In Black America; Ethnic Studies Program, Part 1 with Dr. Otis L. Scott

Music From the Longhorn Radio Network, the University of Texas at Austin, this is in Black America. The formalized and systematic teaching and study of eclectic experiences of ethnic groups, ecologists and universities is a comparatively recent project. The history of ethnic studies must be understood as both a social and political and indeed an academic movement,

which was conceived and born as a child of a civil rights struggle of 1960. It is noteworthy that the February 1960s protest led by African-American students in Greenville, North Carolina, later to be joined by legions of black, white, other students of color, students all challenging the rigid race of segemony in the South. It is important to note that this collaborative protest activity was important for fomenting change, institutional change on campuses, in the North, in the West, Eastern, parts of the United States. Dr. Otis L. Scott, Chairperson of the Ethnic Studies Department, California State University, Sacramento. The generation of African-Americans who established African-American studies programs and departments at major colleges and universities,

also witnessed the coming of age of the civil rights and black power movements, the legal desegregation of our society, and the growth of the modern middle class. African-American studies programs primary objective is to provide students an opportunity to examine the multi-cultural experiences of African-Americans and their responses to the blending of an African heritage and American culture. I'm John L. Hanson, Jr. and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, Ethnic Studies, Curriculum Transformation for Multicultural Society with Dr. Otis L. Scott in Black America. It was this protest dynamic which spirited black student unions and faculty and community people to call for what was at the time substantive changes in the institutional priorities and practices as these related to African-Americans and other people of color. In particular, this protest dynamic resulted in the establishment of the first officially recognized Black Studies program on the campus of a predominantly white institution, the San Francisco State, then college in 1966.

This institutionalization of Black Studies was of no small consequence. The Black Studies program also opened the door for the eventual development and institutionalization of programs in Asian-American studies, Chicano, Chicano, Latino and Latina studies, Native American studies, women studies, and environmental studies programs. Last November, Florida A&M University held this 13th Annual National Higher Education Conference on Student Retention in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The five-day conference brought together college and university administrators, academic counselors, faculty, staff, and students, and leading experts on Student Retention. The brainchild of Dr. Clanidae Ford this year's conference was truly multicultural. Attendees included Hispanics, Native Americans, Anglos, and African-Americans.

Participants had an opportunity to discuss issues of concern that influenced the retention of minority students. Dr. Otis L. Scott was one of this year's keynote speakers. He is vice president, National Association for Ethnic Studies, and a professor at California State University, Sacramento. The National Waters, or that the National Waters, through which the diverse ethnic studies formations have navigated over the last 20 to 25 years, that they have been hardly classified as speaking to the obvious. The histories of the formation of most ethnic studies program, the history is written with a pin and ink similar to those to the history at San Francisco State. Studies and the experiences of people of color have not generally been welcome to the table where ideas and perspectives about the total human experience are discussed. In the main, the studies of and by people of color are still viewed by many academics as marginal to the more serious and meaningful intellectual activities in the academy.

Some of the more high-profile critics of ethnic studies, such as Roger Kimball and Arthur Flesinger and Denise D'Souza to mention just a few, have demonized continued to demonize both ethnic studies scholarship and the scholars. The point here is that the last three decades have been a period of much tension between ethnic studies formations and traditional approaches to teaching, researching, and writing about the social, the historical, and cultural context of the lives of people of color. Much of the tension is a function of the purposefully critical analytical motif driving the ethnic studies paradigm. And ethnic studies approach to knowledge generation necessarily involves the deconstruction or better, the disassembling of knowledge structures, bases, and processes, which incompletely or inaccurately portray the complex experiences of people of color.

The ethnic studies project as a multicultural project requires the assembling of theories and concepts and practices intending to provide a holistic, that is a complete, that is an integrative story of the experiences of African people, of Asian people, of Pacific Island people, of Chicano and Chicano people. And the Native American people. There is another point which must be made about the last 30 years. Ethics studies scholarship and teaching have importantly affected the academy.

Indeed, many of the positive impacts of ethnic studies on the culture of post-secondary institutions, many of the positive impacts have filtered down to K-12 education. And largely through the diverse multicultural curriculum reform efforts that have been underway historically since the period immediately after World War II with the emphasis by educators at the K-12 level on intercultural relations and intercultural studies. But without a doubt, my point here is that ethnic studies scholarship over the last 25 to 30 years has hastened the filtering down process. In short, I'm suggesting, in summary, I'm suggesting that when we look at the curricula of K-12, we see, if you will, the fingerprints, the perspectives offered by ethnic studies scholars. Although most of these reforms at the K-12 level are additive in nature and not as thoroughly infused throughout the instructional process as they could be this process, you know, this limitation, notwithstanding the filtering down into the curriculum is still a noteworthy accomplishment.

