Photo by Kelly L
Can you imagine if someone kicked down your front door, planted a flag in your living room, and declared your house their property — and then justified this theft, the murder and rape of your relatives, and the pillaging of your home, by stating that you were a savage subhuman heathen? This is exactly what European powers have done for centuries in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, justifying their theft of Indigenous lands and the brutal treatment and genocide of Indigenous people with the Doctrine of Discovery; which was a set of documents produced by the Vatican between the years 1452 and 1493, stating that Christian kingdoms had the right to all land occupied by non-Christians, and that all of these non-white pagans were subhuman and could be enslaved, exploited, and murdered at will. In 1823 the US Supreme Court, citing the Doctrine Discovery, ruled that Europeans had the ultimate right to “discovered” land and that the United States, after declaring independence from the English crown, had inherited this right of sovereignty over Native land. Mark Charles makes clear that the Doctrine of Discovery is a documentation of white supremacy, setting the precedent of the dehumanization of Indigenous people, and all people of color, throughout the world, which is followed by multiple documents and supreme court decisions founded on this same white supremacist doctrine of dehumanization of all people not fitting the white male upper-class identity codified. European expansion, propelled by this doctrine, and Manifest Destiny, was deemed, as Richard Drinnon states, a form of progress, modernization, nation-building, and “Americanization,” involving “an assault on family structures and the village” (p. 372). The assault on family and village, on the culture and language of our communities, continues today with attacks on our attempts at creating humanizing liberatory spaces that address the historical, material, and social realities that impede on our freedoms.
The sea of anti-CRT (critical race theory) and anti-history bans that have been proposed in over 28 states, and enacted in 12 either through legislation or other means, is an echo of these past attempts at devaluing and demonizing not only people of color but the very telling of our stories and truths. This round of calling for the censorship of history as a means to interrupt so-called divisive and anti-American aims was spurred by Christopher Rufo, a conservative film-maker, who as he was reviewing Zoom recorded clips of training sessions on anti-racism and diversity during the pandemic decided that “‘Critical race theory’ [was] the perfect villain.” After Rufo’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox show, Rufo was intimately involved in consulting the white house on the executive order issued by Trump in September of 2020, banning federal training contractors from utilizing “critical race theory.” Trump continued to push racist ahistorical narratives through the creation of the 1776 Commission, on November 2, 2020 by executive order, aimed at countering the historical notion, put forth by the 1619 project of the New York Times, that the institution of chattel slavery plays a central role in the formation of the United States as a nation. One of the most ridiculous assertions of this anti-CRT movement, one perpetuated by state Rep. Steve Toth in the Texas state bill he authored, is that MLK himself would have been anti-CRT, an assertion ignoring MLK’s overtly anti-racist words and actions, and those of the civil rights movement, which are at the core of critical race theory itself — stark conversations and confrontations of the realities of structural, systemic, and historical racism in the US are necessary in order to create a more just world and society. As a clear insult to the Black community and memory of MLK the 1776 commission released its ahistorical “findings” on Martin Luther King Jr. day, 2021.
The current attacks on telling historical truths is far from new. It can be seen in how the culture, language, and families of people of color have been devalued and demonized as deficient and lacking, assertions that have origins in the beginning stages of imperialism and colonialism — in the numerous declarations of the subhuman nature of people of color as a means to justify their enslavement, exploitation, and murder. It can be seen in how politicians and academics, at the culmination of the civil rights movement, painted the culture of people of color as lacking in the qualities and values that aligned with prioritizing education and the overall betterment of their communities, essentially blaming people of color for the racist policy outcomes of structural racism and poverty. It can be seen in Texas where lawmakers refused to have historians fact-check their history books, which described enslaved people as “workers” and in how Arizona lawmakers banned Mexican-American studies in K-12 public schools as radical and anti-American (a ban struck down in federal court in 2017). These Mexican-American studies programs empowered Chicana/x/o youth, helping them see themselves in history and schooling, to better understand their role in fighting against ongoing racist policies, and led to higher rates of engagement, testing, and graduation.
Our fight against systemic racism starts with us calling out its many iterations — it starts with naming the calls to ban the teaching of real history as exactly what they are — racism. To disrupt the telling of the history of oppression and racism in this hemisphere is a call to “make America” even more racist “again”. The telling of our history as people of color is one of the main responses we have to disrupting systemic racism, to disrupt the racist narratives that have been perpetuated by the omission of any mention of the history of the violent realities of colonialism and its many iterations. Ethnic studies is the field that makes this telling of real history its core mission — telling history in ways that empower communities of color, that empower youth to tell their own stories.
Chicana/o studies, an element of ethnic studies, calls on the empowerment of Chicana youth and communities to tell our own stories, to rewrite the racist history that has been perpetuated as justification for our oppression. Educators who embrace ethnic studies have known for decades that ethnic studies, when designed and taught well, centers and values community cultural wealth and positively impacts students’(of all ethnic backgrounds) academic engagement and performance, rates of graduation, sense of self-efficacy, critical thinking, and levels of democratic dialogue and outcomes. As Paulo Freire, renowned critical educator, would have us remember, it is through telling our own stories, naming our world for ourselves, our counternarratives to the dominant stories that devalue our culture, language, and history, that we, as Chicana people, la raza unida, el pueblo unido, will be able to empower ourselves to overcome the trappings of structural racism and create humanizing liberatory spaces. We need more educational environments where telling our stories of struggle and triumph, personal and historical, student-led and community-driven, are not only welcomed, but are the primary drivers of our schooling process — these narratives of social justice, community, and beautiful strength in the face of oppressive adversity are what allow for all children to feel welcomed — to know that all of our cultures, languages, and lineages belongs within the intellectual and academic spaces of our society.
