For over sixty years, the pages of the Harvard Educational Review have provided a forum for authors to discuss, debate, and share their ideas about important educational issues. On December 12, 1996, six distinguished scholars gathered in a live forum at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, entitled "Ethnicity and Education: What Difference Does Difference Make?" The participants responded to questions about issues of ethnicity and their connection to education. They approached the topic from several disciplines ranging from sociology, psychology, and ethnic studies to elementary education which provoked a multifaceted discussion that reflected their particular strengths and areas of knowledge. This edited transcript of their discussion highlights the current debates about ethnicity, race, culture, and identity. The speakers address the following questions: What is ethnicity? Who decides? How is ethnicity connected to education? What does it mean that racial minorities are sometimes referred to as ethnics? At a time when the student body in the United States is becoming more culturally, racially, and ethnically diverse, and the faculties of our schools remain mostly White, this debate is both timely and crucial.
The panelists were (in order of appearance):
Enrique Trueba: Welcome. The issue of race and ethnicity is very complex, and is compounded historically and theoretically in different disciplines. This evening we're going to have very simple rules. I'm going to let panel members introduce themselves, then I'm going to give each person a chance to talk about the fundamental issue of race and ethnicity for five to eight minutes. Then I'll let them ask questions of each other, and we can take it from there. Why don't we start with Ronald Takaki.
Ronald Takaki: Let me tell you something about my work in relationship to the theme of this forum on ethnicity and education. I was thinking about my work as a teacher and as a scholar, and I thought I'd begin by just telling you a story.
In 1989, my colleagues on the Berkeley faculty
voted to establish a multicultural requirement for graduation. This is
called
the American Cultures requirement. Courses to fulfill this requirement
are
designed to deepen and broaden understanding of American society in terms
of our racial and ethnic diversity. All of the courses have to be
comparative.
They have to study five groups African American, Asian American, Latino,
American Indian, and also European immigrant groups, especially those
groups
that came in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from
countries
like Italy, Greece, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, and Russia. Today, we
have
about eighty-five courses in our curriculum that fulfill this
requirement,
which are fielded by faculty who teach in about twenty-five different
departments.
And Berkeley presents this as the Berkeley model for multiculturalism,
the
comparative model. If you were to talk to our chancellor today, or if you
were to talk to our provost or our faculty, they would all say, "You
know, we're really proud of this educational innovation." But
there's
one thing I have to confess to you tonight: The Berkeley faculty
initially
did not want to do it. What happened was this. In 1987, two years
earlier,
for the first time in the history of the University of California at
Berkeley,
students of color totaled 52 percent of the undergraduate population.
Imagine
that happening at Harvard? The students of color became the majority.
Imagine
my colleagues on the Berkeley faculty arriving on campus in the fall of
1987 and walking into the classroom, looking out at their students and
silently
saying, "Whoa, something is different here." We have a faculty
that's about 90-plus percent White, and the students, without having to
speak, said to us as the faculty, "Read our faces. We don't see
ourselves
on the faculty. We don't read about ourselves in the books you're
requiring
us to read, and we don't hear our voices in the lectures presented."
The students came up with the idea for a university-wide requirement for
multicultural understanding. What did the Berkeley faculty do? They said,
"No. We know what you need to learn." Students then began to
hold
demonstrations and rallies. The Berkeley faculty continued to say no. We
have a faculty that's like yours here at Harvard, pretty elitist.
And so
what did the Berkeley students do? They began to occupy buildings, and
one
of the buildings that they occupied was the Faculty Club. The Berkeley
Faculty
Club is an elegant, rustic building in the center of campus, next to a
beautiful
stream. And it is a club. You walk in there and there's a bar on the
right
hand side. It's a place where faculty go for their lunches and their deep
conversations. It's their sanctuary. When you walk into this Faculty Club
there's a little corridor that leads to the sandwich lines. At that time
the student movement was not a massive movement; fifteen to twenty-five
students prepared to commit what they called an action. They were
going to go into that Faculty Club and clog that corridor with their
bodies.
And they were pretty media savvy, because they told the student newspaper
to send a reporter and a photographer there because they're going to take
that club at ten minutes till noon. So at ten minutes till noon, they
took
the club. The faculty arrived, and they saw all these bodies clogging
that
corridor. Some of them found it amusing. But some of them got kind of
angry,
and one of them shouted at the students, "You can take your
multicultural
proposal and shove it up your !" Well, the thing about students is
that they take good lecture notes. So here they were, copying down what
he said. The next day when the other students found out about what this
professor had said, they got angry and said to the faculty, "Look,
you can disagree with us intellectually, but do not insult us." And
that led to an explosion on campus. The chancellor of the university then
called a convocation to address the question: What should an educated
Californian
of the twenty-first century know? I think a form of this question is what
we need to address here, in this symposium tonight on Ethnicity and
Education.
What is it that students across this country need to know as we approach
the twenty-first century?
