COLUMN: It's time ethnic studies got back to the basics

From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '99 From Ronald Kim's, "The Wretched of the Earth," Fall '99In April 1995, I and 16 other Princeton undergraduates occupied the university president's office to protest the lack of support for Latino and Asian-American studies. After 36 hours of intense confrontation and often emotional debate, we emerged with a written promise from Princeton's administrators to allocate several million dollars for the hiring of new ethnic studies professors. For example, minority activists in the late '60s constantly emphasized the need to not simply recover lost histories or neglected writings, but to bring that knowledge to the people outside the schools. What happened to the role ethnic studies was supposed to play as a catalyst for student involvement? To be sure, many universities, including Penn, have numerous programs through which students can become involved in helping their local neighborhoods. But the ethnic studies programs themselves have largely become professionalized vehicles for academic self-promotion. Despite frequent talk of reaching out to off-campus neighborhoods with after-school activities, health campaigns or night classes, students in ethnic studies programs have come to prioritize their academic careers, just like students in any other department. The last thing the founders of these fields intended was that ethnic studies programs should confine themselves to the ivory tower. And why have so few minority intellectuals had anything to say about international events over the past decade? Has ethnic studies retreated from its original emphasis on relating the condition of minority communities here to the larger forces shaping the rest of the world? Malcolm X, for instance, saw a connection between the CIA's war in the Congo and the drafting of black soldiers to die in Vietnam. And it was the Vietnam War itself which galvanized the emerging Asian-American civil rights movement. Today, despite the supposed emphasis on "diaspora" communities, this sort of criticism of and staunch opposition to imperialism has become a dead chapter in the history of ethnic studies. But perhaps worst of all, the movement has lost the devotion to social justice that inspired its founders to protest and struggle a generation ago. The recent revival of activity by Penn's Latino and Asian-American organizations this semester notwithstanding, most minority organizations across the country have long since forsaken their militantly political roots and wound up as glorified clubs for study breaks and socializing. With opposition to ethnic studies and minority centers as strong as ever, college activists have found themselves on the defensive, constantly preoccupied with having to justify and protect their meager, hard-fought gains. The danger is that in doing so, they may lose sight of exactly what it is they are defending. Certainly, the original justification for such programs remains valid. As long as "American studies" programs deal with only a fraction of the entire "American experience," there can be no question that we need ethnic studies departments to teach the often-ignored histories and cultures of the United States' non-white populations. Certainly, improving the identity and repairing the self-image of minority youth while teaching America's white majority a less triumphalist, Eurocentric version of their country's past and present were also important objectives, and they remain no less so today. And minority centers do provide students with often much-needed support and host activities that benefit the entire campus. But my problems with the current state of minority academia and campus politics are not mere quibbles or minor differences of opinion, much as I would like them to be. Ethnic studies today stands in real danger of turning into just another academic discipline, barely distinguishable from any other humanistic or social science. Without any ties to the off-campus world, student centers and organizations become irrelevant to everyone except, well, students. If that happens, I have to ask myself whether it's really worth all that effort and struggle for programs that fall that far short of their larger purpose -- increasing and spreading knowledge, serving outside communities and making our society a better place for a greater number of people.