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marmar

(76,985 posts)
Thu Jan 26, 2012, 06:11 PM Jan 2012

Whitewashing History in Arizona


from Consortium News:



Whitewashing History in Arizona
January 26, 2012

The dispute over Arizona’s 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 state’s 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 Tucson’s 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 they’re 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. It’s 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/



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Whitewashing History in Arizona (Original Post) marmar Jan 2012 OP
Good pun: "Whitewashing". n bemildred Jan 2012 #1
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