Victoria Muñoz: I just want to say a little bit about myself to begin. In 1983, I really wanted to become a high school biology teacher. So I went to a master's program, and I was certified to teach biology. I did my student teaching in Lawrence [Massachusetts], right after the so-called racial riots between a group of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans and the Irish working-class community. One of the things my supervisor told me was, "How will you discipline, you're not big enough." I suppose that is because I'm 5 feet, 2 inches. So I said, "Well, I didn't really think teaching was about one's height." Once I arrived in Lawrence, I found that the assumption among the school staff and faculty was that I was going to be a bilingual teacher, and not a science teacher. My ethnicity qualified me in their eyes to teach bilingual education, not science. Well, I insisted that I was going to teach science. So, then the assumption among staff and faculty was that I would teach basic science, right? I insisted that I was going to teach academic biology. So very quickly I found out that nobody knew quite where to place me. Before they knew I was Puerto Rican, I would hear comments about the Puerto Rican students. Once they found out I was Puerto Rican, they sort of apologized and said, "We didn't mean it about you. It's them." Then I thought, "Well, who is `them'?" I mean, there were faces that I had grown up with, not the same faces, but they looked like my family, neighbors, community, and so on. Very quickly, I realized that teaching high school biology was not just about teaching science, but was about trying to find out who was sitting in the classroom. What were the identities of the students in the classroom, that I knew in some ways, but really didn't know in other ways. And certainly the other teachers that were there didn't know who the Puerto Rican and Dominican students were at all. They had their stereotypes of them.
I did a little research study for my masters, and I asked the kids what it was that was meaningful to them. What did they love to work on? That became the basis for my work when I entered the doctoral program here at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I continued to ask young people then, in Puerto Rico, what was the work that they really cared about? My assumption was that if schools could be places of meaningful work, there would be a reason to stay in school, since Puerto Ricans have the highest drop-out rate of just about any other group. This was my idea, and I continued to do some interviews. I went back to Puerto Rico and went to certain programs that were successful with young people. I found out that there are many things that young people love to work on. It wasn't a surprise. But the kinds of things that they loved to work on had very much to do with ethnicity, gender, class, and sexuality. My dissertation was published last year by SUNY Press in a book series, "Identities in the Classroom." It's called Where Something Catches: Work, Love and Identity in Youth. I think of ethnicity as very much connected to class and sexuality and gender, and that these have to be studied as interlocking spheres. That if one studies ethnicity by itself, it doesn't necessarily answer the questions; it's not the same questions for girls as it is for boys, for example, or for Puerto Ricans of African descent as for Puerto Ricans of Spanish descent and so on. The model has become much more complicated for me.
Sonia Nieto: I started teaching thirty years ago, in 1966, in a junior high school in Brooklyn, New York. I was the first Puerto Rican teacher in the school. The faculty had never seen a Puerto Rican, and the children had never seen a Puerto Rican teacher. They immediately put me in charge not only of teaching Spanish, but of what they call the NE Kids, or the non-English kids. There was no bilingual education yet. It was to come a couple of years later, but I was a Spanish teacher. I'm sorry to say I was also the French teacher, because I had studied French in high school for four years and that qualified me in their eyes to teach French to children who lived in the ghetto. What I find interesting in looking back, and I don't think I thought about it too much then, was the fact that they not only labeled the kids, but they also labeled me. So I was known as the NE teacher. And as you can hear, I speak English perfectly well. Ethnicity for me at that point meant that I could be labeled in a negative way. I hope that our work has gone beyond that of the past thirty years, so that we no longer just see it as a negative. I hope that we can learn to see what ethnicity means in a real way and in a positive way, and that we understand how it affects education. I hope that we'll be able to talk about that this evening. My work really focuses on the sociopolitical context of education. That is, looking at the context in which education takes place, and not separating it from issues of race, ethnicity, gender, and also the stratification that we have in society.
Margaret Andersen: As I think about the influences on my life, I realize
that
there's more order to it in the telling than there probably was at the
time
that it happened. I was born into the White working class in Oakland,
California,
in 1948, and lived for the first ten years of my life in what I recall as
being a neighborhood that was predominantly White Scandinavian and
Chinese
American, although I didn't really think about it at the time. It was
just
where I lived, a little six-block universe. Because my father was
upwardly
mobile, we moved to a small town in northwest Georgia in 1958, where I
started
to learn, unconsciously at the time, some of my first lessons about race
and what it was like to be an outsider. Coming from California to the
South
at what was the burgeoning time of the civil rights movement, I was
quickly
labeled by my ten-year-old peers as a Yankee, even though I was from
California.
I stayed there for two or three years, stunned at the time by what I
encountered
and by what I now know to be referred to as Jim Crow segregation.
My
family
then moved, when I was a young teenager, to Arlington, Massachusetts. I
went to junior high and my first two years of high school right down the
road on Massachusetts Avenue, and used to come and hang out in Harvard
Square
as a fourteen-year-old kid to see where things were happening in the
world.
