This guy. John Huppenthal. An elected Republican official, currently running for re-election in Arizona. What's worse than his just being a garden-variety bigot is that he is the Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction, who was elected in 2010, and is a former state senator and state representative.
Huppenthal, well known to those who follow Arizona politics, especially the policies that target Hispanics, has waged an ongoing vendetta against Mexican-American/Chicano(a) studies, which I covered here back in 2011. This takes place in a state where Hispanics make up over 30 percent of the population, and "43 percent of Arizona residents were minorities in 2012."
Mother Mags posted here about the recent outing of Huppenthal as an online troll by Blog For Arizona, busted for making racist, xenophobic, anti-Hispanic, and anti-black internet posts—using pseudonyms, aka "sockpuppets"—many of them defending himself. His disgusting comments online date back to the day he was elected in 2010.
Of course he issued a standard and lachrymose "nopology," which is de rigueur for busted bigots, and has refused to resign. The primary election in Arizona will take place August 26. His leading Democratic opponent is progressive David Garcia.
His sockpuppet comments like "We all need to stomp out balkanization. No spanish radio stations, no spanish billboards, no spanish tv stations, no spanish newspapers. This is America, speak English" are par-for-the-course nativism and racism.
Huppenthal is only one of the most visible members of today's bigot brigade waging war on immigrants, Hispanics, Native Americans and ethnic studies. In "The Hypocrisy of Racism: Arizona's Movement towards State-Sanctioned Apartheid," Dr. Augustine Romero, Director of Student Equity and Co-Founder of the Social Justice Education Project wrote:
Recently, my colleagues and I have been called racist because we encourage our students to ask questions about the impact of race and/or racism upon their social condition, their impact on the history of our country, and their potential impact upon our future. The irony and hypocrisy are that our racist state, its racist superintendent of public instruction, its racist attorney general, the racists within its state legislature, and the racist nature of its legal representation are saying that my colleagues and I are racist because we illuminate their acts of white privilege, their acts of oppression, and their acts of racism. They would prefer that we simply acquiesce to these actions and accept them as part of their malevolent and insular perception of patriotism or even what is considered to be American.
The Attorney General referred to is Tom Horne, architect of AZ
House Bill 2281, known as the "ethnic studies ban" which
he championed while he was Superintendent of Public Instruction, and used to parley his way on a wave of racism into being elected state attorney general. He's up for re-election, opposed by Democrat
Felecia Rotellini.
Follow me below the fold for more on Huppenthal, and the history and current battles around ethnic studies.
Here are a few more reported online blog posts from Huppenthal:
"There is no aspect of (Child Protective Services) nationwide which protects children. No correlation between spending on CPS and child safety," Thucydides posted in January on Blog for Arizona. "The only factors which provide safety for children are employment of parents and good schools on the positive side and welfare enrollment on the negative side."
• "It was Darwin, not Hitler, who named the Germans the master race," Thucydides posted in September 2013 on the blog Seeing Red AZ. "It was Darwin who expressed approval of eliminating both Jews and Africans. Hitler worked to eliminate the Jews. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood was given the job of eliminating African-Americans. Hitler fed 6 million Jews into the ovens. Sanger has fed 16 million African-Americans into the abortion mills."
• "We now know that (Franklin D. Roosevelt) was almost completely responsible for the great depression," Falcon9 posted in 2013 on Blog for Arizona. "Only in liberal mythology did FDR 'save' the nation. ... Worse yet, Roosevelt's disastrous economic policies drug down the whole world and directly led to the rise of a no-name hack named Adolph Hitler who was going nowhere until Germany's economy went into the tank."
• "Obama is rewarding the lazy pigs with food stamps (44 million people), air-conditioning, free health care, flat-screen TV's (typical of "poor" families)." (Editor's note: Parentheses included in posting.)
So this is the man right-wing voters in Arizona want to have overseeing the education of children?
This is not just about Arizona, however. Right-wing agendas fueled by right-wing funding and think-tanks are part of a U.S. wide movement to undo gains made by civil rights and education rights activists dating back to the 1960's.
