The Truth About the Lies Students Learn Or the Case for Ethnic Studies at Every School, in Every State by Oriel María Siu, PhD
Lies Rationalize the Settler Nation
As a settler nation, the United States has necessitated the invention and sustained dissemination of various lies in order to negate, hide, and distort the truth about its past and present. These lies get taught to children as fairy tales at schools -as stories with sweet beginnings and happily-ever-after endings- and these fictions form the backbone of the history and social studies curricula of most K-12 classrooms in the U.S.:
"Columbus discovered America"
"Pilgrims settled the New World"
"The pilgrims sat over a meal together and became friends with the Natives"
“1776 marks the birth of our nation”
"We are a nation of immigrants"
"Slavery was bad but is a fully closed chapter of our history"
"The Civil Rights Movement solved the problem of racism"
Reinforcing these myths is recent legislation in at least 42 states barring teachers from teaching the honest history of the land we live on, forcing educators to lie about the origins of the United States, and limiting discussion on race and gender in the elementary, high school, and college classrooms. In Iowa, for example, one of the first states in the country to pass such legislation, teachers are feeling obliged to quit out of fear of legal repercussions for simply doing their jobs. And in Florida, educators are facing fines of up to $5,000 and third-degree felony charges for opening up discussion on these foundational topics, further cementing the myths already taught about the settler nation and making school environments more dangerous for all students and educators, particularly students of color and/or LGBTQ children and educators.
This latest push against teaching truth in our classrooms, however, is nothing new. It began the very moment non-White educators collectively began educating, obtaining Masters and PhDs, opening up avenues for publishing in an otherwise White industry, and creating syllabi to shed light on the inconsistencies, omissions, and lies of the Eurocentered K-12 and college curriculum 60 years ago, a movement which birthed Ethnic Studies.
Prior to the emergence of Ethnic Studies in classrooms, Indigenous people and people of color were systemically excluded from institutions of knowledge production and teaching. Virtually zero courses on the knowledge-worlds, histories, and contributions of non-White racialized groups living in the United States were offered either the K-12 or in college classrooms before the 1960s. What was taught about these multiple groups, moreover, was based on curricula that directly stemmed from White settler colonialism's intent of removing and erasing Indigenous peoples in order to take their land in perpetuity. Education, this is to say, involved a targeted attempt at erasing Indigenous peoples' histories, languages, cultures, and all the stories that would interrogate or resist the United States development as a settler colony. Most notably absent was its deep history of White Supremacy.
From its inception, Ethnic Studies deviated from the rigid and limiting Eurocentric categorizations and definitions of an academic discipline, and it instead proposed inter- and multidisciplinary lenses and methodologies to analyze, understand, name, and uproot inbuilt White supremacist structures in all areas of our society: law, education, government, the economy, agriculture, culture, and knowledge. Scholars and activists in the fledgling field faced an uphill battle from the start. Unlike the other academic fields introduced in the Americas as part of the project of White settler colonialism 400 years earlier, however, Ethnic Studies had to fight for its very right to exist. From targeted budget cuts to reductions of physical space within universities to a sustained lack of institutional support for hiring an adequate number of full-time professors, the war on this hard-won academic field has been well-documented. And Ethnic Studies' necessary move from college into K-12 classrooms, beginning ten years ago, has been no different.
Due to the outreach capabilities of the Internet and social media platforms today, however, the war on the truth is ever more visible. And if we look at the money and political motives behind it, also ever more dangerous.
Twitter post by Moms for Liberty, a right-wing organization that advocates racist, queerphobic, and damaging reforms to public education, from November 12, 2021
As a result of this sustained attack on antiracist and LGBT-friendly education in our classrooms, students and educators in the United States are continuously steered away from critical conversations on two specific systems that shape us: White settler colonialism and race.
Since the settler nation systemically refuses to teach students the truth about these topics, most educators in the United States today are able to obtain their Teaching Credentials, Masters, and even their PhD degrees, without once having had the opportunity to learn about, facilitate discussion on, or center White supremacy in their teaching, their curricula, or their classroom cultures. Thus, settler colonialism and racism for the most part reign unchallenged in textbooks, classroom dynamics, state legislation, and school curricula both in the United States and everywhere the United States exports its textbooks and curricula.
The level of omissions, lies, and negations in school textbooks and curricula vary from state to state, but all serve, derive from, and bolster the same White-washed origin and development story of the United States.
Images from textbooks used in classrooms in Canada (above) and the United States below, which erase the history of genocide and White settler colonialism in the Americas.
