Ethnic studies
Ethnic studies, in the United States, is the study of difference—chiefly race, ethnicity, and nation, but also sexuality, gender, and other such markings—and power, as expressed by the state, by civil society, and by individuals.
Its antecedents came before the civil rights era, as early as the 1900s. During that time, educator and historian W. E. B. Du Bois expressed the need for teaching black history. However, ethnic studies became widely known as a secondary issue that arose after the civil rights era. Ethnic studies was originally conceived to re-frame the way that specific disciplines had told the stories, histories, struggles and triumphs of people of color on what was seen to be their own terms. In recent years, it has broadened its focus to include questions of representation, racialization, racial formation theory, and more determinedly interdisciplinary topics and approaches.
As opposed to international studies, which was originally created to focus on the relations between the United States and Third World countries, ethnic studies was created to challenge the already existing curriculum and focus on the history of people of different minority ethnicity in the United States. Ethnic studies is an academic field that spans the humanities and the social sciences; it emerged as an academic field in the second half of the 20th century partly in response to charges that traditional social science and humanities disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, sociology, philosophy, political science, and area studies were conceived from an inherently Eurocentric perspective.
"The unhyphenated-American phenomenon tends to have colonial characteristics," notes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera in After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism: "English-language texts and their authors are promoted as representative; a piece of cultural material may be understood as unhyphenated—and thus archetypal—only when authors meet certain demographic criteria; any deviation from these demographic or cultural prescriptions are subordinated to hyphenated status."
History
In the United States, the field of ethnic studies evolved out of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s and early 1970s, which contributed to growing self-awareness and radicalization of people of color such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and American Indians. Ethnic studies departments were established on college campuses across the country and have grown to encompass African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Raza Studies, Chicano Studies, Mexican American Studies, Native American Studies, Jewish Studies, and Arab Studies. Arab American Studies was created after 9/11 at SF State University. Jewish Studies and Arab Studies were created long before 1968, outside of the U.S., apart and separate from the 1968 Ethnic Studies Movement.The first strike demanding the establishment of an Ethnic Studies department occurred in 1968, led by the Third World Liberation Front, a joint effort of the Black Student Union, Latin American Students Organization, Asian American Political Alliance, Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor, and Native American Students Union at San Francisco State University. This was the longest student strike in the nation's history and resulted in the establishment of a School of Ethnic Studies. President S. I. Hayakawa ended the strike after taking a hardline approach when he appointed Dr. James Hirabayashi the first dean of the School of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University, and increased recruiting and admissions of students of color in response to the strike's demands. In 1972, The National Association for Ethnic Studies was founded to foster interdisciplinary discussions for scholars and activists concerned with the national and international dimensions of ethnicity encouraging conversations related to anthropology, Africana Studies, Native Studies, Sociology and American Studies among other fields.
Schools of thought
While early ethnic studies scholarship focused on the repressed histories and identities of various groups in the U.S., the field of study has expanded to encompass transnationalism, comparative race Studies, and postmodernist/poststructuralist critiques. While pioneering thinkers relied on frameworks, theories and methodologies such as those found in the allied fields of sociology, history, literature and film, scholars in the field today utilize multidisciplinary as well as comparative perspectives, increasingly within an international or transnational context. Central to much Ethnic Studies scholarship is understanding how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and other categories of difference intersect to shape the lived experiences of people of color, what the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw calls intersectionality. Branches of ethnic studies include but are not limited to African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American/ Indigenous Peoples' Studies, and Latino/a Studies.A discipline within ethnic studies is African American Studies, which consist of studying people of African descent and their ideologies, customs, cultures, identities, and practices by drawing on social sciences and the humanities. The changes made to educational and social institutions by the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s can be traced as the origin for the development of African American Studies as a discipline. In general, the changes made to the higher education system to incorporate African American Studies has been led by student activism. When initially created, in many cases to end protests, the African American Studies programs at predominately white universities were underfunded and not highly esteemed. Since the 1970s, African American Studies programs, in general, have become reputable and more concretely established within predominantly white universities. Historically, African American scholars and their works have been used as sources to teach African American Studies. Teaching African American Studies has been categorized by two methods: Afrocentric, which relies solely on text by black authors and are led by all-black faculties, and traditional methods, which are more inclusive of non-black authors and are more broad in their studies. Scholars whose work was influential to the development of African American Studies, and whose work is studied include W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, and George Washington Williams. The first historically black college or university to offer a variation of African American Studies was Howard University, located in Washington D.C.
