Today, California is expanding ethnic studies even as its similarly diverse red state peers, like Texas and Florida, are scaling back and eliminating programs that teach about the troubled history of racism and inequity.
In 2020, California mandated that ethnic studies be included in the graduation requirement for all CSUs. The following year, the state also passed the first law requiring high school students to take ethnic studies.
With the emergence of a nonwhite majority in the U.S. (currently projected for 2045), California is at the forefront of rethinking the way we teach and learn history through an ethnic studies education. California stands to be a model precisely because of the state’s own long history of both racism and activism, and as the birthplace of ethnic studies.
As an Asian American historian and activist, I am deeply invested in the crucial next task of building, instituting and fully funding the curricula.
Though a center of Asian American culture and politics today, California was a hotspot for anti-Asian violence and discrimination for much of its 175-year history. The Los Angeles Massacre of 1871 was one of many times white-led mobs sought to drive all Chinese Americans from a city or town.
In July 1885, the author Jean Pfaelzer recounted in Driven Out, a white mob lynched a Chinese man in Monterey because he voted. During the early statehood period, white assailants felt they could act with impunity, because state law barred nonwhites from testifying against whites in court.
Racism deformed California’s labor movement. Rather than build proletarian solidarity, white unions and working-class leaders tried to keep Asian immigrants beneath them. Racist mobs targeted Japanese, Korean, and Indian immigrants, who arrived in the early 20th century, to push them out of agricultural work and block them for starting their own farms. The state’s 1913 Alien Land Act, linked to federal law banning Asians from becoming naturalized citizens, barred Asian Californians from owning land.
Colonized by the U.S. during a brutish war that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, Filipinos were the only Asians not barred from coming to the U.S. by the 1924 Immigration Act. But as a result, they suffered when scapegoating and xenophobia erupted during the Great Depression. In 1930, California’s worst recorded anti-Filipino riot took place in Watsonville, where 22-year-old Fermin Tobera was murdered by machine gun fire. Authorities allowed the assailants to get away or receive a slap on the wrist.
In the late 1960s, Asian American, Black, Chicano, Latino, Native American and white student activists at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley, opposed to U.S. imperialism and the Vietnam War, first united to push for a curriculum under the principle of self-determination. It sought to stop normalizing white men’s place atop the social hierarchy and instead validate the experiences of communities of color and working-class populations who were foundational to the nation’s growth and development yet too often shut out of its prosperity.
Through what they called the Third World Liberation Front, students waged campus-wide strikes in the face of police brutality and arrests. They won the first university departments and colleges of ethnic studies.
But even as campuses saw gains and new policies allowed Asian immigrants and refugees to enter the U.S. after 1965, the violence did not cease. After the U.S. withdrew in defeat from Vietnam, Americans seeking a scapegoat for political and economic woes attacked Southeast Asian refugees. In 1983, Davis High School student Thong Hy Huynh was stabbed to death by a white student who regularly bullied Vietnamese youth. In 1984, James Oliver Huberty massacred 21 people at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, exclaiming that he “killed many in Vietnam and he wanted to kill more” — though he was not a veteran and most of his victims were Latino.
In 1989, Patrick Purdy shot and killed five Southeast Asian children and wounded 30 other victims before turning his gun on himself at Stockton’s Cleveland Elementary School. The police and media initially downplayed racial motivation, but investigators later found that Purdy, who complained that “communists” who were stealing jobs from white Americans, was seething with hatred and resentment toward Southeast Asians.
This time, Asian American community leaders demanded that policymakers address the overlooked, systemic problem of anti-Asian violence. In response, the California attorney general later that year released a report on the shootings that called for expanding then-college-focused ethnic studies curricula to K-12 education to reduce “violence motivated by bigotry in California.”
The state’s new ethnic studies requirements are a belated, decades-overdue response to this push by Asian Americans.
For many of us, overcoming a history of erasure combats the “model minority” stereotype, which paints a false picture of Asians as untroubled by racism and pits Asians against other communities of color. Importantly, ethnic studies can also reveal a buried record of Asian American activism and resistance.
Our parents often attempted to shield us from hardships they endured, including discrimination, war, and displacement. Japanese American civil rights advocate Karen Korematsu, for instance, only learned about her father Fred’s monumental Supreme Court case fighting Japanese American wartime incarceration when a classmate mentioned it in a high school book report.
Ethnic studies helps vanquish the myth of Asian American political passivity, illuminating greater pathways to multiracial coalition building and solidarity. When Indian immigrants to Northern California formed the Ghadar Party during the 1910s, they connected their struggles against American racism to the drive to free India of British colonial rule.
In response the Watsonville Riot of 1930, labor activist Pablo Manlapit, helped lead a march of 1,000 Filipinos and their allies. Even when they were denied citizenship rights, Asian Californians went on strike, filed court cases, and sometimes armed themselves in self-defense.
It’s a tradition that lives on. Recently, tens of thousands of Asian Californians gathered in protests, signed petitions, and joined organizations in response to a new upsurge of anti-Asian racism and violence during the pandemic. Some demanded more effective policing; others pointed out incidents where police were the problem.
In December 2020, an Antioch officer killed Angelo Quinto, a Filipino American veteran suffering a mental health crisis, by holding his knee on Quinto’s neck — reminiscent of the way George Floyd was murdered in Minnesota. Family and friends organized for justice, leading to passage of a state law banning police from using restraints that cause positional asphyxia.
Ethnic studies lessons here can ultimately resonate far beyond the classroom — for Asian Americans and the entire U.S. Through antiracist education and a deepening of the historical record, California can build the type of solidarity and awareness we all need to lead the nation away from its turn back toward divisiveness, scapegoating, and war.
Scott Kurashige has published five books on the history of race and social justice. His latest work is American Peril: The Violent History of Anti-Asian Racism. He wrote this for Zócalo Public Square, an ASU Media Enterprise publication.
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