When I moved to Boston, because I had lived in the South a few years and
had, I suppose, a Southern accent, at least from a Bostonian's point of
view, I was then quickly labeled as Dixie, ridiculed and teased, and was
assumed to be not as smart as the other students in my class because I
was
from the South. Because of circumstances in my family, we soon moved back
to the South, where I graduated from high school. I came back to
Massachusetts
to do my graduate work. My professors have since admitted that they
thought
I wouldn't be as smart as the other kids who were coming in, since I not
only came from the South, but had gone to a state university and not a
private
college. Now I can put order on those things. At the time it was merely
painful. When I went to graduate school at the University of
Massachusetts
at Amherst, by complete coincidence I studied sociology with some of the
great thinkers in race relations in American sociology. In the first
semester
of graduate school, I had my eyes opened in a way that was analytical and
started to make sense of things that I had only casually observed both in
my life and in the social and political movements that were all around
me.
I think I am someone a little bit unusual for a White feminist, because
I moved to Women's Studies after first studying race relations. What this
means, and one of the things you'll hear in my comments later tonight, is
that, as a feminist, my work has been very grounded in the study of
inequality
and power relations, and not simply lifestyles or the post-structuralist
construction of identity. I've always been someone interested in race
first,
class next, and now gender. I do see them, and have written about them in
the terms that Victoria just mentioned, as intercepting and interlocking
systems of oppression. Now I find myself in quite different and
contradictory
roles. I am a professor of sociology at the University of Delaware, which
is very different from Berkeley and is about 95 percent White. It's what
many people refer to as a so-called predominantly White institution, but
if you think about that from the perspective of those 5 percent, it is
actually
an overwhelmingly White institution. So I work there both as someone who
sees herself as a progressive scholar-teacher who is also on the inside,
since I serve as vice provost for academic affairs. So I wait for the day
when the students occupy the administration building. And I must say
that,
as an administrator, and you'll hear me speak about this, that I find
that
to be a real series of lived contradictions, since I actively write and
do work on integrating race, class, and gender into the university and
college
curriculum. But I largely work with senior administrators who, though
they
would describe themselves as liberal and well-intentioned, really have no
idea what race, class, and gender are about, although on a given day of
my work as an administrator, most of the issues that I see as
particularly
salient, critical, and part of the everyday work that I do really emerge
from the dynamics of race, ethnicity, class, and gender on our
campuses.
Doris Sommer: I'm
really honored to be here with all of you and so happy that I was invited
to participate. Since we're telling life stories here, I'll just add mine
to the mix. My childhood was a Brooklyn childhood, and I grew up in one
of those neighborhoods where all the adults spoke with some kind of
accent,
except for the ones that we went to learn from in school. So the adults
in school were the ones that looked the least interesting. They really
looked
culturally deprived. The Anglo monolingual teachers that we had in school
were sweet, but they were not to be taken very seriously. This is an
impression
that I know other people with the same kind of background in a
multilingual
neighborhood share. There's a kind of sweet condescension to the
monolingual.
And it's a funny, ironic feeling when you realize that the monolinguals
are condescending to you for being a little culturally more complicated.
What this brings me to is my angle on what we're now calling Ethnic
Studies.
And that is to bring to the study of literature and culture, in general,
a different take on what post-structuralists are now calling a
resignification
of the notion of a double consciousness. Since DuBois coined the term, we
have basically considered the concept of double consciousness to be a
burden.
Well, it's not only a burden. I think that people who experience double
consciousness know the advantage of it as well, that kind of playing at
the margins of two cultures and knowing that you are playing with two
codes,
where you're superior. So double consciousness isn't only a burden, it's
also a cultural advantage, an opportunity to play, to strategize, and to
build community in the margins of what looks like a center, but is very
often more empty than that. That's one of the things that my Brooklyn
childhood
brings to what I want to do in Cultural Studies. And related to that, I'd
just like to mention another term, "universalism," which gets
a lot of bad press, especially from those of us who are interested in
Ethnic
Studies, because universalism has tended to flatten out differences, not
recognize asymmetries or to simply try to get beyond them. From my point
of view, I'm enjoying my double consciousness, and I don't want to get
beyond
anything. I'm encouraged by a different approach to universalism that is
becoming, I think, more and more visible. And that is an idea that
universalism
is possible, precisely, as a play of differences, a play of
particularisms,
in a public sphere, and something that we can agree procedurally to
respect.
That one enters a debate not because one is bereft of different markers,
but because one can express those in a public sphere or a university. I
hope you understand that that kind of notion of a universal, of an
American
context, will help to shape a new generation of American Studies. The
model
of American cultures courses that Professor Takaki was talking about I
think
is especially promising to those of us who have been trying to think of
institutional contexts for Ethnic Studies in this university.
Enrique Trueba: The whole political development that has accompanied the issues of race and ethnicity bring the discussion into conceptually very tough issues. What is the difference between race and ethnicity? Historically, how do we use the terms interchangeably, and then how do we respond to the whole issue of the existence of various racial and ethnic groups? Do we have many races in one ethnic group and vice versa?
