California is set to make history as the first state in the nation to require instruction in ethnic studies in all its public high schools. Given that enrollment in an ethnic studies course is shown to boost at-risk students’ academic performance, among other critical benefits, California is to be applauded for its leadership. If any of the states considering a similar move, including Minnesota, Oregon and Vermont, follow California’s example, they should be praised as well.
While, recently, some have worked to minimize the importance of this field, there is no denying that educating students about the social and political significance of race and ethnicity and the experiences of minoritized communities throughout U.S. history enables them to participate fully, constructively and productively in national life, and help make our country the world’s most vibrant multiracial and multiethnic society.
As California moves forward, however, recent commentary is starting to promote an overly restricted description of ethnic studies that deeply threatens the progress being made.
In this false understanding, one hard position among a few ethnic studies scholars on contemporary geopolitical issues is incorrectly taken to define the entire large field of study. But, in fact, ethnic studies is neither narrow nor prescriptive. Core to the discipline is open-ended inquiry — not preordained conclusions. The field studies and asks questions about the ways race, ethnicity and indigeneity figure into the collective experience of peoples in historical, political, social and cultural terms, and how they fit against other aspects of social differentiation such as class, gender, sexuality, religion and legal status.
Within the United States, the field has sometimes focused such complex, multilayered inquiry on the experiences of white populations that are not of Western or Northern European descent or of Protestant Christian faith. More typically, it centers on the fraught histories of Indigenous, Black, Asian American and Latinx populations in the U.S., often in relation to international political issues. For instance, when an African American woman in hijab, en route to a vacation in Istanbul, was detained for FBI interrogation at Newark Liberty Airport, the incident touched on a long history of U.S. surveillance of people of color and social control of women, but it was also informed by ongoing U.S.-Islamic tensions.
The discipline, up to now featured solely at the university level, is fascinatingly complex and layered. While we wouldn’t expect that level of complexity to be fully replicated within high school curricula, high school students certainly can and must be familiarized with the flexibility, expansiveness and inquiry that truly define the field.
Not only are high school students capable of this kind of thinking, it also is a moral imperative they receive training in it. After all, the impetus for the development of ethnic studies as an area of academic inquiry in the late 1960s and early 1970s was the recognition that if students are not being instructed in the experiences and perspectives of minoritized populations — and in the pivotal role played by race in the social, political and cultural life of the nation, past and present — then they are receiving an account of the nation’s history that is incomplete, inaccurate and impoverished. Individuals cannot function as responsible democratic citizens without this full education.
It is, therefore, a grave disservice to allow ethnic studies to be turned into a diminished caricature of what it is.
As California high schools start offering ethnic studies in the 2025-26 academic year, with all students required to take it in order to graduate as of 2029-30, we risk triggering a movement to undermine what they and others will be taught. Withholding that thorough education would mean denying students access to exactly the kinds of social and cultural intricacies that we know they find most compelling and engaging. Take, for instance, the breathtaking poignancy of Maya Lin’s Vietnam Veterans Memorial considered in relation to the intense controversy the design initially generated. Or what about the extraordinarily powerful instances of African American cultural expression that emerged in Harlem and elsewhere at the height of Jim Crow in the 1920s? Or the sly and beautiful rejoinder to 20th century hot-rod culture that can be seen in the Latinx lowrider communities of California, New Mexico and Texas?
It would also mean depriving them of the powerful tools they could be given to help manage the challenges they will inevitably confront as members of a highly complex and rapidly evolving global society — one composed of myriad peoples bearing an uncountable array of different traits and lived experiences.
As we know from history, without deep intention and knowledge, social differences are all too easily translated into social hierarchies that impede our collective ability to solve the problems we face in common. Ethnic studies is not just an academic abstraction; it helps dismantle the racial hierarchies that inform social inequality within the U.S. and beyond, and thus hold us all back. Helping U.S. students become acquainted with the field’s probing and challenging questions is good for them, and for society writ large.
Phillip Brian Harper is program director for Higher Learning at the Mellon Foundation.