14 Facts About Ethnic studies

Ethnic studies is an academic field that spans the humanities and the social sciences; it emerged as an academic field in the second half of the 20th century partly in response to charges that traditional social science and humanities disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, sociology, political science, cultural studies, and area studies were conceived from an inherently Eurocentric perspective.

However, Ethnic Studies became widely known as a secondary issue that arose after the civil rights era.

Ethnic studies was originally conceived to re-frame the way that specific disciplines had told the stories, histories, struggles and triumphs of people of color on what was seen to be their own terms.

Ethnic studies departments were established on college campuses across the country and have grown to encompass African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Raza Studies, Chicano Studies, Mexican American Studies, Native American Studies, Jewish Studies, and Arab Studies.

In 1972, The National Association for Ethnic Studies was founded to foster interdisciplinary discussions for scholars and activists concerned with the national and international dimensions of ethnicity encouraging conversations related to anthropology, Africana Studies, Native Studies, Sociology and American Studies among other fields.

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Discipline within ethnic studies is African American Studies, which consist of studying people of African descent and their ideologies, customs, cultures, identities, and practices by drawing on social sciences and the humanities.

Important to whiteness Ethnic studies, according to scholars such as Richard Dyer, is understanding how white bodies are both invisible and hypervisible, and how representations of whiteness in visual culture reflect and, in turn, shape a persistent commitment to white supremacy in the US even as some claim the nation is currently a colorblind meritocracy.

Such attention to geography is an example of the way ethnic studies scholars have taken up the study of race and ethnicity across almost all disciplines using various methodologies in the humanities and social sciences.

Ethnic studies exists in dialogue—and occasional tension—with a variety of related fields and disciplines.

In some instances, ethnic studies has become entrapped within and similar to the mandates of liberal multiculturalism, which relies on politics beholden to US nation-building and capitalist imperatives.

Ethnic studies is in a difficult position, because as it gets more legitimized within the academy, it has frequently done so by distancing itself from the very social movements that were the triggers for its creation.

Proponents of ethnic studies feel that this is a reactionary movement from the right.

Ethnic studies devised HB 2281 under the belief that the program was teaching "destructive ethnic chauvinism and that Mexican American students are oppressed".

Since the Mexican American Ethnic studies course was the only course in Arizona to be banned, it became clear that the bill had targeted the one course.