This week there were three significant anniversaries observed: the 40th anniversary of the shootings at Jackson State (story on Democracy Now!here), which followed the Kent State shootings by 10 days, the 50th anniversary of the Anti-HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) demonstrations in San Francisco that signaled the de facto end of the McCarthy era, and the beginning of the 60s, and the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the MOVE house in Philadelphia (story on Democracy Now!here)which killed six adults and five children--and incidentally destroyed 65 other houses.
Together, these anniversaries highlight the outlines of highly significant political struggles over the past half century, struggles crossing many different lines, but all deeply implicated in the struggle against America's historical legacy of white supremacy. The mass resistance of the anti-HUAC demonstrations was directly inspired by the new wave of mass actions undertaken by the Civil Rights Movement, which some of the anti-HUAC demonstrators had directly participated in. Jackson State was a black college, whose students had long been subjected to racial violence. It was the only cite of police murders in the aftermath of the Kent State shootings. MOVE was symptomatic of the ideological disarray in the black community in the aftermath of the massive anti-civil rights and anti-black power secret police war waged by the FBI and other associated "law enforcement" agencies under the COINTELPRO program and other initiatives.
Compared to the earlier organizations destroyed, crippled or intimidated by the FBI and its allies, MOVE was relatively incoherent in its politics, but no moreso than its contemporary counterparts on the other side, white supremacist organizations such as those that Randy Weaver, of Ruby Ridge fame was associated with. If civil liberties and freedom from government tyranny, rather than white supremacy were the issue at hand, so-called "patriot" militias, Tea Baggers and the like would invoke MOVE at every opportunity, as the attack against them was far more blatantly unprovoked, and the opportunity for peaceful surrender virtually non-existent. The fact that the MOVE bombing remains a matter of historical obscurity, and is never cited by rightwing "patriot" groups is a glaring indication of the true racial politics of our time, much mellowed, perhaps, but still little changed in underlying structure.
It is against this background that Arizona has passed a law against ethinic studies programsas TPM reports:
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R), it turns out, is not one to shy away from a little controversy. And she seems well on her way to becoming something of a national right-wing hero.
The governor, who sparked a national debate less than a month ago when she signed into law a hotly-contested immigration bill, signed a bill into law yesterday that restricts ethnic studies programs in Arizona schools.
The new law, which says that students "should be taught to treat and value each other as individuals and not be taught to resent or hate other races or classes of people," bans classes that might promote an overthrow of the U.S. government; that promote resentment toward a particular race or class; are designed for students of a particular ethnic group, or which advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.
Of course, it would seem that few (if any!) school districts would approve of a class whose purpose was to urge an overthrow of the United States government. But HB 2281's real target is said to be a particular ethnic studies program in the Tucson Unified School District.
According to the AP, state schools chief Tom Horne (who is also, incidentally, running for state attorney general) has long advocated the bill, claiming that the district's Mexican-American studies program encourages the belief among Latino pupils that they are oppressed by whites. Horne has also said that the program promotes "ethnic chauvinism."
Not so, say district officials, who contend the program merely provides historical information regarding particular ethnic groups' roles in history.
In another article, TPM reported:
Horne, the state's superintendent of public instruction since 2002, has long sought to kill the Tucson school district's ethnic studies classes, including La Raza studies -- and he wrote the bill to target that single program. "It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it," he has said of ethnic studies classes that, he claims, teach Hispanics to resent whites.
Horne is now trumpeting the bill, which he wrote and pushed through the legislature, on his attorney general campaign website. His GOP primary opponent, Arpaio-ally Andrew Thomas, is a right-wing champion of anti-immigration policies.
Parallels have been drawn between the new ethnic studies law and the state's immigration law, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer less than a month before she signed the ethnic studies bill without public comment Tuesday. But the new legislation explicitly targets Hispanics in a way that the immigration bill -- which, some proponents argued, was about public safety and jobs -- did not.
Bruce Merrill, a state pollster and professor emeritus at Arizona State University, notes that Tucson is heavily Hispanic. "The population has grown very quickly, and I dont know how you can look at the [ethnic studies] law in any other way than being punitive," he tells TPMmuckraker. "It's obviously more directed toward Hispanics as a group, keeping them down or being fearful of them, in terms of this growing population threat."
....
A very small number of students would be affected by any change. The Los Angeles Timesreported that only 3% of the Tucson district's 55,000 students take ethnic studies classes.
Horne is merely the latest in a long line of rightwingers attempting to kidnap Martin Luther King for their own purposes. On Friday, Democracy Now! covered the story, with an emphasis on student protests against it.. In the excerpt below, Amy Goodman is interviewing Isabel Garcia, co-chair of the Tuscon-based Coalition for Human Rights and legal defender of Pima County, Arizona. But first is a clip from CNN that Democracy Now! replayed as part of its introduction, where you can see the rightwing civil rights blackface routine in full flower:
TOM HORNE: The standards that we promulgate require that all social studies classes teach different cultures. We want all kids to be exposed to a lot of different cultures. But what I'm opposed is dividing kids up, so they have La Raza studies for the Chicano kids-"La Raza" means "the race" in Spanish-African American studies for the African American kids, Asian studies for the Asian kids.