Sonia Nieto: I'd like to focus on the issue of ethnicity and some of the problems. How ethnicity itself can be problematized. I think that a focus on ethnicity takes us a step away from just looking at race. But I also want to say that looking at ethnicity is also problematic, and these are some of the reasons. One is that there's a tendency to use "ethnic" and "minority" as interchangeable. For example, to say that people of color, to use that term, are ethnic. And that's how people of color are seen, although everybody's really ethnic. But when we say Ethnic Studies, we should be talking about Human Studies, because everybody's really ethnic. When we say Ethnic Studies, what do we mean? We mean African Americans, we mean Asian Americans, and we mean Latinos and Native Americans. That's who we mean. And we can break it down further, but really that's who we mean. What happens then is that European Americans are seen as the norm or as normal, and everybody else is sort of a step away from that, because they're ethnic. Another problem is that of essentializing what are seen as ethnic traits or characteristics. Of course, there's a problem, because whenever we define something it is natural that we have borders. And that we frame something as soon as we define it, and we confine it. So, some of the essentializing of course is natural, but it is a problem because it brings about for me the tyranny of imposed definitions, no matter who does the imposing.
I will speak as a Puertoriqueña, as a Puerto Rican. For me it brings up such questions as: What does it mean to share a common and distinctive culture, which is how ethnicity is usually defined. Is there a Puerto Rican purity test that one needs to pass in order to be considered Puerto Rican? Does one need to be born in Puerto Rico? I mean, I have friends who felt that they were more Puerto Rican if they could say they were born in Puerto Rico, even if they came here at the age of five months, because then they could say, "I'm from there," and that made them more "pure." Or do you have to speak Spanish to be 100 percent Puerto Rican? For example, there was an uproar about twenty-five years ago in New York City. I was teaching in a Puerto Rican Studies department, and there was a Puerto Rican sociologist who created an uproar, and he was from Puerto Rico. He said that the vibrant and very exciting poetry that was being written in New York City by Puerto Ricans was not Puerto Rican poetry because, after all, it was written in English. And so I would ask, can people be ethnic their own way? Just recently I spoke to a young woman who was Korean, who said, "My face is Korean, but that's not who I am, that's not my culture. I was adopted and raised by a White family." I said, "You're Korean your way." And I think that that's a question that we all need to ask ourselves.
Another problem is the tendency to understand ethnicity in even more restricted or rigid terms than culture, because culture is often thought of as a characteristic rather than a process. I see it really as a process. So it's generally understood that culture is made by people, but that one is born with a particular ethnicity and that's unchangeable. I would say that the difference is not that simple, because many people who are from the same ethnicity can manifest their identity in very different ways. So I see ethnicity as a step away from understanding the world in Black and White, a step closer to the real-life complexity of identity. But it's still not close enough. I see ethnicity as the affirmation and visibility of those who've been made invisible by discourse that refuses to acknowledge hues or tints or textures. It's a recognition of ethnicity in the U.S. context, that allows for a more complex and less neat and less rigid definition of identity. On a personal level for me, ethnicity means my language and it means my languages. And how I combine my languages, and how I express myself. And it's a primary part of my identity, but it's only a part. It means my birth family, and my home, and my childhood memories, and the senses and smells of my past and also of my present.
Margaret Andersen: When
I was given this question to think about, I thought about it really in
two
contexts. One is as a sociologist. Sociologists have traditionally made
the distinction conceptually between race and ethnicity, something I want
to return to in a minute. And second is within the context of the
discussion
going on in many places that we should abandon the term race in
preference
for using the term ethnicity. It's in that context that I've been
thinking
about this, because I really want to argue that abandoning the term race
would be a tremendous error. It would be an analytical and conceptual
error.
More importantly, I think, it would be probably a grave political and
social
error. Sociologists have traditionally defined a racial group to be a
group
that is presumed on the basis of some physical or cultural characteristic
to be inferior to a dominant group and is therefore subordinated and
oppressed.
Sociologists have defined an ethnic group to be a group that shares,
either
through its own internal definition or because that definition is
externally
imposed upon them, some common cultural heritage or is perceived to do
so.
I think one of the things that concerns me is people saying we should
abandon
the term "race" in preference for the term
"ethnicity."
The argument is that, as a concept, race does tend to homogenize
diversity
within groups, to treat people as if they are all alike, and to oppress
and subordinate on that basis. And I think that in the well-intentioned
part of the argument that ethnicity as a concept is meant to unpack that,
to recognize what each of the panelists has talked about as the
multiplicity
of identities. I think all of us are really struggling with how to think
more multiply about who we are as a people, as individuals, as groups.
But
the caution that I would put forth, which reflects some of what Sonia has
already said, is that in abandoning the concept of race, there is a
serious
tendency to abandon discussions of power, domination, and group conflict.
And as a sociologist, recall that I said that my work is really grounded
in studies of inequality. I cannot help but notice in works on ethnicity
how quickly the discussion then turns to matters of culture and identity,
and not at all to questions of economic exploitation, political power,
and
powerlessness. The discussion takes a whole other turn that once again
renders
groups invisible and renders the kind of group subordination that occurs
invisible. We don't necessarily think about oppression when we talk about
ethnicity, so a lot of questions about this come to mind. Who gets to
choose
to be ethnic? Does one get to choose to be racially labeled in quite the
same way? Is multicultural studies really a matter of, as it is
frequently
said on my campus, appreciating cultural diversity? As if this were
merely
a matter of some kind of ethnic food festival? Or is it about group
survival
or well-being? When I was a member of the commission to promote racial
and
cultural diversity on my campus, I sat in on one of the workshops on
diversity
for an entire day where there was not one word mentioned about racism,
about
equity in education, about access, about mentoring, about achievement,
and
about oppression. And so my caution in the discussion of ethnicity,
although
I very much embrace the attempt to have more multiple ways of thinking
and
more inclusive thinking, as I've called it, is that it runs the grave
risk
of ignoring questions of power and domination that are absolutely central
to the study of both race and ethnic relations in the United
States.
