Just when you thought that the melted brains from the Arizona heat couldn't get any worse, this week they bring us House Bill 2281 which the Arizona Governor (and I use that term loosely) signed into unconstitutional law. The "law" provides for in Plessy v. Ferguson logic:
A SCHOOL DISTRICT OR CHARTER SCHOOL IN THIS STATE SHALL NOT INCLUDE IN ITS PROGRAM OF INSTRUCTION ANY COURSES OR CLASSES THAT:
1. PROMOTE THE OVERTHROW OF THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT.
2. PROMOTE RESENTMENT TOWARD A RACE OR CLASS OF PEOPLE.
3. ARE DESIGNED PRIMARILY FOR PUPILS OF A PARTICULAR ETHNIC GROUP.
4. ADVOCATE ETHNIC SOLIDARITY INSTEAD OF THE TREATMENT OF PUPILS AS INDIVIDUALS.
The inherent idiocy of the law is a case study in racism and hypocrisy. For those who haven't taken an American history class or watched the History channel, let me help you:
Over 100 years ago we fought a war against the towel-head, Gook Nazis from the South called the Southern States. This war was fought for various economic and social reasons, most of which revolved around the subjugation of people with a different skin color. Silly I know, but a lot of people died over it. Deciding that a lot of people dying over skin color was a bad idea, the United States passed three amendments to its Constitution which guaranteed equal rights to all citizens of the country. This is the Constitution and the government that an ethnic studies class cannot promote the overthrow of in Arizona.
This law is the kind of law that would make anyone with any legal training's brain explode. The law
states that you need to uphold all of the Constitutional principals and not discriminate and then proceeds to discriminate like crazy. Kind of a divide and conquer mentality.
Arizona's law could just as easily be used to stop the teaching of the Civil War as it could the Tuscon school's ethnic studies program. Can you teach about the Holocaust because it encourages Jews to think in terms of ethnic solidarity, rather than as individuals? Aren't there Mormons in Arizona? Can the Mormon persecution and exodus West be taught in Mesa County since it encourages all those Mormons to think like a group -- which they would never do otherwise? And what about teaching about those oppressed English colonists in the early 1700s?
Since when did individualism become the gospel of "We the people"?
This shouldn't be the country of "Me, the racist."
Guess what folks? We have a piss poor track record in this country of avoiding racism. The only positive thing I can think about the law is that Arizona now gets to go down in the History books of the future as an exemplar for the tide of anti-Latino racism that flooded the American Southwest in the early 21st Century when they should have fucking known better.
The inherent idiocy of the law is a case study in racism and hypocrisy. For those who haven't taken an American history class or watched the History channel, let me help you:
Over 100 years ago we fought a war against the towel-head, Gook Nazis from the South called the Southern States. This war was fought for various economic and social reasons, most of which revolved around the subjugation of people with a different skin color. Silly I know, but a lot of people died over it. Deciding that a lot of people dying over skin color was a bad idea, the United States passed three amendments to its Constitution which guaranteed equal rights to all citizens of the country. This is the Constitution and the government that an ethnic studies class cannot promote the overthrow of in Arizona.
This law is the kind of law that would make anyone with any legal training's brain explode. The law
Arizona's law could just as easily be used to stop the teaching of the Civil War as it could the Tuscon school's ethnic studies program. Can you teach about the Holocaust because it encourages Jews to think in terms of ethnic solidarity, rather than as individuals? Aren't there Mormons in Arizona? Can the Mormon persecution and exodus West be taught in Mesa County since it encourages all those Mormons to think like a group -- which they would never do otherwise? And what about teaching about those oppressed English colonists in the early 1700s?
Since when did individualism become the gospel of "We the people"?
This shouldn't be the country of "Me, the racist."
Guess what folks? We have a piss poor track record in this country of avoiding racism. The only positive thing I can think about the law is that Arizona now gets to go down in the History books of the future as an exemplar for the tide of anti-Latino racism that flooded the American Southwest in the early 21st Century when they should have fucking known better.
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