I want to place this summary that I've offered, respecting the key features of the struggle to develop both a socially responsible and relevant discipline within a larger context of analysis. I want to do so because in the first instance I believe it is important, it is essential that we always attempt to extract meaning from and attach meaning to all of our creative endeavors. When we do this, and unless we do this, we not only risk not learning about the significance of what we do, we also risk not understanding the importance of what we do. Not doing either risk leaving the record of our work to the interpretation of others, some, maybe many, are not favorably disposed to reporting the record of our achievements and accurately as they were written.

I am suggesting that the significance of the last three decades of the ethnic studies project is best understood as a transformative project. The ethnic studies in effect have had its overriding and connecting objective to transform not only the knowledge bases that we have about the social and the historical and cultural experiences of people, but to do so by critically challenging existing bases of knowledge and when and where appropriate, replacing these inaccuracies, these distortion with information that more accurately represent. I believe that the scholarly and the instructional achievement by ethnic studies, scholars and teachers must be examined and understood as occurring within this transformative paradigm. This is to say that one of the distinguishing characteristics of what we attempt to do in this discipline in various ways.

This is certainly not, we don't approach the teaching in our research in some homogenous fashion, but a common feature of what we attempt to do is to use our study, our research and our teaching to carve out, to carve out intellectual space, where our students, where our colleagues, where people in our community can gain a better, a higher level of understanding about the experiences of people whose experiences have been written by the pen of colonization and forced inclusion and slavery. Carving out the space within the cultural apparatus of college and universities has been no easy undertaking.

I've alluded to that point previously. It is generally accepted that colleges and universities are in fact the sine qua non of conservatism in the United States. They perpetuate and protect the dominating societies, angle of centric hold on the cultural formations, the ideas and the practices of this society. The presence of ethnic studies courses in programs in no small way presents a challenge to this agemony over cannons and curricula and the presumed right of a privileged view to be the stewards of learning and knowledge. And while it is true that this transformative role is far from being complete, it is also true that the presence of ethnic studies programs in all of their diversity and quality ranges, the presence of ethnic studies programs have somewhat changed the intellectual and academic arenas within which the struggle for the right to have an authoritative voice on matters relating to the human experience occurs.

A few minutes ago I mentioned that is important for us to ascribe meaning to our achievements and accomplishments. And this last observation was intended to illustrate what I consider to be one way by which we can assess the significance of the ethnic studies of the multi cultural project that is ethnic studies. The academic and intellectual arenas on many colleges and universities, how many, the latest study that was conducted indeed by the National Association for Ethnic Studies identified nearly 700 campuses across this nation where there is some form of an ethnic studies program from degree, or granting all the way down to a regular and some instances irregular offering of courses. My point is simply that the presence of those programs and courses have indeed altered some what the academic arena on the campus that I'm on and have been for nearly

a quarter of a century 25 to 30 years ago, there were no courses offered that speak to the complex array of experiences of people of color. We now offer a major and have for close to 20 years. We now have a department and I'm not offering these comments as self patronizing comments but a department that I have chaired since 1979. My point is as we assess our progress, holding as it may indeed be over the last 25 to 30 years, we have altered somewhat the landscape of the intellectual and academic arenas within which we function. These formations where they are interdisciplinary programs or institutes or centers or departments represent a definite counter to the bodies of thought and practice which have historically and to this day separates people of color from the truth of their existence.

We search and teaching and publishing the ethnic studies critique as part of the multicultural project has directly challenged old ritualized truths about the histories and the cultures and the lives of folk of color old truths which shift shape themselves into factual representations of the other those people. So credible examination of the social history of this nation or its cultural achievement in my opinion can be offered without the purposeful inclusion of the multi multicultural dimension of this history. Always, always astounded by the expressions of my students and the courses that I teach when they bring to the attention through class discussions or in notes that they write to me or email messages or comments on exam that are returned.

They comment on how incomplete they're learning about the social and cultural history of this nation has been until until they had a course where the lives of Chicano's and Native Americans and African American and various Asian American groups were the lives and the experiences of those groups were central to the learning process. My students tell me that one student, a philosophy student a number of years ago, three or four years ago wrote to me that his education was most incomplete. He said, why didn't I know this? Why didn't I know about executive order 966 and its consequences for over a hundred and over a hundred thousand Japanese Americans?

Why didn't I know about the Indian Removal Act and its consequences for indigenous people? The teaching of Mexican American history never included in any meaningful sense how a war was prosecuted over the years of 1846 through 1848 for the express purposes of selling house to Southwest and bringing it within the folds of manifest destiny. My students and these tend to be sharp students, insightful students, students who take their education seriously, who take themselves seriously and who don't always always agree with the perspective that we present most often are troubled by the critique motif that I alluded to a few minutes ago.

