Why Do They Fear Teaching Students the Truth?

 

                                                                                   

An important journey into ethnic America

     I wanted to say something about this Administration’s attack on Ethnic Studies classes and programs, especially after so many universities and school districts around the nation have introduced various classes on the subject, going back to the 1970s. Then, I remembered. I did write an essay back in 2021 on the topic, and it pretty much said what I had wanted to say, so I thought I’d polish it up and repost it.      

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     As I walked down the street, I saw a cardboard box filled with books in front of an apartment building. Most of the books were throwaways. Then, I noticed a familiar book cover. I picked it up. It was Ron Takaki’s book, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993). It was practically new, which meant someone had taken really good care of it or had hardly taken time to crack it open. Me, I can’t even read a newspaper without a pen in hand to mark it up with my comments and ideas.

     Dr. Ronald Takaki, a Japanese Californian, by way of Hawaii, died in 2009. He was a preeminent scholar in the field of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. I’d read his book, Strangers from a Different Shore (1998), where he records the stories of Chinese, Japanese, Hmong and other Asian groups in the U.S., a topic few Americans, including myself, knew much about and I grew up on the West Coast, home to most Asian Americans in the U.S.

     After the publication of Strangers from a Different Shore, I heard Professor Takaki speak to a gymnasium filled with faculty at Santa Monica College, where I was teaching at the time. Takaki talked like he wrote, his words and ideas accessible to the public, whether scholars or everyday people, as if he was just another guy telling a story. Those who study pedagogy, the study of teaching, say students, especially African Americans and Latinos, learn best when teachers present information in narratives, rather than lecture in abstract, often vague facts and ideas couched in oblique academic language, like professors do in many university classes.

     Dr. Takaki started his presentation by asking, “How many of you know about Ellis Island.?” Every hand in the auditorium shot up, of course. “Good,” Takaki said, and laughed, something of a cackle, followed by deep breaths. He then asked, “How many of you have heard of Angel Island?” Slowly, as if needing to think about it, only a smattering of hands rose. The majority of educators sat silently, hands at their sides.

       Professor Takaki went on to explain Angel Island, adjacent to San Francisco, was the West Coast Port of Entry for Asian immigrants, mostly Chinese and Japanese, strangers from a different shore. He then said, “As educators, we should know about Ellis Island. We should also know about Angel Island, about the Middle Passage from Africa, and about El Paso del Norte, and so should our students.”

     In his presentation, he talked about stories he had uncovered in his research of Asians who had come to settle in the U.S. He told stories about their work, the living conditions, families, religion, and their culture characteristics, like the Hmong who had a difficult time settling into the cold Wisconsin winters, so different than the tropical weather of Southeast Asia. One would think students in Wisconsin or in Fresno, CA, where many Hmong settled, would benefit from a class about these new strangers living among them.

     During a short Q& A period at the end of Dr. Takaki's presentation, one teacher, though he didn’t explicitly say it, suggested Takaki’s degree and work in Ethnic Studies weren’t legitimate, even if he couldn’t explain why. Many of us in the audience took it as straight-up racism, or biased, to give him benefit of the doubt, definitely ignorance.

     The man's comment, I think, took Takaki by surprise, but I’m sure it wasn’t the first time he’d been faced with such criticism. Using his sharp wit, he told the man he’d received his doctorate in American History from the University a California, Berkeley, and as an historian, the more he taught American History, the more he felt obligated to teach the true history of America and not just the history of those who came from England and found their way to Plymouth.

     Takaki took us back to the 1970’s and the intense debates at Berkeley, when faculty decided students needed to take a course in Ethnic Studies to receive a degree in History. Takaki told us, at the time, one faculty member stood, obstinately, and asked, “What if a student chooses not to take a course in Ethnic Studies?” Takaki said he responded, “Then the student can choose not to graduate with a degree in history from the University of California at Berkeley.” He said he recalled hearing a low murmur run through the crowd, so he answered, “If university students don’t know the real history of the U.S., they are not worthy of a degree in history.”

     In the late 1980s, early 1990s, “American Ethnic Studies,” as a discipline, was just taking hold in the academy, introducing students to classes like Chicano, Black, Asian, and Women’s Studies. The study of world cultures wasn’t’ new in the academy. In Anthropology, Archeology, Sociology, Literature, and Music teachers had been researching ancient cultures, teaching such courses as Ethnomusicology, Folklore, and Mythology for decades.