Doris Sommer: I think those are very important observations to keep in focus and I'm grateful for them. My training and my discipline in literature makes me more interested in questions of cultural difference than in ethnicity. But, I'm very much aware of and also grateful for your underlining the danger that that specific cultural focus has in reducing the apparent asymmetries in this multiculturalism. Because ethnicity, as some of us have already said, is sometimes a self-authorized position. One can choose it. One can claim it strategically. And sometimes it makes more strategic sense to claim it than not, or in certain terms and not others. And passing is a lot more complicated when there are color lines, so it's very important to keep that focus on race. One thing that is very important in many of our disciplines is to acknowledge asymmetries. I'm using a language that I picked up from Emmanuel Levinas, an ethical philosopher, but lots of people talk about this issue and in their particular languages. Human relationships are asymmetrical. Those of us who want to immediately jump to some kind of conversation where asymmetries are no longer important or palpable or meaningful in the discussion, if we want some kind of idealized Habermasian dialogue, we're already overriding the problem and becoming blind to it. So I don't want to lose focus of those asymmetries when I'm reading, when I'm talking to people, when I'm looking at the world. And remembering race in the question of ethnicity is a way of keeping the asymmetry in focus.
Victoria Muñoz: Some people say Hispanics, and other people say Latinos or Latinas, and that's a political call that sets you within a certain terrain. In statistics on higher education it's usually Hispanics, and it is the same for the census. What's interesting for me as a Latina, Hispanic, depending on what I'm reading, is that there are two categories that I cannot put myself in Black non-Hispanics and White non-Hispanics. That tells me that Hispanics are a really difficult group to sort out, because we are denied access into two races, and then categorized as an ethnicity. By definition, then, we're not a race, according to these statistics and also to the census. So one of the ways to look at what ethnicity means to Latinas and Latinos is to look at the places we cannot enter in terms of race. We can't really be White, and we can't really be Black, although we are in some instances. So our experience of ethnicity, I think, is very much what Sonia was saying, it is very much self-constructed and in process.
Sonia Nieto: But I would add that both race and ethnicity are socially constructed. I think it's really important that we understand that. Because it means that they are not only socially constructed within or by groups themselves, but that they're socially constructed frequently from the outside, through the state, as you mentioned in the case of the National Census. The census is the best example of an attempt to define a group. It is almost as if Hispanics were a kind of race in formation, so to speak, being defined as a group that is Other, that doesn't fit into Black and White. I think if we understand race and ethnicity as created through political and social historical processes that involve group self-definition, but often also imposition from state authority, then you see how transient they can be, but also that they have to be understood within a political context.
Doris Sommer: I just want to give you a historical footnote about one really dramatic way that that worked in Latin America. People who know mid-nineteenth-century Argentine literature know that it's full of Afro-American characters, full of Afro-Argentine characters, important characters. If you look at the statistics of the 1850 census, 25 percent or more of the population of Buenos Aires was African. What happened to Africans in Argentina? It was a mystery for a long time. There were stories about Blacks being sent to the frontier, to the wars. But the women may have stayed home nobody talks about the women. It turns out that in 1880 the government decided to eliminate the category Black from Argentina's national census. It was, literally, a wipeout. It was a Whitening of the category, so that Blacks no longer existed in Argentina. So anybody who was dark was, in a few generations, Sicilian or Brazilian but not Argentine, because there were no Blacks in Argentina. So, I mean, the importance of those kinds of administrative decisions can be dramatic.
Ronald Takaki: I think that it is important to note that there is a kind of American uniqueness here, in terms of purifying race and denying that mixture. I know for the 2000 census there's a new group emerging now called multiracial. They say, "Wait a minute, I'm not Black and I'm not White, I'm both. And for me to claim one or the other would be to deny one of my parents." And I think this is kind of a fascinating devolvement in terms of deconstructing race. What is race? And this is where I think Puerto Rican Studies might be able to make a very important theoretical contribution. Just think of yourselves and the wide range that you represent. What does it mean within Puerto Rican identity and Puerto Rican culture to have this broad diversity? All of this is related then to identity, to ethnicity, and to race. Then again, maybe this kind of theoretical contribution already exists, but I'm not aware of it. But that would be very interesting for people in Ethnic Studies. I know Asian American Studies is making theoretical strides in terms of analyzing a transnational identity. And because of our diversity we're Chinese, Japanese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Filipino we're aware of the concepts of heterogeneity and hybridity. These are theoretical concepts coming out of Asian American Studies. But I think it would be interesting to see what kind of theoretical studies are coming out of Puerto Rican Studies addressing this kind of diversity, heterogeneity, and hybridity.