Let's roll the lens of history backwards for a bit to take a look at the birth of ethnic studies and the battles that we fought and won. It's hard for me to believe that over 45 years have passed since the establishment of ethnic studies—spearheaded by student strikes that took place in California which spread quickly to other campuses across the US. Many of you reading today weren't even born in '68. My students today take programs like ethnic studies, women's and gender studies for granted. But we cannot afford to ignore the fact that for every battle that has been won, the forces from the right develop counter measures to erase those victories, and move us backward.
Please take the time to view this short documentary on the start of the movement.
Activist State (Documentary: '68 San Francisco Student Strike)
The battle for Ethnic Studies
The first strike for Ethnic Studies 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, Filipino American Collegiate Endeavor, and Native American Students Union at San Francisco State [College now University] was the longest student strike in the nation's history, and resulted in the establishment of a School of Ethnic Studies, when President S.I. Hayakawa ended the strike by taking a hardline approach, appointed Dr. James Hirabayashi the first dean of the School (now College) of Ethnic Studies at SFSU, 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 for scholars and activists concerned with the national and international dimensions of ethnicity.
The University of California at Berkeley minority students united under their own Third World Liberation Front and initiated the second longest student strike in the history of the country on January 22, 1969. The groups involved were the Mexican American Student Confederation, Asian American Political Alliance, African American Student Union and the Native Americans. The four co-Chairman's 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 police presence on campus. The faculty union voted to join the strike on March 2, and 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 [SFSC] on March 20, 1969.
To this day the only
College of Ethnic Studies in the U.S. is located at San Francisco State University, with departments in Africana, American Indian, Asian American, Latina/o studies and a Race and Resistance Studies Program. Other campuses across the United States also have outstanding departments and programs, many who are members of the
National Association for Ethnic Studies (NAES) which was founded in 1972. The movement to establish these academic departments and disciplines influenced the establishment of Women's Studies programs
in 1970, and LGBT, Queer/Gender studies in
the late '80's.
Why is this issue important to me, and why should it be important to all Democrats, progressives, liberals and activists?
If we truly want to change our country—diminish and eventually eliminate systemic racism—the ground zero of that battle is education. I grew up in a world where my culture, the lives of my ancestors and my family were not reflected in the "canon" of academia. I can now teach those cultures that were excluded.
We all know that the right wing in this country wants to move us backward and to erode the gains we've made in civil rights, voting rights, affirmative action, women's rights and that corporations are now people. Do not forget that along with the battle for ethnic studies we fought long and hard to get bilingual education in our schools. The loud braying of nativist, English-only right-wing voices are reflected in the words posted by Huppenthal as a sockpuppet.
I have not forgotten my frustration teaching as a VISTA volunteer in the late 1960s in a school for drop-outs/kicked-outs who were predominantly Puerto Rican. Most had run afoul of New York City's strictly enforced policy against bilingual education. These were young people already being shuttled into the school to prison pipeline. They were dubbed "uneducateable," "unteachable" and "unreachable." A lie. A lie that continues to be perpetuated. We designed a bilingual and culturally specific program for those young people. And almost every one of them went on to college.
Yet my home town has always been a city of many tongues—some tongues are clearly more equal than others.
In "Speaking in Tongues: Bilingual Education and Immigrant Communities," Yana Kunichoff covers "A Very Brief History of Bilingual Education in America."
The history of bilingual education has always been tied up with national feeling towards immigrants—in Chicago, during the 19th Century, school was originally taught in German. Though there were some failed attempts to require all public schools in Illinois to teach English, such as the short-lived Edwards Law of 1889, the reaction from immigrant families kept English education at bay. It was only after the U.S. entry into World War I and the strong anti-German sentiment that removed bilingual education from Illinois schools, according to the Chicago Encyclopedia.
The next big fight over bilingual education was for what would eventually become the Bilingual Education Act of 1968, the first piece of federal legislation regarding minority language speakers. Its purpose was to provide school districts with federal funds to establish educational programs for students with limited English-speaking ability.