Most often my students find themselves troubled and angry but more often than not they understand that what they had been presented up to the point of taking my courses or courses from other faculty is that what they have been presented was a series of the old ritualized truths about the social history of this nation. The enterprise of ethnic studies in all of its unevenness I contend has contributed mightily to erasing the lines that separate back from fiction lies from truth about the experiences and contributions of women and men of color.

In this light it is clear to me that most of us cannot but undertake this multi cultural project of teaching and research and challenging old paradigms seriously. The fact that on hundreds want to say a little bit more about this transformative project. The fact that on hundreds of colleges and universities faculty and students are engaged in a learning process and learning activities of various sorts directly addressing issues and topics which present people of color as proactive originators of cultural systems and not health helpless waste is no small matter. Such learning activities are evidence of the transformative paradigm in ethnic studies.

The challenge of this transformation is to reconfigure and reconstruct post-secondary curriculum into one that reflects the multi dimensional multi cultural pluralistic interdisciplinary realities which we all live. The transformative process begins with a commitment to challenging constructions of knowledge which disallow or patronize the cultural experiences and perspectives of people of color necessarily necessarily. The curriculum change of the magnitude that I am imploring will gradually transform extant curricula which still tends to be hegemonic and hierarchical and non egalitarian. This is not an easy project and while these words might flow simply and easily off of my tongue and out of my mouth I understand that it is not an easy project to create a curriculum that is hegemonic, non hierarchical and non egalitarian.

It is not easy to create a curriculum where we can see each other as human beings complete with our strengths and our weaknesses, our lumps and our warts and our beauty spots. It is not easy to create a curriculum, a learning process where we as human beings in all of our manifold diversities can develop a respect for our own particular cultural food. But that is a challenge to this multi cultural transformative project that is ethnic studies.

We are concerned many of us, certainly many of us in the National Association for Ethnic Studies, we are concerned that our struggle is still a struggle against processes that tend to separate us from our cultural lives. We are concerned that we have to struggle against a Western norm that tends to subordinate the experiences of people of color and of women and the vulnerable, poor and poor people to the idealized experiences of privileged male, poor people and people of color, Dr. Woodson, Carter G. Woodson in his book, Ms. Education of the Negro, indeed I would recommend that to those of you who have not read it, this Western norm of education, Woodson tells us, is intended to separate us from our cultural experiences. We are to, we are to, Woodson tells us, we are to see ourselves as neo-European.

We become estranged separated from our own experiences, separated from other people, and dominated by an education process supported by a political and social apparatus that is intended to maintain its dominance over it. Coursework in ethnic studies can be a corrective to this and to the learning experiences which perpetuate this distancing of people from themselves, this distancing of people from each other. Transformation as I am using the term refers to process practice in products, process practice in products and all involve reconceptualizing, re-envisioning the curriculum so as to accept the challenge of understanding the centrality of a human experience. Its generality, its particularity, this is important to the process of becoming learned.

Transformation as I am using it means understanding that the physical and cultural differences between us and they abound need not make a difference in the course of effecting humane relationship. Within our own cultural group and across cultural groups, the transformative process, Elizabeth Minich teaches us, is one where learners develop skills and knowledge banks which enable them to critically assess cultural information. And to take those steps necessary to build humane relationship across cultural lines, across social lines, across economic lines, across color lines. The transformative process necessarily demands a change in the paradigm used to describe and otherwise represent the social and cultural experiences of people in general, but people in color in particular.

It is a mighty and mighty challenge. Dr. Otis L. Scott, Vice President, National Association for Ethnic Studies, speaking at the 13th Annual National Higher Education Conference on Student Retention, we will conclude his address on next week's program. If you have a question or comment or suggestions asked in future, in Black America programs, write us. Also, let us know what radio station you heard us over. I would like to thank Florida A&M University for their assistance in the production of this program. Reviews and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. Until we have the opportunity again for IBAG Technical Producer David Alvarez, I'm John L. Hansen, Jr. Thank you for joining us today and please join us again next week. Cassette copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America Cassettes, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712.

That's in Black America Cassettes, Communication Building B, UT Austin, Austin, Texas, 78712. From the University of Texas at Austin, this is the Longhorn Radio Network. I'm John L. Hansen, Jr. Join me this week on in Black America. It is important, it is essential that we always attempt to extract meaning from and attach meaning to all of our creative endeavors. Ethnic Studies curriculum transformation for multicultural society with Dr. Otis L. Scott this week on in Black America.