Enrique Trueba: A quick comment on that: the research efforts among African Americans and some Latinos in reconstructing precisely the history of racial and ethnic compositions and constructions is very, very important. There's another important issue here that you have brought up. We are not in a vacuum. American society is replicating European racism, the traditions there, and the diversity that they try to oppose systematically, to the point that today, 25 percent of the population seen, for example, in Belgium or in Germany are voting essentially along color lines against immigrants of color. So this is a very important factor to retain. We talk about ourselves as Latinos, but within our group we have enormous differences of wealth, skin color, and cultural traditions. One can argue that an upper-class Mexican from Mexico City might relate better to an upper-class person from anywhere else in the world, than to a Mexican from Tepito or an Indian from Chiapas.
Sonia Nieto: I think I learned very young in my life that I could relate much better to my African American neighbors than I could to middle-class Puerto Ricans on the island, who I didn't meet until I went back to the island to visit. And I didn't feel that I had very much in common with them. So I think that the issue of diversity is tremendous. It's an issue that cuts across all Latino groups, yet the label, ethnic, tends to homogenize these differences. For instance, look at the two Puerto Rican members of the panel or at most of the Puerto Rican students who are at Harvard, and I would say that we are probably among the lighter-skinned Puerto Ricans. By looking at those of us who are professors or who are Harvard students, you wouldn't know that there was a tremendous diversity among Puerto Ricans, no matter what our social-class origins may have been.
Ronald Takaki: From an Asian American perspective, I've written a book called Strangers from a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans. In this book, I say that there is an Asian American identity. If you go to Asia, you don't find an Asian identity. You're Korean, you're Japanese, you're Chinese, you're Vietnamese. But what's interesting is the ethnic formation of an Asian American identity, making it possible for a historian to write a book entitled, Strangers from a Different Shore. I wonder if such as book could be written about the Latino experience in the United States?
Enrique Trueba: That is a very interesting notion. However, the question of identity formation also raises questions of boundaries and sometimes creates conflicts between peoples.
Victoria Muñoz: Well, one of the things that's going on at the college where I am, and I think it's going on in other colleges as well, is the shift from talking about power, inequality, and oppression to talking about ethnicity and diversity. This shift from racism to issues of diversity has meant that now students of European descent are suddenly ethnic again. And so they want to join the United Women of Color organization. Or they want to join the Latina organization because they are ethnic too, and basically the by-laws of those two organizations say they are for different ethnic groups. So if we don't talk about racism, we talk about ethnicity, but this changes the discussion about power. But there's more to these issues I think sexuality is important to consider because there is such a thing as gay and lesbian culture, yet that's not really an ethnicity. So again, there are power inequalities within those communities too, depending on whether you're African American and gay, and White and gay, and so on. So that's another interesting thing for me to think about when I think about ethnicity too.
Enrique Trueba: OK, I'll throw out another question. If you're going to distinguish between violence, oppression, and adopted memberships in different groups for purposes precisely of finding support systems, the whole issue of gender and of sexual preference is intrinsically different from ethnic affiliation. Let me put it this way. The system found ways of oppressing those groups, curtailing their rights and so on. What I'm saying is that the boundaries that create ethnic groups have to exist in order to clarify memberships. Consider, for example, Latinos, many of whom can pass for White, because we can choose to be part of that group. For Blacks, you can say, maybe they don't have a choice. But can they say tomorrow, "I'm sorry, man, I decided just to stop belonging to this group."
Margaret Andersen: Well, I have a number of things to say about that. Because there's an assumption that somehow all of this is a matter of choice. And it certainly can be, under some circumstances. Even starting with the analogy that you used with sexual preference, one does not have to be gay or lesbian to be labeled as such by an outside group or person. I think, for example, of women who pursued professional careers in the thirties, forties, and fifties, who were defined in the clinical literature as lesbian, no matter what their sexual preference. Similarly, I think there's an assumption that "passing" isn't possible in the African American community, which in my understanding is exactly where the term comes from. And to use even the concept of "passing" implicitly assumes that one is somehow negating membership in a particular group in order to pass as a member of the dominant group. And that's been a historical tradition, among African Americans as well as among Latinos. So it seems to me that the very use of that word "passing" assumes that there is oppression by a dominant group. This cannot be seen simply as a matter of choice. Though obviously, as many people have said, one can also choose to be ethnic for a variety of purposes. Some groups define themselves as ethnic as the result of political mobilization.
Ronald Takaki: Well, it's hard for somebody like me to pass of course, you know. I can't change my name to Thomas or anything. But I notice that increasingly you have children of mixed Asian and European parentage now claiming a dual identity. They're forming Hapa Clubs. I don't know if you know what "Hapa" means, but it's a Hawaiian word meaning half and half. In California there are a lot of Hapa Clubs. These are students of mixed Asian, European ancestry who are embracing their Hapaness. They're talking about Hapa power, for example, and that's great. That's a part of that multiplicity, that reaching toward complexity. But it challenges essentialisms, and I think that is what education is all about.
Sonia Nieto: Can I suggest that we relate this back to education? Of course, I'm particularly interested in how ethnicity relates to education, and I'd like to focus on that and what people think about that.
Ronald Takaki: I think we should have institutionalized requirements for the study of this multiplicity.