ANDERSON COOPER: But what's wrong with that? If an African American kid wants a class that, you know, has a focus on African American studies, what's wrong with that?
TOM HORNE: What's wrong with it is that it divides students up by race, and I believe that one of the principal ideas of the American public school system is we bring kids together and we teach them to treat each other as individuals. What matters about a person is what does he know, what can he do, what's his character, or hers, not what race was he born into.
You know what? I was on that March on Washington in summer of 1963-I just graduated from high school-where Martin Luther King gave his famous speech saying we should be judged by the quality of our character and not the color of our skin. And that has been my most fundamental belief my entire life, that we are individuals. We are not exemplars of the race we were born into. And this philosophy that's preached by this program in Tucson and by your other guest, that's a race-obsessed philosophy, and it's a downer philosophy, teaches people that they're oppressed, make them angry, make it so that they don't have hope for their future.
The right has been trying to kidnap Martin Luther King for decades now. They think that somehow they own the word "character," and since he uttered the word "character" he must be one of theirs, and therefore they get to endless reinterpret what he must have meant. Of course, this overlooks a number of key facts. First off, that "character" has always been a fallback rationale for white supremacists to deny the humanity of blacks. To this very day, those who blame blacks for their lower economic status are significantly less likely to support social spending that benefits blacks. So it's pretty clear that whatever Martin Luther King was talking about, it's 180 degrees opposite to what the likes of Horne intend. Second of all, King made it perfectly clear what he meant by character, both by the way he lived his life (including facing the constant threat of death for more than a decade before he was finally assassinated) and by the explicit message of one of his most famous speeches, the Drum Major Instinct, which I wrote about in this context over 15 years ago. Let me quote briefly from the beginning and end of that piece, "Martin Luther King - A Different Drum Major":
It's fashionable today to pose the theme of personal responsibility in opposition to the continued quest for social justice. We even hear Reverend Martin Luther King quoted out of context, as if judging people by the "content of their character" was meant to endorse the idea that some of us should starve, some should go homelss, and some should shiver naked in the midst of winter.
But Dr. King didn't think that the content of our characters was something coldly quantifiable, capable of being determined by the marketplace, like the price of pork rind or pig iron. When he spoke of personal responsibility he had a much more lofty view in mind: that we are each responsible not just for ourselves, but for each other, and for our collective redemption from the sins of our past that stain us still. He did not falsely oppose the ideas of personal responsibility and commitment to social justice. Rather, he saw the commitment to social justice--rooted in the Gospels--as a means for transforming mere egotism and blind ambition into engines of individual redemption--the crowning reward of personal responsibility....
On the day of his birth, if we want to remember Martin Luther King, we must first turn to his words and study them in depth. And if his words are worth remembering this one day, they are worth remembering every day. We should remember Dr. King's words every time we hear someone talking self-importantly about other people's lack of personal responsibility, every time we hear them speak of the poor, the tired, the hungry, the desolate as objects of contempt, lacking in responsibility, dignity, and worth. And we should remember his words as well every time we hear talk about "individual achievement," "competitiveness," or "being all that you can be."
Dr. King did not despise, belittle, or ignore the importance of individual achievement. Quite the opposite. More than anyone, he knew the meaning of real achievement--it belongs to the merciful, not the mercenary. It exults in social justice, not scapegoating. It consists in serving those who are "the least among us," even as the Gospels teach. Happy birthday. Dr. King. You are still with us, serving those in need through the instrument of all those celebrants today who hear your words with their hearts--and heed them with their hands.
There is, of course, no trace of understanding the real Martin Luther King in Horne's message of de facto white supremacy.
Here is a portion of the Democracy Now! interview:
AMY GOODMAN: Isabel Garcia, can you talk about how this fits into your whole campaign around human rights? I mean, this is the second bill that has been passed in the last month. You first had the bill around immigration, and maybe you can talk about that and how that has fueled the response to this second bill that would ban ethnic studies in the public schools of Arizona.
ISABEL GARCIA: Yes, for the last ten, fifteen years, this state, of course, has seen a dramatic increase in like the anti-immigrant, anti-immigrant Mexican sort of hysteria around here. And as--following 1070, like you say, 2281 was also approved. If you can imagine, this is a Republican government and legislature that portends to or pretends to say that all control should be local. Here we have a local successful Chicano, Mexican American studies program that has proved over and over and over again that the students who take these classes not only do much better in the high stakes testing system that they have here, but these are students that come out into the world and the relate to the entire-all cultures because they've been able to learn something about Mexican Americans. So it is totally tied to this anti-immigrant fervor that has gripped the state because they have come here.
Tom Horne, who is now running for attorney general, has come here to focus on TUSD and what we believe is sort of like a cultural cleansing, an ethnic cleansing. It's very, very clear what this legislature is up to. They're trying not only to drive immigrants either underground or out of state, but all of us to put us in--really in our place. These measures are absolutely racist measures, backed by racist tendencies on the part of these legislators, and they're absolutely lying about everything that they say about Raza studies. They're totally lying.
But, of course, it doesn't matter what people like her say. Because she's not 100% American like Horne is. He can speak for everyone. He's post-racial, don'tcha know!