Consequently, most students and educators alike do not once get the opportunity to learn the actual history of the land we live on, or how this history links to our everyday lives today. In the case of White parents, for example, most see race and settler colonialism as needless conversations to engage (with or without, their children). Disingenuously claiming they “do not see race,” these parents either do not feel these topics directly impact them, or they find these conversations to be "too uncomfortable," "complex," or "touchy" for their children. In other instances, they may simply feel unfit to guide these discussions with their young ones at all. Unless a situation arises in which their child must confront racism –something they hear or see, e.g. a news report, a playground fight, a display, or a situation with a peer– White parents and their children mostly do not talk about race or settler colonialism, and yet every day, their experiences are shaped by these systems.
Parents of color and Indigenous parents, on the other hand, do not have the privilege of avoiding these conversations with their children. Yet they must send their children to schools where the curriculum directly or indirectly belittles and invalidates their true lived histories and experiences, as well as those of their families. What these students learn every day in their educational spaces is quite the contrary; that race and White Supremacy do not merit the importance of open discussion, analysis or understanding. Thus, even though Indigenous children and parents are more than aware than their White peers that their lands are occupied, and even though racism is a fact of life for everyone, at school, these very children cannot openly speak about, learn about, or analyze the historical repercussions of these forces in their lives with their peers, or discuss how it directly continues to affect them and their families.
A ticking bomb of many sorts, our schools continue to prepare children for a climate that does not validate, see, know or understand one another’s histories, stories, or lived experiences. Epicenters of negation, schools instead serve as lying sites where we dangerously teach all children to negate themselves, their stories, identities, and true histories, ultimately shaping the way they see themselves and others well into adulthood.
The results of this sustained abnegation of truthful histories and stories in our classrooms are atrocious, and they can be seen anywhere and everywhere the banning of productive discussion on race and White settler colonialism takes on shape and form: an Indigenous boy being ashamed of his braids at school, a Black boy getting shot for ringing a doorbell, the ever-increasing frequency of race-based hate crimes, the systemic police violence against bodies of color, the many thousands of LGBTQ authors and authors of color being banned from bookshelves at the national level by a handful of (White) people, my (visibly Black) daughter combing her curly hair as tight to her scalp as she can every morning "so that no one at school can see it or touch it", the images of Black and Brown refugee children being separated from their parents at the border and within the US, the weight of unknowingly carrying and living out White privilege, damaged identities proliferating. The list is unending.
The truth is that banning conversation about White settler colonialism, race, and the intersecting power structures that derive from these, only serves to reinforce these systems. And talking about these, in the form of lies or myths, only worsens them. False narratives of place and history offer us at best, a distortedly inaccurate image of our ourselves, ensuring we never see ourselves for who we really are. At worse, false narratives leave us trapped in vicious cycles of violence, confining ourselves and our neighbors to the continued impossibility of mending, re-building, and justice.
It Is Way Past Time We Introduced Ethnic Studies at Every school, In Every state
As a professor of Ethnic Studies, I have witnessed how truthful histories empower all students given that Ethnic Studies allows White and non-White students alike the possibility of connecting, naming, dismantling and intervening in harmful dynamics of power in their environments and society. Through Ethnic Studies, a students' sense of self becomes strengthened and their understanding of others, land, and place, amplified. A very common remark by all college students engaged in these courses is that they wish they had been exposed to what they learn in Ethnic Studies classes much earlier. How different their lives would be had they had the proper tools to intervene inequity earlier, had they known the truth, had they not been lied to. In fact, I have seen countless students find their life purpose through Ethnic Studies. Many have pursued careers in law, environmental justice, immigration, and, among others, education as a result of Ethnic Studies curricula.
As a children's book author and educator, I have also had the opportunity to implement Ethnic Studies tools and tenets at the K-12 level with hundreds of educators and young ones from all over Turtle Island (the original name of what’s now “the United States”) and across the globe during the past three years while on book-tour. A common response from educators has been the same as college students' comments: how they wish they had been exposed to this curriculum before. The tools and vocabularies Ethnic Studies provides them with, in other words, help open up fruitful, transformative, and healing discussion.
Given the continued war against the truth in our classrooms, it is clear that the majority, if not all proponents of bills like the "Stop Woke Act," have never had the opportunity to study –much less bothered to learn– the teachings or tenets of Ethnic Studies. My goal here is to offer some of the basic principles of Ethnic Studies.
(1) Ethnic Studies understands that Native-American, African-American, Mexican-American, Chicana/o, Puerto Rican, Central American, Dominican-American, Asian-American, Pacific-Islander, and Arab-American history IS American history. As is also the history of White Supremacy and Whiteness. As opposed to offering a partial history of the United States, Ethnic Studies offers the suppressed histories of all groups, -and land- intervened by White Settler Colonialism, U.S. imperialism, and U.S. immigration policy, allowing for a fuller picture of the United States' origin and development story. Ethnic Studies embraces the hyphen, or altogether de-hyphenates us, connecting us instead, through our real-lived "American" histories, stories, and experiences.
