Recently signed into law by Arizona Governor, Janet Brewer, House Bill 2281 will discontinue funding to schools at the K-12 levels that offer courses in ethnic studies. Authored by Tom Horne, Arizona’s Superintendent of Public Instruction, the bill seeks to discontinue the integration of Mexican American studies into that state’s primary-secondary curriculum.

Built into the rationale for the ban is the assumption that such a program encourages solidarity among members of a separate group and that its courses teach members of one race to resent those of another. A Mexican American studies program had been established in the district’s six public schools, which affects some 1,500 students.

My response to HB 2281, from one who teaches and researches in the field of ethnic studies, is a clear vote of support for a curriculum that does recognize the historical experience of an under-represented group and does acknowledge the social realities of oppression, segregation, exclusion and other forms of injustice. The focus in any one of the diverse fields of ethnic studies — and they include Asian American, African American, American Indian and U.S. Latino/a studies — can be considered a pedagogical corrective to the eurocentric, hegemonic version of history and culture that Arizona’s HB 2281 would enforce across the board.

The key allegation of Superintendent Horne’s bill is the charge that classes in ethnic studies foster “ethnic chauvinism.” To support his claim, Mr. Horne has pointed to an address given by Dolores Huerta, civil rights activist and leader of the farm workers’ movement, to students of a Tucson Unified District high school in 2006. Huerta’s address included the remark, “Republicans hate Latinos.” The bill’s sponsor is Rep. Steve Montenegro, Salvadoran immigrant and first-year congressman representing Litchfield Park, a suburb of Phoenix, Ariz. Students “shouldn’t be taught they’re oppressed, they shouldn’t be taught that they are subservient in any way,” argues Montenegro. “We’re not trying to prevent the teaching of history. We’re trying to prevent the promotion of victimology.”

The perhaps unconscious intention behind the ban is clear: to create an intellectual climate that would validate and normalize the kind of white ethnic privilege and virtual apartheid that the anti-immigrant SP1070 would institute in the spheres of legislation and public policy. However, we should consider how the teaching of Mexican American history constitutes not “the promotion of victimology,” but rather the promotion of a more accurate history, and, for these particular students, a more meaningful history.

In view of the demographic fact some 30 percent of Arizona’s population is Latino, and in view of the historical fact the Southwest was Mexico until the 1848 signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as an outcome of the Mexican-American war, the offering of a course in Mexican American history, far from constituting ethnic chauvinism, would address the need for a curriculum relevant to the lives of all the state’s students.

Ethnic Studies, in whose curriculum Mexican American history can be said to form a part, is an emergent field of study in American academ — emergent, because only in recent decades has it brought into the foreground the historical experience of peoples whose historical experience has been eclipsed and suppressed by what has been institutionalized as the official history. This official history in reality is the version made dominant by those who, on the basis of falsely universalized self-interest, have determined what is to be considered American history for all of us. Superintendent Horne’s argument falls into the fallacy of the “color-blind ideology,” which says race no longer matters. Yet the same ideology overlooks the powerful ways in which wealth and opportunity continue to be unequally distributed in American society on the basis of racialized perceptions.

We are not yet a post-racial society. Horne may aver that, “A fundamental American value is that we’re all individuals, and what race we were born into is not relevant;” yet our racialized identities, however irrelevant they should be, still matter to those concerned with the building of community and with resistance to all the normalized forms of structural violence and acts of overt violence that continue to victimize individual members of minoritized groups in our society. Although race should not be relevant, it persists as a powerful cultural construction that guides the way we treat one another. We are not yet a post-racial society; the horrific acts of violence that were perpetrated against Rodney King, Vincent Chin, James Byrd and Amadou Diallo more than prove this point.

We are not yet a post-racial society. But the teaching of what goes under the rubric of ethnic studies constitutes a step towards building one.

—Eugenio Matibag is professor of Spanish and director of the Center for American Intercultural Studies at Iowa State