Margaret Andersen: I want to comment on that actually because I agree with Ron and I wish our multicultural requirements at Delaware were more like Berkeley's.
Ronald Takaki: You have one at Delaware?
Margaret Andersen: We do. I wish it was as progressive as yours is. Let me tell you what the problem with ours is. Every student has to take one course in their four years that is defined as the multicultural requirement. When it was adopted in 1980, as at Berkeley, many of the Delaware faculty opposed it. So a political compromise was struck, because everybody can be in favor of cultural pluralism. My hope and the hope of some other faculty and administration was for a requirement in anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and anti-sexist education. So our requirement actually favors cultural pluralism over anti-racist, anti-homophobic, and anti-sexist education because of the way it is worded. The wording also requires that students study a non-Western group that has previously been excluded, but it cannot be European. Now this creates a problem for me as vice provost, because I have a whole line of students who come in wanting to substitute their Spanish language course or their study abroad in London trip for the multicultural requirement. Why isn't that multicultural? And frankly, in this language of multiculturalism, I don't have a lot of ground to stand on to turn that request down. Likewise, one of the things that's very disturbing to me is I sometimes hear some of the Black students on campus articulate, "Well, that requirement ought to mean studying a culture other than one's own." The language of the requirement almost encourages that thinking. When in fact, what we wanted was for African American students to have Black Studies count as one of the requirements, and for women to have Women's Studies courses count. So to me it's one of the traps in this multicultural diversity discussion, as much as I am an advocate of multicultural education, I think when it is thought of fully in terms of cultural pluralism that you get into these conflicts.
Ronald Takaki: So in terms of your requirement, Black students can take Black Studies and it will fulfill the requirement?
Margaret Andersen: Yes, actually they can. Anyone can use Black Studies, Women's Studies; we don't have Ethnic Studies.
Ronald Takaki: You see, that was proposed at Berkeley. Group-specific courses should count. I was one of the faculty that opposed it. I said, I teach a course called, "The History of Asians in America," and I have three hundred students in it. Almost all of them are Asian American students. You walk in there, and you see this sea of black heads. I said, "I don't want Asian American students taking that course to fulfill something called a multicultural requirement. I want these Asian American students to learn Black history. I also want Black students to learn Asian American history. That's why we conceptualized it as a comparative course."
Margaret Andersen: That's why I like the way your requirement is actually written, because African American students, for example, would still learn about their own culture, but they would be see it in more relational terms as it intersects with all of these other cultures.
Doris Sommer: I think Asian students should be able to take it for credit, because the simple fact that they're Asian doesn't mean that they know anything about their history.
Ronald Takaki: But they can take it as an elective. We have thirty courses in Asian American Studies.
Doris Sommer: How many courses do they need to fulfill the multicultural requirement?
Ronald Takaki: Just one.
Doris Sommer: Oh.
Ronald Takaki: But we're saying, what does a Berkeley bachelor of arts degree mean? We're saying it means that you have some understanding of this world called the United States of America in terms of our diversity. Now Asian American students can take Asian American Studies, but they take them as electives. This is a university-wide requirement, and students in engineering, in chemistry, in computer sciences, in business education, all have to take this requirement. Otherwise they don't graduate.
Sonia Nieto: I thought Berkeley required five courses.
Ronald Takaki: No, we have four breadth requirements: two social science requirements and two humanities requirements. So out of the four courses, one of the courses must have this comparative multicultural context.
Doris Sommer: I think this is a wise innovation from Berkeley, the comparative nature. Because if we're talking about something like Ethnic Studies, we're already being comparative. We're not here to talk about Latino Studies or Asian American Studies or African American Studies. We're talking at some level conceptually about where the similarities work and where they break down. And that's invisible unless you do a comparative study, and I really think that that's an inspiration.
Sonia Nieto: But it's also complicated. I have three students who are Japanese and African American. How should they decide what course they should take or what they couldn't get credit for taking?
Ronald Takaki: Well, either course would accommodate them, because they would study Japanese Americans and Blacks in the same course. And it would show how the two groups have intersected each other and how they have not.
Sonia Nieto: Oh, it's a course that includes
Ronald Takaki: Five groups.
[Question from the audience.]
Audience: What can we as educators, as people who care, who ourselves have a lot of trouble addressing issues of cross-cultural communication do when we are together with a multiracial group of students who are also in this struggle with communicating?
Sonia Nieto: One of the questions that I was asked to think about was how ethnicity might affect education. I come at it from two different perspectives. One perspective is that it's often not ethnicity itself that affects education, but rather how it's viewed and operationalized by schools and teachers. That means looking at the sociopolitical context; for example, students who speak a high-status language are not marginalized in the same way that students who speak a marked language are marginalized. And I would say the same thing about ethnicity. I think that one way ethnicity affects student learning is that it's often denied. The importance of ethnicity and other differences are denied by teachers and by schools. That is, teachers, in an attempt to be so-called color blind, want to say that they don't see any differences at all, whether they are racial or cultural. And so they say that everyone is the same. That affects how students are treated, of course. On the other hand, and at the same time, I think that students' ethnicity, their culture, among other differences, and I would certainly include social class, is consciously or unconsciously used by schools and by teachers as an explanation for either their success or lack of success in school. We can look at examples of Asian kids being seen by teachers as inherently smarter because of their culture, or, as I heard when I was teaching, that the Latino kids are very good with their hands. And so their ethnicity, even though it's discounted on the one hand, on the other hand it is looked at in terms of how teachers treat students, and how teachers look at these students. The curriculum and the pedagogy are strongly influenced by how teachers look at the ethnicity and other differences in children.
