Spencer Lindsay's opinion piece, "The Ethnic Studies Requirement Should Go" is both inaccurate and counter-productive to a goal of improving cultural competence, equity, and diversity at UW Madison.
Let's examine the inaccuracies first. Lindsay claims to know that all students resent taking ethnic studies classes. Having served as a TA for one of the largest ethnic studies courses on campus, I know that it's true that some students do resent having to take these courses. But many of them, even some of the students that initially resented the course, ended up learning from- and even liking the course.
Lindsay also claims that professors present "less honest" material about race relations (watering it down) in order to appeal to majority students. He adds that professors don't list their classes as ethnic studies to avoid student resentment. While I can't claim to know ALL of the ethnic studies instructors' intentions and curriculums, given the commitment to diversity and inclusion of the instructors that I do know, there's serious cause to reject this argument completely.
Lindsay does make two points worth thinking about in this piece.
1) Considerations of race/ethnicity (and actually, I think other sorts of diversity too) should be integrated into many other courses on campus rather than JUST taught in separate ethnic studies courses. Agreed. A worthwhile project would be to highlight examples of courses from multiple disciplines on campus that are already doing this successfully and zero in on some translatable and replicable aspects of these approaches to share with other instructors.
2) "Everyone talks in soft voices that don’t allow them to really dig into America’s dark history on race."
True. I would argue that this shows how majority students are AFRAID to talk about race/ethnicity because it necessitates examining oneself (sometimes critically and/or painfully) as existing in power relations that can threaten ideas of independently earned success; and because talking about race seemingly risks incurring the dishonorable label of "racist."
With these challenges acknowledged, Lindsay then argues we should abolish the ethnic studies requirement for undergraduate students. Why? How would this help further diversity, inclusion, and equity for non-majority students? How would this help majority students to better understand and empathize with Badgers that are different from them? How would this further cultural competence for anyone on campus? The answer is: not at all.
Perhaps Lindsay is not aware of the everyday interpersonal discrimination and alienation that non-white students experience on this campus, testified to most recently by minority students via http://itooamuwmadison.tumblr.com/. They are subject to common unintentional (but nevertheless hurtful) racist stereotypes; avoidance by white students; and even sometimes malicious racism.
Rather than getting rid of the ethnic studies requirement, we should support the strengthening and modifications to the requirement that would better meet the UW's goals of diversity, cultural competency, and creating a positive campus climate for all students. For instance, we could improve training and support for instructors on teaching about race/ethnicity in majority-white classrooms; including pedagogy that deals with the challenges of majority-student resentment. We could also integrate a cross-racial/ethnic dialogue element to these required courses to provide safe, respectful spaces for having honest discussions about course material as it is connected to our own campus environments. But eliminating the ethnic studies requirement would be completely counterproductive.
Gina Spitz is a PhD student in Sociology at UW-Madison and a Co-Chair of the Teaching Assistants' Association's Diversity Committee.
