{"id":22136,"date":"2012-04-02T15:41:09","date_gmt":"2012-04-02T15:41:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=22136"},"modified":"2014-10-07T19:28:06","modified_gmt":"2014-10-07T19:28:06","slug":"in-arizona-censoring-questions-about-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=22136","title":{"rendered":"In Arizona, Censoring Questions About Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Arizona, Censoring Questions About Race<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The New York Times<\/a>
\n2012-04-01<\/p>\n

Linda Mart\u00edn Alcoff<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Philosophy
\nHunter College, City University of New York<\/em><\/p>\n

In recent weeks, the state of Arizona<\/a> has intensified its attack in its schools on an entire branch of study \u2014 critical race theory<\/a>. Books and literature that, in the state\u2019s view, meet that definition have been said to violate a provision in the state\u2019s law that prohibits lessons \u201cpromoting racial resentment.\u201d Officials are currently bringing to bear all their influence in the public school curriculum, going so far as to enter classrooms to confiscate books and other materials and to oversee what can be taught.\u00a0 After decades of debate over whether we might be able to curtail ever so slightly the proliferation of violent pornography, the censors have managed a quick and thorough coup over educational materials in ethnic studies.<\/p>\n

I have been teaching critical race theory for almost 20 years. The phrase signifies quite a sophisticated concept for this crowd to wield, coined as it was by a consortium of theorists across several disciplines to signify the new cutting edge scholarship about race. Why not simply call it \u201cscholarship about race,\u201d you might ask? Because, as the censors might be surprised to find, these theorists want to leave open the question of what race is \u2014 if there is such a thing \u2014 rather than assuming it as a natural object of inquiry. Far from championing a single-minded program for the purpose of propaganda, the point of critical race theory is to formulate questions about race.<\/p>\n

Arizona\u2019s House Bill 2281, which was signed into law by Gov. Jan Brewer<\/a> in May 2010, does not actually mention critical race theory, but the term has been all over the press with a \u201cdamning\u201d image from 1990 of Barack Obama<\/a>, then a Harvard law school student, hugging the law professor Derrick Bell<\/a>, one of the field\u2019s founders. State Superintendent Tom Horne devised the bill particularly to put a stop to what he describes as the \u201cracist propaganda\u201d of critical race theory, and now other conservatives are sounding the call against what they say is a \u201cdeeply disturbing theory.\u201d Perhaps the negative publicity recently produced by the Republican stance on contraception has the party looking for a new target to shore up the base.<\/p>\n

What the bill does say may sound to some ears as reasonable. It prohibits courses that \u201cpromote resentment toward a race or class of people,\u201d that \u201cadvocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals,\u201d or that are \u201cdesigned primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group.\u201d\u00a0 The reality, of course, is that ethnic studies teachers are constantly trying to get students from multiple backgrounds in our classes, and many of us have even endeavored to make these courses required for all. But the other two issues raised by the bill, concerning \u201cresentment\u201d and \u201cethnic solidarity,\u201d are a bit more complicated…<\/p>\n

…Yet those who believe that critical race theory aims to produce ethnic or racial \u201csolidarity\u201d may be surprised to find that most critical race theorists have some skepticism about the existence of race. In this they simply follow the anthropology profession, which declared some 50 years ago that the concept of race is an illusion. In a paper published in 1963<\/a>, S. L. Washburn<\/a>, the president of the American Anthropological Association, referred to the concept of race as \u201can antiquated biological notion.\u201d He and others argued that there is simply no global coherency or consistent social practice in regard to the concept of race, and that the biological status of the term was a sham produced by suspect scientific methods.<\/strong> Character traits we associate with races, including intelligence, are produced, not found. Dividing people by race, others explained, was like identifying slides by the box they came in.<\/p>\n

Many people who are familiar with the debates over racism \u2014 over its causes, its nature and its solution \u2014 may be unaware that the very category of race has been debated for decades, not only among anthropologists but also among biologists, sociologists, social psychologists and even philosophers. Human beings share over 99 percent of our genes across racial groups, and no single gene accounts for anything physical other than eye color, a rather insignificant attribute. Diseases often associated with racial groups are found in other groups, thus making them more likely to be the result of reproductive patterns than some biological foundation. If siblings \u2014 who share the largest amount of DNA \u2014 can be identified as being of different races because of the way they look (as is common in Latin America and in my own family), how can race be biological?<\/strong> There just is no clear cut way to map our social classifications of race onto a meaningful biological category. Debates today concern how to explain the historical development of the physical traits we associate with races, but nobody with any standing believes that the racial groups named in the Great Chain of Being<\/a> actually exist. In short, scholars have become quite critical of the concept of race…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Arizona, Censoring Questions About Race The New York Times 2012-04-01 Linda Mart\u00edn Alcoff, Professor of Philosophy Hunter College, City University of New York In recent weeks, the state of Arizona has intensified its attack in its schools on an entire branch of study \u2014 critical race theory. Books and literature that, in the state\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,1196,8,26,20],"tags":[5202,375,6295,1414,2640,10302,2327],"class_list":["post-22136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-literary-criticism","category-media-archive","category-politics","category-usa","tag-arizona","tag-linda-alcoff","tag-linda-m-alcoff","tag-linda-martin-alcoff","tag-new-york-times","tag-s-l-washburn","tag-the-new-york-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22136\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}