It consolidated gains that were fought for by schools and the Chicano movement in the Southwest and West during the riotous 1960s to gain educational equality, and was clarified by an additional civil rights case, Lau V. Nichols, in 1974. This case was brought by Chinese American students in San Francisco who claimed that, under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, they were entitled to special help because if their difficulty with the English language. They won the suit and helped set the precedent for bilingual funding and allowances, and legitimized the idea that students learning English had specific educational rights.
In "The fight for bilingual education" Jeff Bale writes about some of the more recent history in his section on
Anti-immigrant backlash and the English-only movement
Bilingual education—and the broader societal goal of maintaining non-English languages—has been under attack ever since. These attacks culminated at the turn of this century with the passage of three state ballot initiatives effectively outlawing bilingual education. The first, Proposition 227, was passed by large margins in California in 1998. Bankrolled by Silicon Valley millionaire Ron Unz, the initiative—subtly entitled “English for the Children”—outlawed home language use for instruction and mandated English-only “sheltered” programs for a period “not normally intended to exceed one year.” The measure passed with 61 percent of the vote, although Latinos voted against it by a two-to-one margin. While media coverage at the time was obsessed with the “failure” of bilingual education, they often ignored two facts: 1) only 30 percent of emergent bilinguals at that time were actually enrolled in bilingual programs (most of them transitional programs); and 2) within those programs, only 20 percent of teachers were certified bilingual educators.
A year later, Unz took his show on the road to Arizona, where he bankrolled Proposition 203. Sixty-three percent of Arizona voters approved the proposition in 2000. Proposition 203 is even more restrictive than its California cousin, as evidenced by the Structured English Immersion model discussed above.
A particularly outrageous consequence of Proposition 203 is that the only way public schools in the Arizona portion of the Navajo Nation have been allowed to continue with their bilingual programs is to formally label Navajo a foreign language. Two years later, Massachusetts voters approved Question 2, an initiative to replace transitional bilingual programs with English-only ones. The measure passed by 68 percent. That same year, Colorado voters narrowly turned down the most restrictive initiative of all, an amendment to the state constitution that actually would have made bilingual education illegal. (my bold)
Things may begin to change in a positive direction. See this recent Los Angeles Times editorial "Is bilingual education worth bringing back?"
A lot has changed since 1998, when Proposition 227 all but wiped out bilingual instruction in California public schools. The matter is due for reconsideration; a bill that passed the state Senate last week would allow that to happen.
SB 1174, by state Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens), would place a measure on the November 2016 ballot to repeal Proposition 227 and allow local school districts to decide whether they want to bring back bilingual education rather than continue with the current system, which aims to move students toward full-time English use as quickly as possible.
We have work to do on multiple fronts. Defending curricula, defeating right-wing candidates who are pushing backward agendas driven by fears of our changing demographics. The ethnic studies ban in Arizona is still
working its way through the courts.
A group of teachers and students challenged the constitutionality of H.B. 2281 in federal court. Though the teachers were dismissed from the lawsuit, the students, Maya Arce, Korina Lopez, and Nicolas Dominguez, continued the challenge. In March 2013, the district court declared subsection (3) above unconstitutionally overbroad, but granted summary judgment to the defendants on all of the students' other claims.
The students appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. On November 18, 2013, they filed their opening brief, available here, arguing among other things, that the statute violates first amendment rights and the right to equal protection and is unconstitutionally overbroad and vague. On November 25, 2013, six amicus briefs were filed supporting the students' appeal from an impressive group of individuals and organizations from across the country, including: (1) Authors of Books Banned from TUSD; (2) National Education Association and Arizona Education Association; (3) Freedom to Read Foundation, American Library Association, American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression, Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association, Black Caucus of the American Library Association, Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, National Association for Ethnic Studies, National Coalition against Censorship, National Council of Teachers of English, and REFORMA; (4) Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy and the Anti-Defamation League; (5) 48 Public School Teachers; and (6) LatCrit, Inc.
As of today:
Plaintiffs' Response and Reply was filed on June 2, 2014, and can be found here.
Defendants may file an option reply brief by July 21, 2014. Oral argument has not yet been set in the case.
I said that my ground zero is education. But the foundation of that ground is the vote.
Elections are coming. Get people registered and get them to the polls.
Kick the racists out of office.