Whitewashing History in Arizona
from Consortium News:
Whitewashing History in Arizona
January 26, 2012
The dispute over Arizonas shutting down of ethnic studies programs that cite white exploitation of Chicano and Indian communities has focused on the impact on Mexican-American children, but the new policy also affects students from Native American communities, as Bill Means explains to Dennis J. Bernstein.
By Dennis J. Bernstein
Arizona is closing public school ethnic studies programs that accuse whites of oppressing Chicanos and Native Americans on the grounds that these historical lessons constitute racist hate speech. But scholars and activists are protesting the states latest move as racist itself because it keeps students from these communities from learning about their own history and heroes.
Bill Means, co-founder of the American Indian Movement and a member of the board of the International Treaty Council, describes the impact of the state-pressured shutting down of Tucsons Chicano studies program and the banning of books used in the curriculum. Arizona has the largest concentration of Native people in the country.
DB: What was your first thought, what was going through your mind, what was your reaction when you heard that they not only banned the Ethnic Studies for Mexican-American children and Indigenous children, but they had the teachers pack up the books in boxes, right in front of the students, some of them crying and then gave the teachers, 48 hours to figure out what theyre going to teach? Your response.
BM: My response is, this reminds me of the days when they were talking about turning the fire hoses and the dogs loose on the marchers for civil rights, down in Alabama and Mississippi, in the South during the Sixties. Its almost getting to that point in the sense of the denial of rights. ...............(more)
The complete piece is at:
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/01/26/whitewashing-history-in-arizona/