There are two ways that I've seen ethnicity affect student learning. One is students' ways of learning. I say ways of learning rather than learning styles, because I think that's a concept that's very slippery; it can also become essentialized. We end up with lists that many of us have seen: this is how African American students learn, this is how Native American students learn, this is how Latino students learn. We end up with lists that I think are more dangerous than helpful. So I don't talk about learning styles as much as ways of learning, rather than seeing learning in rigid or deterministic ways. And so these ways of learning can result in serious mismatches between what is done in schools and how they're taught, and actually how they can best learn. So I think one thing that teachers need to do and that schools need to do is to learn more about their students and about their ways of learning. This doesn't mean that all the students will learn in exactly the same way.
I think another difference is in students' communication strategies. Some students, not because of their ethnicity, but because of their culture or how they've been raised, may learn to interact with adults and with one another in particular ways that are not promoted in school. For example, looking at the literature of Puerto Rican youngsters in schools and Latino youngsters in general, we find again and again that Latino youngsters drop out of school, say that they feel like outsiders, or say that they don't belong because teachers don't care about them. The issue of caring also has to do with exclusion and marginalization. But more than other students, Latino youngsters talk about care. And I think that's something that we need to look at, and what it is in terms of ethnicity and in terms of culture that is influencing that perception.
Audience: I teach in an elementary school, and I'm wondering on the university level what work goes on for cultural identity for students. Sometimes it's a lot to ask students, "Oh, you're a Native American, tell us about your culture," and they may really not have that history.
Margaret Andersen: One of the things I wanted to ask that is related to this question and the previous one, though it may not seem so initially, is when you are a student in the Graduate School of Education at Harvard, do you take graduate seminars in race and ethnic relations? Raise your hand how many of you have had a graduate level course in race and ethnic relations?
[A few hands are raised.]
Audience: The teacher certification program has one.
Margaret Andersen: Now, it's interesting, because I've been posing this question to sociology Ph.D.'s of late and to the sociology faculty, and I would not get that many more hands in a sociology audience. One would think that sociology, of all disciplines, given that this is where the concepts and research on race and ethnicity have historically lain and now lie, would be doing this. And one of the things that I think is incumbent upon us is not only to include this when you're teaching young children, which I don't do, but to include this at the graduate level. Because I was struck by these questions from the audience. It's very difficult for us as teachers to go in and teach in any classroom setting, whether it's math or English or American Studies, if we ourselves have not been educated in these concepts, histories, and cultures. One of the things I'm struck by in one of the earlier questions about what to do in the schools is that there's now some research in sociology indicating that children as early as the third grade have already learned racial narratives. They have already learned senses of each other's racial identity, who's in the hierarchy, etc. In the words that Ron Takaki used earlier, the responsibility, it seems to me, of the teacher in that setting is to disrupt the master narratives. Now you can't do that if you yourself are not informed about the racial and ethnic history and politics of this nation. I teach a lot of graduate students now in sociology who are interested in Women's Studies and gender, and it's very troubling to me, because on the one hand they really embrace the notion of race, class, and gender. But they know absolutely nothing about the racial history of the United States. And so I would say right here, in your own environment, that you need to be working, advocating, and figuring out ways to get that education yourself. I didn't grow up with it. Nobody taught me what I know now. I feel like I've been on a course of compensatory education since the day I went to graduate school.
Sonia Nieto: Something like 90 percent of classroom teachers in elementary and secondary school are of European background, European American background. And so the minority of teachers are African American, Latinos, Asian, and Native American. And most teachers feel this excruciating difficulty with confronting issues of race and racism. I would say it doesn't start in third grade. A lot of literature in education actually points to children as early as two and three years old as not only being aware of race, but also incipient racism. So at a very young age they're learning this. And I think those issues that you're bringing up about getting Latino students to identify as Latino is more complex than this. They have to identify the way that they feel that they need to identify. Some will identify one way, and some will identify another way. That's up to them, but it's influenced by the social context. I know what you mean when you say that, some students feel that they all have to be joined together. I think that because we are so obsessed with race in this society because of racism, we can't just undo that. We have to study it. We have to learn about it. We have to talk about it. There's very little talk about race, racism, and other kinds of oppression in classrooms, and that's what we need to do. Because otherwise we're going to be labeled only in one way, as I remember a young man years ago saying to me, "Oh, you're Puerto Rican, well, then you're Black." I said, "Well, I'm not Black, I'm Puerto Rican." "It's the same thing, you know," he replied. And I said, "Well, it's not the same thing. You know, it's partly that, but it's, it's more than that, it's different than that." And so I think that these are the kinds of very complex issues that we need to engage in with our students, but there isn't room in our discourse in schools to talk about these things. We have to make the room.
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