(2) Ethnic Studies does not reinvent history. It rather teaches students to think critically about the content already taught in the K-12 curriculum by incorporating, centering, and interrogating its silences and omissions with a special focus given to our collective and individual histories of resistance to White Supremacy.
(3) Ethnic Studies understands knowledge and power are intricately related. By showing how power and knowledge production are always socially situated, Ethnic Studies dismantles the Eurocentric idea of "universal" truths and makes it clear that we are incapable of an impartial view of our world. At the same time, Ethnic Studies recovers silenced and oppressed ways of knowing and teaches us to view, interrogate and think of our world from diverse Indigenous and marginalized knowledge-worlds.
(4) Ethnic Studies potentiates students' critical thinking skills by encouraging continued evaluation of how the past connects to the present, and engaging students in analysis of concepts, theories, history, narratives, and current-day issues and events. Through Ethnic Studies, students learn to think critically about how race, class, gender, and the land experience and resist oppressions. In the process, students consider and evaluate their own role in either perpetuating or intercepting inequality, prejudice, and/or injustice.
(5) Ethnic Studies understands there is no "appropriate age" for truth. There are only age-appropriate words for it. It thus offers the vocabulary, terms, and conceptual tools that young ones need to engage truthful stories and histories. Conversations on race and colonialism are only harmful when not guided properly, or worse yet, when inexistent. As an example, children across the US read The Diary of Anne Frank and learn about the horrors of World War II, so as to never repeat such atrocities. It is therefore only logical that US students also learn about historical injustices at home that we must likewise never repeat, or their consequences, ignore.
(6) Ethnic Studies understands all narratives are fabricated and situated. It guides ongoing conversation on how the narratives and stories we read and are told, as well as the ones we tell, shape us. Similarly, it allows students the opportunity to interrogate how the narratives and stories that never get told, those that we do not get to tell, read, or hear at all, shape us too.
(7) Ethnic Studies understands race is an invention - a social construct with the real-lived consequence of racism. It thus demonstrates how the lie of race is a central axis of stratification in our society. In the U.S, for example, a person’s “race” is often the best predictor of this person’s life opportunities, income, wealth, education, health, employment, and other important measurements of well-being.
(8) Ethnic Studies does not divide, nor guilt-trip White students. On the contrary, by focusing on the omitted, collective histories of resistance to White settler colonialism (including long-enduring legacies of White resistance to White Supremacy), Ethnic Studies unites us through conversation on our collective and individual responsibilities to that history. While some White students may experience sadness, or feelings of guilt at the beginning of some of these conversations, Ethnic Studies instruction will always channel these feelings into a stronger sense of empowerment, often resulting in anti-racist behavior and social justice action in both White and non-White students.
(9) Ethnic Studies understands that the past is never past. One way we normalize and allow for White settler colonialism and racism to persist is by treating such systems as issues of the past. Ethnic Studies understands how dangerous this misinterpretation is and highlights the many ways in which the past continually shapes us. Furthermore, Ethnic Studies helps us see how there is no way of effectively intervening the present-day consequences of history if we are unable to discuss, analyze, or know what the past actually looked like for those living it.
(10) Ethnic Studies views all students as agents of change and not mere receptacles of information. As much as Ethnic Studies teaches buried histories and stories, it also fosters the idea that students are as capable of learning as they are of changing and writing their own histories and stories.
(11) Ethnic Studies benefits all students, not just students of color. As a result of treating students as agents of social change, Ethnic Studies courses yield powerful outcomes for students. Some of the well-documented and proven benefits of the field include improved graduation rates, greater self-confidence, overall well-being, enhanced critical thinking skills, sustained academic engagement, and the ability to interact, work, and develop meaningful relationships with people of different backgrounds. Ethnic Studies transforms students into life-long learners with the knowledge necessary to improve their lives, the lives of those around them, and the land they live on.
Image from Dr. Siu's latest children's book, Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It's Over! Illustrator: Víctor Zúñiga. Translator: Matthew Byrne.
Oriel María Siu, PhD, is a scholar, writer and educator of Náhuat-Pipil and Chinese descent born and raised in Honduras, Central America. She is the author of the award-winning children's book series, Rebeldita the Fearless, a series that disrupts the fairytaled narratives of the foundation story of the Americas and empowers children to become active agents of change through the power of our stories. Christopher the Ogre Cologre, It's Over! and Rebeldita the Fearless in Ogreland, have been recognized as "absolute musts for the classrooms," "literary wonders" and "pioneering" by organizations like the LA Times, Rethinking Schools, Truthout.Org, and others. A strong proponent of Ethnic Studies in every K-12 and college classroom, Dr. Siu's books are helping educators battle institutionalized racism in the K-12 curricula. For more about the author, visit www.orielmariasiu.com.