Perhaps something good will come of Gavin Newsom’s national ambitions after all.
The Democratic governor of California has made his intention to run for president his defining characteristic over the past couple years. If this were a whodunnit, Newsom would be deemed too obvious to have done it. Indeed, until this week I thought he’d exhausted the list of ways to tell us he’s running.
Then on Wednesday he found yet another means to telegraph his presidential aspirations: He dropped funding for California schools’ ethnic-studies mandate, rendering the mandate inoperable.
Ethnic studies has brought California nothing but grief in the four years since the state decided to make it a requirement for graduation. To the public, “ethnic studies” sounds like multicultural programming. It isn’t—and the activists and academics who traffic in it will voice the loudest objections to such a fuzzy characterization. Rather than being a “a descriptive curriculum that speaks to various ethnic and racial groups’ experiences,” as one such academic told the New York Times last year, it is “a critical analysis of the way power works in societies.”
In other words, it’s a revision of history according to a radical political reinterpretation of the world that regards established facts as suspect.
And today’s version of it is—you guessed it—centered on Israel and focused obsessively on erasing Jewish history. And to be clear: calling Israel a colonialist state is not a “criticism of Israeli policy”; it is just simple anti-Semitism, denying the reality of Jews in the world.
In the Times story from last year, the counterfeit nature of the entire discipline is laid bare by merely describing it: “Ethnic studies focuses on four groups: Black Americans, Latinos, Native Americans and Asian Americans. It aims to critique various forms of oppression and spur students to take action, often drawing analogies across disparate expanses of time and geography. The Palestinian experience of displacement is central to that exercise, and has been compared by some scholars to the Native American experience.”
In other words, it is an anti-intellectual desperation play to make decades-old racial politics relevant again. No one ever “supports” the Palestinians to support the actual Palestinians; they are a tool used by various progressive interest groups to expand their share of the identity-politics market. The Palestinians don’t benefit from this, because the curriculum that comes out of it is baldfaced anti-Semitism and incitement to violence, which only makes normal-brained people more skeptical of the Palestinian national cause.
When Jews objected to making it a graduation requirement to show proficiency in Being An Anti-Semite, the state tried to remove the worst of it from its model curriculum. Which led, naturally, to the rise of a competing model curriculum that called itself “liberated ethnic studies.” To many in the industry, you see, the anti-Semitism was the point.
When asked if the Zionist narrative (also known as “history”) should be taught alongside the critical-studies and postcolonial versions, one teacher responded that that was like asking if creationism should be taught alongside biology.
As ethnic studies is actually taught in the classroom, meanwhile, there is almost no relation to the plain facts of history. An example from the Times article:
“In November, several weeks after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, an ethnic studies teacher at Menlo-Atherton High School, in Silicon Valley, presented a lesson that inaccurately claimed the United Nations considered the creation of Israel illegal. (A U.N. resolution partitioned the territory into Jewish and Arab states, and the U.N. admitted Israel as a member in 1949.)
“In addition, a slide depicted a hand manipulating a puppet, recalling antisemitic tropes about secret Jewish control of government, the media and finance.”
It’s just a mix of blood libels and provably false historical assertions.
Because none of what the kids were going to be taught was true, there was growing pushback against California’s ethnic-studies requirement. There is something very mid-20th-century Europe about obligating students in government schools to internalize and then express the idea that Jews are intrinsically evil.
The requirement was set to go into effect next fall. But by law, it cannot be a degree requirement unless the California legislature funds it. This week, Newsom’s revisions to the state budget pointedly excluded the funds for ethnic studies.
Democrats have enough problems with anti-Semitism without the party’s most important blue state making Soviet Jew-baiting a degree requirement. For four years, the fight over ethnic studies has divided the state, and it might end up being all for nothing. That, of course, is better than the alternative. Perhaps all we need to get anti-Semitism under control nationally is to have every Democratic governor run for national office.
