By Marsha Sutton
Times of San Diego
CARLSBAD, California — What’s frustrating about ethnic studies in California is that it should never have been necessary in the first place, had the state approved instructional materials all along that included complete history lessons of the contributions and struggles of under-represented cultures and ethnicities.
Nevertheless, that horse has left the barn — and here we are, saddled with a horse that’s run wild, with a mandate that’s controversial, costly and problematic to implement.
Assembly Bill 101, signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom in October 2021, mandates that ethnic studies be a required course for high school graduation beginning with the class of 2030. That means that high schools across the state must have in place an ethnic studies course by the fall of 2026.
The coursework, according to the law, is to focus on four subgroups: Native Americans, Latinx Americans, Black Americans and Asian Americans.
A previous Times of San Diego column outlined the problems with the state’s first model curriculum, which was withdrawn and re-created after strong objections were raised about the original version’s biased content.
The revised Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum includes “guardrails” which state that ethnic studies courses “must not reflect or promote, directly or indirectly, any bias, bigotry or discrimination against any person or group of persons.
Because the state neglected its duty for decades to provide instructional materials that teach kids the complete history of our country, warts and all, we’re stuck with a law aimed to rectify inadequate history lessons — forcing districts to expend precious resources, time and money to do what the state should have done all along.
No student should be made to feel guilty for the sins of others, but it’s not society’s role to shield students from feeling uncomfortable with the truth.
So, teach students about the horrors of slavery, the Civil War, the Tulsa massacre, the civil rights movement and ongoing conditions that continue to discriminate against Black Americans, including the appalling display of symbols of the Confederacy.
Teach about Supreme Court decisions like Plessy vs. Ferguson, the seminal 1896 Supreme Court case that enshrined legal segregation for nearly 60 years. And Brown vs. Board of Education.
Students should learn that indigenous people were massacred mercilessly in the name of manifest destiny.
Kit Carson was a legendary figure celebrated as a brave frontiersman. But he was a brutal leader, commanding attacks on Native Americans across the west, destroying food sources and murdering innocent women and children.
Yet we have a local park in Escondido named after him.
“Revered” Junipero Serra established a string of Spanish missions in California in the mid-1700s, among other accomplishments.
Although he was later accused of suppressing Native American culture through forced conversions to Catholicism and condemned for decimating tribes through disease, overwork, starvation and torture, he was beautified in 1988.
The San Diego neighborhood of Serra Mesa is named for him.
Facing intolerable discrimination, California’s farm workers, primarily Hispanics, struggled mightily to earn a decent living in the state’s agricultural fields.
Corporate agribusiness overworked and underpaid farm workers, engaging in rampant child labor practices, providing inadequate food and shelter and exposing workers to toxic chemicals.
After raising public awareness through boycotts and marches, finally, in 1962, under the leadership of Cesar Chavez, farm workers were allowed to form a union.
Let’s teach kids that during the building of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s Chinese immigrants provided vital labor but were abused and suffered under deadly working conditions, no housing and low wages.
Japanese internment camps created during World War II are a stain upon American history. After the Pearl Harbor attack, the Roosevelt administration rounded up nearly 120,000 Japanese Americans and forced them to leave their homes and property.
These are just some examples these four ethnic groups faced and continue to face in some cases. If students had been learning about them all along, perhaps ethnic studies wouldn’t be needed.
The issues ethnic studies are designed to remedy reveal the intolerable omissions in our children’s state-endorsed history lessons.
In a recent San Dieguito Union High School District board meeting, board president Rimga Viskanta spoke about ethnic studies lessons the district plans to teach, saying, “It’s a shame [for these lessons] to be in an ethnic studies class and not integrated into regular coursework.”
Exactly right.
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Opinion columnist and education writer Marsha Sutton can be reached at suttonmarsha@gmail.com. This article appeared initially in Times of San Diego with which San Diego Jewish World trades stories under auspices of the San Diego Online News Association.