Ethnic studies, in the United States, is the study of difference—chiefly race, ethnicity, and nation, but also sexuality, gender, and other such markings—and power, as expressed by the state, by civil society, and by individuals.
Its antecedents date back to the civil rights era, as early as the 1900s. During that time, educator and historian W. E. B. Du Bois expressed the need for teaching black history. 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. In recent years, it has broadened its focus to include questions of representation, racialization, racial formation theory, and more determinedly interdisciplinary topics and approaches.
As opposed to international studies, which was created to focus on the relations between the United States and Third World countries, ethnic studies was created to challenge the already existing curriculum and focus on the history of people of different minority ethnicity in the United States. 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, philosophy, political science, and area studies were conceived from an inherently Eurocentric perspective.
"The unhyphenated-American phenomenon tends to have colonial characteristics," notes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera in After American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism: "English-language texts and their authors are promoted as representative; a piece of cultural material may be understood as unhyphenated—and thus archetypal—only when authors meet certain demographic criteria; any deviation from these demographic or cultural prescriptions are subordinated to hyphenated status."
History In the United States, the field of ethnic studies evolved out of the Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s and early 1970s, which contributed to growing self-awareness and radicalization of people of color such as African Americans, Asian Americans, Latino Americans, and American Indians. 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. Arab American Studies was created at SF State University after the September 11 attacks. Jewish Studies and Arab Studies were created long before 1968, outside the U.S., and apart from the 1968 Ethnic Studies Movement.
The first strike demanding the establishment of an Ethnic Studies department occurred in 1968, led by the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF), a joint effort of the Black Student Union, Latin American Students Organization, Asian American Political Alliance, Pilipino American Collegiate Endeavor, and Native American Students Union at San Francisco State University.This was the longest student strike in the nation's history and resulted in the establishment of a School of Ethnic Studies. President S. I. Hayakawa ended the strike after taking a hardline approach when he appointed Dr. James Hirabayashi the first dean of the school (now college) of ethnic studies at San Francisco State University, and increased recruiting and admissions of students of color in response to the strike's demands. In 1972, the National Association for Ethnic Studies was founded to foster interdisciplinary discussions among scholars and activists concerned with the national and international dimensions of ethnicity, encouraging conversations across anthropology, Africana Studies, Native Studies, Sociology, and American Studies, among other fields.
Minority students at The University of California at Berkeley — united under their own Third World Liberation Front — the TWLF, initiated the second longest student strike in US history on January 22, 1969. The groups involved were the Mexican American Student Confederation, Asian American Political Alliance, African American Student Union, and the Native American group. The four co-chairmen of the TWLF were Ysidro Macias, Richard Aoki, Charlie Brown, and LaNada Means.
This strike at Berkeley was even more violent than the San Francisco State strike, in that more than five police departments, the California Highway Patrol, Alameda County Deputies, and finally, the California National Guard were ordered onto the Berkeley campus by Ronald Reagan in the effort to quash the strike. The excessive use of police force has been cited with promoting the strike by the alienation of non-striking students and faculty, who protested the continual presence of police on the Berkeley campus. The faculty union voted to join the strike on March 2. Two days later the Academic Senate called on the administration to grant an interim Department of Ethnic Studies. On March 7, 1969, President Hitch authorized the establishment of the first Ethnic Studies Department in the country, followed by the establishment of the nation's first College of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University on March 20, 1969.In 1994, with Taiwanese government's support, National Dong Hwa University established the first Ethnic Studies institute in Taiwan, the Graduate Institute of Ethnic Relations and Cultures, which nowadays is one of leading institution of Ethnic Studies in Asia for its Austronesian and Taiwanese Indigenous Studies.