Native American Studies, or sometimes named Native Studies or American Indian Studies, is another branch of ethnic studies which was established as a result of university student protest and community activism. The first attempts at establishing some form of Native American Studies came in 1917 from Oklahoma Senator Robert Owen, who called for an 'Indian Studies' program at the University of Oklahoma. Several decades later, the "Red Power" Movement of the 1960s, in a time of high minority and suppressed group activism in the US, sought to get Native American Studies into higher education. San Francisco State University and University of California at Berkeley were the first to adopt these fields into their departments in 1968. The TCU movement of the 1960s aimed to expand the teaching of Native American Studies by establishing tribe-run universities to educate the tribe's youth and their communities. Navajo Community College, later renamed Diné College, was the first of these institutions. Curriculum in Native American Studies programs teach the historical, cultural and traditional aspects of both natives of the land in general, as well as that of the American Indians specifically. Figures within Native American Studies include Vine Deloria Jr., an American Indian scholar and rights' activist, Paula Gunn Allen who was a writer and educator of Native American Studies, poet Simon J. Ortiz.
Asian American Studies, different than Asian Studies, is a subfield within ethnic studies, which focuses on the perspectives, history, culture, and traditions of the Asian peoples' in the United States. Asian American Studies originated in the late 1960s at the San Francisco State College where a student strike led to the development of the program at the school. The historical approach to representing Asia in the United States prior to the introduction of Asian American Studies has been Orientalism which portrays Asia as a polar opposite to anything western or American. To counter this historical representation of ideas, Asian American Studies became one of the interdisciplinary fields that emphasized teaching the perspective, voice, and experience of the minority community. In terms of the ethnicities being studied, there are distinctions between Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, but those groups tend to be grouped as a part of Asian American Studies. Prose, plays, songs, poetry and several other forms of writing were popular during the 1970s as methods of Asian American expression. Among the most read authors were Frank Chin, Momoko Iko, Lawson Fusao Inada, Meena Alexander, Jeffery Paul Chan, and John Okada, who were considered by Asian American scholars to be pioneers of Asian American literature.
Most recently, "whiteness" studies has been included as a popular site of inquiry in what is traditionally an academic field for studying the racial formation of communities of color. Instead of including whites as another additive component to ethnic studies, whiteness studies has instead focused on how the political and juridical category of white has been constructed and protected in relation to racial "others" and how it continues to shape the relationship between bodies of color and the State. As Ian Haney-Lopez articulates in White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race, the law has functioned as the vehicle through which certain racialized groups have been included or excluded from the category of whiteness across time, and thus marked as inside or outside the national imaginary and the privileges that result from this belonging. Important to whiteness studies, according to scholars such as Richard Dyer, is understanding how white bodies are both invisible and hypervisible, and how representations of whiteness in visual culture reflect and, in turn, shape a persistent commitment to white supremacy in the U.S. even as some claim the nation is currently a colorblind meritocracy. In addition to visual culture, space also reproduces and normalizes whiteness. The sociologist George Lipsitz argues that whiteness is a condition rather than a skin color, a structured advantage of accumulated privilege that resurfaces across time spatially and obscures the racism that continues to mark certain bodies as out of place and responsible for their own disadvantage. Such attention to geography is an example of the way ethnic studies scholars have taken up the study of race and ethnicity across almost all disciplines using various methodologies in the humanities and social sciences.
In general, an "Ethnic Studies approach" is loosely defined as any approach that emphasizes the cross-relational and intersectional study of different groups. George Lipsitz is important here as well, demonstrating how the project of anti-black racism defines the relationship between the white spatial imaginary and other communities of color. Thus, the redlining of the 1930s that prevented upwardly mobile African Americans from moving into all-white neighborhoods also forced Latino and Asian bodies into certain spaces.