     Noted mythologist Joseph Campbell first taught Mythology at Sara Lawrence College in 1938, introducing his students to storytelling from nearly every corner of the world, as documented in his bestselling book, A Hero with a Thousand Faces, which made such an impression on filmmaker George Lucas, the filmmaker followed Campbell’s research on the hero’s journey in his movie Star Wars.

     Educators like John Dewey, Howard Zinn, Edward Said, Bell Hooks, Noam Chomsky, Cornel West, Gloria Anzaldua, and others had begun looking at U.S. history beyond our mythical borders. Somehow, the study of American ethnic groups threatened many traditional faculty. Some, outright, said they didn’t want to study or teach about other U.S. cultures and to leave that to the Foreign Language departments.

     After I finished Takaki’s book, I wished I had read it earlier, when I started teaching U.S. Ethnic Literature. Professor Takaki follows an interesting pattern and style of writing. His book is an engaging read, storytelling based on historical research, moving from the early days of the United States, starting with the relationship between the colonists and indigenous inhabitants, citing journals and early writings, and moving on to Irish and indentured servitude then shifting to early slavery, before it was even institutionalized, explaining why and how it became an institution and affected the future of labor in the United States.

     In the early chapters, Takaki focuses on the Founding Fathers, from a different perspective. He’s always respectful, but he doesn’t hold back regarding their “real” views of slavery and forced labor, or their treatment of the Indians, especially from men, like Thomas Jefferson, who suffered a moral dilemma, introducing laws to abolish slavery, yet, at the same, time, building his fortune on the backs of African labor, on native American lands.

     I’ve read many historians of the Founding Fathers. I noticed Takaki includes what many historians choose to evade, or completely, ignore, especially harsh language leading to the detriment of those the Founders and early Americans considered outsiders, like the French, Germans, and Irish, but, understanding, the outsiders were here to stay, a complex part of the fabric that would become America.

     In the last chapters, Takaki moves on to Mexican and Asian immigrants and how they became American, and the unique challenges they faced. Where Irish and Africans were often forced, or coerced, to come to America to work, often under hellish conditions, many Mexicans were already here or, when nearly half of the United States belonged to Mexico. In the early 1900s, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, hundreds of thousands crossed the border to flee violence and starvation, much like the Chinese and Japanese who emigrated out of desperation.

     As a former teacher of American, Mexican, Latino, and Ethnic literature, I’ve read much American and ethnic history.  I’ve always known about Takaki’s, A Different Mirror, but never took the time to read the book, until now. I’ve been working my way through biographies of the Founding Fathers, to get a better grasp of this country’s foundation and the way these men thought and behaved. I hear so many people say, “Well according to the Founding Fathers….”

     What I learned was many people, including politicians, who quote the Founding Fathers haven’t read or studied them. They spout what somebody else said, and often, it’s not even accurate, especially about religion and economics. Many of the Founding Fathers were agnostics or outright atheists but could never admit it. Many, like Jefferson, wanted to abolish slavery but knew they’d upset too many rich, influential Southern plantation owners if they did.

     Takaki’s book provides a conceptual foundation for ethnic history in the U.S., and not in a dry, analytical scholarly way but, as I said earlier, wrapped up in engaging stories about people, based on historical research, often in the words of the historical figures themselves, as uncomfortable and disconcerting as those words might be.

     Navajos, and many American indigenous people, as children, had their languages and cultures stripped from them in school. Ironically, commanders in WWII gave it back to them by asking Navajo Marines to resurrect their language and create a code the Japanese couldn’t break. A similar code was used in Europe against the Germans.

     We often talk about why we used the atomic bombs on Japan. We had no choice, some argue. We would have lost too many soldiers and Marines had we invaded, was what most historians taught. Takaki and other historians’ research points to another path, one few talk about, a cultural path to peace, one our leaders did not understand or refused to accept. They chose a more destructive path, an intriguing dilemma for teachers and students to discuss.

     It is all part of our history, the real history of America and Americans, not the sanitized or invented history some would like us to believe, the one being forced on our schools and children today. Ethnic Studies teaches us how we are much more united as Americans, even though we come from so many different countries and cultures, or as the Founding Fathers said, "Out of many -- one."