Courses in ethnic studies address perceptions that, because of the Eurocentric bias and racial and ethnic prejudice of those in power, American historians have systematically ignored or undervalued the roles of such ethnic minorities as Asian Americans, Blacks, Mexicans, Latinos and Native Americans. Ethnic studies also often encompasses issues of intersectionality, where gender, class, and sexuality also come into play. There are now hundreds of African American, Asian American, Mexican American, and Chicano/Latino Studies departments in the US, approximately fifty Native American Studies departments, and a small number of comparative ethnic studies programs. College students, especially on the East Coast, continue to advocate for Ethnic Studies departments. The Ethnic Studies Coalition at Wellesley College, the Taskforce for Asian and Pacific American Studies at Harvard University, and CRAASH at Hunter College are among student organizations calling for increased institutional support for Ethnic Studies. Ethnic studies as an institutional discipline varies by location. For instance, whereas the Ethnic Studies Department at UC Berkeley comprises separate "core group" departments, the department at UC San Diego does not.
In May 2016, another Hunger Strike took place at San Francisco State University. It was founded by Hassin Bell, Julia Retzlaff, Sachiel Rosen, and Ahkeel Mesteger, all students at SFSU, to both defend and improve the College of Ethnic Studies. They were on strike for 10 days, and the strike drew national attention, which helped end it with a signed compromise from SFSU president Leslie Wong. The compromise consisted of allocating $250,000 to the Ethnic Studies department.
Schools of thought While early ethnic studies scholarship focused on the repressed histories and identities of various groups in the U.S., the field of study has expanded to encompass transnationalism, comparative race Studies, and postmodernist/poststructuralist critiques. While pioneering thinkers relied on frameworks, theories, and methodologies drawn from allied fields such as sociology, history, literature, and film, scholars in the field today employ multidisciplinary and comparative perspectives, increasingly within international or transnational contexts. Central to much Ethnic Studies scholarship is understanding how race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and other categories of difference intersect to shape the lived experiences of people of color, what the legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw calls intersectionality. Branches of ethnic studies include but are not limited to African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Native American/ Indigenous Peoples' Studies, and Latino/a Studies.
A discipline within ethnic studies is African American Studies, which involves studying people of African descent and their ideologies, customs, cultures, identities, and practices, drawing on the social sciences and the humanities. The changes made to educational and social institutions by the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s can be traced as the origin for the development of African American Studies as a discipline. In general, the changes made to the higher education system to incorporate African American Studies has been led by student activism. When initially created, in many cases to end protests, the African American Studies programs at predominately white universities were underfunded and not highly esteemed. Since the 1970s, African American Studies programs, in general, have become reputable and more concretely established within predominantly white universities. Historically, African American scholars and their works have been used as sources to teach African American Studies. Teaching African American Studies has been categorized by two methods: Afrocentric, which relies solely on text by black authors and are led by all-black faculties, and traditional methods, which are more inclusive of non-black authors and are more broad in their studies. Scholars whose work was influential to the development of African American Studies, and whose work is studied include W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson, and George Washington Williams. The first historically black college or university to offer a variation of African American Studies was Howard University, located in Washington, D.C.
Native American Studies, or sometimes named Native Studies or American Indian Studies, is another branch of ethnic studies that was established as a result of university student protests and community activism. The first attempts at establishing some form of Native American Studies came in 1917 from Oklahoma Senator Robert Owen, who called for an 'Indian Studies' program at the University of Oklahoma. Several decades later, the "Red Power" Movement of the 1960s, in a time of high minority and suppressed group activism in the US, sought to get Native American Studies into higher education. San Francisco State University and the University of California at Berkeley were the first to adopt these fields into their departments in 1968. The TCU (tribal colleges and universities) movement of the 1960s aimed to expand the teaching of Native American Studies by establishing tribe-run universities to educate the tribe's youth and their communities. Navajo Community College, later renamed Diné College, was the first of these institutions. Curriculum in Native American Studies programs teach the historical, cultural and traditional aspects of both natives of the land in general, as well as that of the American Indians specifically. Figures within Native American Studies include Vine Deloria Jr., an American Indian scholar and rights' activist, Paula Gunn Allen who was a writer and educator of Native American Studies, poet Simon J. Ortiz.