themselves, love their history, love their heritage, be proud of their grandparents. . . . It’s so critical [that our kids] learn about our brothers and sisters who are Asian or black or Native American because they need to learn that we are all suffering and we suffered.
Over 75 percent of the Santa Ana population is Hispanic. The public school district serves 44,000 students in Orange County, the vast majority of whom receive free or reduced-price lunch. The district held its third annual ethnic-studies conference this April, ten days before it passed the curriculum.