More evidence that what's going on in Arizona has nothing to do with race:
Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has signed a bill targeting a school district's ethnic studies program, hours after a report by United Nations human rights experts condemned the measure.
State schools chief Tom Horne, who has pushed the bill for years, said he believes the Tucson school district's Mexican-American studies program teaches Latino students that they are oppressed by white people.
Public schools should not be encouraging students to resent a particular race, he said.
"It's just like the old South, and it's long past time that we prohibited it," Horne said.
This is another good example of how conservatives marshal the language of racial equality in the service of racial discrimination.
The law -- "prohibit[ing] classes that advocate ethnic solidarity, that are designed primarily for students of a particular race or that promote resentment toward a certain ethnic group" -- basically speaks for itself. It suggests that, in this case, the study of Mexican-American history is by nature something that has no value to white people and therefore has no value, period. The authors of this law would never imagine that a history class that completely excludes the contributions and stories of people of color would be "designed" for white people and therefore could be banned under this law, because white is "normal" and by definition anything designed for white people is designed for everyone. The perspectives of nonwhite people are not "normal" and are therefore not relevant.
As for ethnic studies programs in general, many conservatives deeply believe that, for example, black people only vote Democratic because they are "told" Republicans are racist. It may seem more intuitive to think that personal experiences, political rhetoric, and laws targeting certain ethnic groups -- like Arizona's recently passed immigration law -- may be the cause of racial resentment among minorities. But to conservatives, it's actually that minorities believe whatever white people tell them, and if they can get rid of these nasty ethnic studies classes then resentment will go away.
It's all part of the same problem--the reoccurring theme is that people of color have no independent thoughts worth thinking. Colorblind rhetoric doesn't actually seek to end racism; it seeks to end the means by which racism is exposed and dealt with, like medieval Europeans carrying around pockets full of flowers to mask the scent of the plague.
-- A. Serwer
